1944, claimed that "they had broken away from the Irish Labour Party because it was not Irish, nor did it fulful the expectations that an Irish labour party should have for the people." Speaking after Mass, Cork general election candidate P.J O'Brien claimed that "with the dissolution of the Communist Party of Ireland, these people (communists) are endeavouring to get a foothold on the Irish Labour Party." Speaking at a National Labour delegate conference in October 1944, Everett stated that the Labour Party's attitude to Peadar Cowan's new openly communist organisation "The Vanguard" demonstrated how "helplessly the party leaders were caught in the Communist web" and "the individuals running the Vanguard were the same people who crashed into the party in 1942, founded the notorious Dublin Central branch and caused the party constitution to be torn up." The Catholic press supported the ITGWU's allegations, which were founded on James Larkin's communist activities in groups like the Irish Worker League. The number of communists in the movement had increased since 1941, when the Communist Party of Ireland had disbanded and its members had joined the Labour movement. Based on conservative labour support, the National Labour Party won four seats in the 1944 election. At a meeting in Rathdowney, Labour politician William Davin criticised the new party in the aftermath of the election, referring to them as "disruptionist" and told his audience that he strongly resented being called a communist by "certain persons who did not bother to go to church or chapel either on Sundays or weekdays." In response, National Labour stated that "Mr Davin and his colleagues short-circuited any kind of unbiased inquisition by setting up a tribunal of their own on which those very people charged with complicity in the Communist fusion sat as the judges and assessors." Continuing, they said that "Mr Davin is not a Communist; no one in the National Labour Party either thought or said that he was." A failed attempt by the Labour Party to end the split occurred in May 1944. In June 1944, the Donegal News wrote that "Mr. Norton and his colleagues may well reflect that the advent of a National Labour Party puts an end to future Labour hopes of a come-back. In 1947, National Labour criticised Labour's renewed calls for unity and that "failure to maintain unity within the Party occurred in 1943 when some members of the Administrative