 | This article includes a list ofgeneral references, butit lacks sufficient correspondinginline citations. Please help toimprove this article byintroducing more precise citations.(August 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
| The Dublin lock-out | |||
|---|---|---|---|
 Dublin Metropolitan Police break up a union rally | |||
| Date | 26 August 1913 – 18 January 1914 | ||
| Location | |||
| Caused by |
| ||
| Goals |
| ||
| Methods | Strikes, rallies, walkouts | ||
| Resulted in |
| ||
| Parties | |||
| |||
| Lead figures | |||
| Number | |||
| |||
| Casualties and losses | |||
| |||
| 2 dead, several hundred injured | |||
TheDublin lock-out was a majorindustrial dispute between approximately 20,000 workers and 300 employers that took place inDublin, Ireland. The dispute, lasting from 26 August 1913 to 18 January 1914, is often viewed as the most severe and significant industrial dispute inIrish history. Central to the dispute was the workers'right to unionise.
Many of Dublin's workers lived in terrible conditions intenements. For example, over 830 people lived in just 15 houses inHenrietta Street's Georgian tenements. At 10 Henrietta Street, theIrish Sisters of Charity ran aMagdalene laundry that was inhabited by more than 50 single women.[1] An estimated four million pledges were taken in pawnbrokers every year. Theinfant mortality rate among the poor was 142 per 1,000 births, extraordinarily high for a European city. The situation was made considerably worse by the high rate of disease in the slums, which was worsened by the lack of health care and cramped living conditions. The most prevalent disease in the Dublin slums at the time wastuberculosis (TB), which spread through tenements very quickly and caused many deaths among the poor. A report, published in 1912, found that TB-related deaths in Ireland were 50% higher than inEngland orScotland. The vast majority of TB-related deaths in Ireland occurred among the poorer classes. The report updated a 1903 study by DrJohn Lumsden.
Poverty was perpetuated in Dublin by the lack of work for unskilled workers, who did not have any form of representation before trade unions were founded. The unskilled workers often had to compete with one another for work every day, with the job generally going to whoever agreed to work for the lowest wages.
James Larkin, the main protagonist on the side of the workers in the dispute, was adocker inLiverpool and a union organiser. In 1907, he was sent toBelfast as a local organiser of the British-basedNational Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL). In Belfast, Larkin organised astrike of dock and transport workers. It was also in Belfast that Larkin began to use the tactic of thesympathetic strike in which workers who were not directly involved in an industrial dispute with employers would go on strike in support of other workers, who were striking. The Belfast strike was moderately successful and boosted Larkin's standing among Irish workers. However, his tactics were highly controversial and so Larkin was transferred to Dublin.
Unskilled workers in Dublin were very much at the mercy of their employers. Employers who suspected workers of trying to organise themselves couldblacklist them to destroy them any chance of future employment. Larkin set about organising the unskilled workers of Dublin, which was a cause of concern for the NUDL, which was reluctant to engage in a full-scale industrial dispute with the powerful Dublin employers. It suspended Larkin from the NUDL in 1908. Larkin then left the NUDL and set up an Irish union, theIrish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU).
The ITGWU was the first Irish trade union to cater for both skilled and unskilled workers. In its first few months, it quickly gained popularity and soon spread to other Irish cities. The ITGWU was used as a vehicle for Larkin'ssyndicalist views. He believed in bringing about asocialist revolution by the establishment of trade unions and callinggeneral strikes.
The ITGWU initially lost several strikes between 1908 and 1910 but after 1913 won strikes involving carters and railway workers like the1913 Sligo dock strike. Between 1911 and 1913, membership of the ITGWU rose from 4,000 to 10,000, to the alarm of employers.
Larkin had learned from the methods of the 1910Tonypandy riots and the1911 Liverpool general transport strike.
Another important figure in the rise of an organised workers' movement in Ireland at the time wasJames Connolly, anEdinburgh-bornMarxist of Irish parentage. A talented orator and a fine writer, he became known for his speeches on the streets of Dublin in support of socialism and Irish nationalism. In 1896, Connolly established theIrish Socialist Republican Party and the newspaperThe Workers' Republic. In 1911, Connolly was appointed the ITGWU's Belfast organiser. In 1912, Connolly and Larkin formed theIrish Labour Party to represent workers in the imminentHome Rule Bill debate in theBritish Parliament. Home rule, although passed in the House of Commons, was postponed by the start of theFirst World War. The plan was then suspended for one year, then indefinitely, after the rise ofmilitant nationalism after the1916 Rising.
Among the employers in Ireland opposed to trade unions such as Larkin's ITGWU wasWilliam Martin Murphy, Ireland's most prominent capitalist, born inCastletownbere,County Cork. In 1913, Murphy was chairman of theDublin United Tramway Company and owned Clery's department store and theImperial Hotel. He controlled theIrish Independent,Evening Herald andIrish Catholic newspapers and was a major shareholder in theB&I Line. Murphy was also a prominentIrish nationalist and a formerHome Rule MP in Parliament.
Even today, Murphy'sdefenders insist that he was a charitable man and a good employer and that his workers received fair wages. However, conditions in his many enterprises were often poor or worse, with employees given only one day off in 10 and being forced to labour up to 17 hours a day. Dublin tramway workers were paid substantially less than their counterparts in Belfast and Liverpool and were subjected to a regime of punitive fines, probationary periods extending for as long as six years and a culture of company surveillance involving the widespread use of informers.[2]
Murphy was not opposed in principle to trade unions, particularly craft unions, but he was vehemently opposed to the ITGWU and saw its leader, Larkin, as a dangerous revolutionary.[3] In July 1913, Murphy presided over a meeting of 300 employers during which a collective response to the rise of trade unionism was agreed. Murphy and the employers were determined not to allow the ITGWU to unionise the Dublin workforce. On 15 August, Murphy dismissed 40 workers whom he suspected of ITGWU membership, followed by another 300 over the next week.
.jpg)
The resulting industrial dispute was the most severe in thehistory of Ireland. Employers in Dublin locked out their workers and employedblackleg labour from Britain and elsewhere in Ireland. Dublin's workers, despite being some of the poorest in theUnited Kingdom at the time, applied for help and were sent £150,000 by the BritishTrades Union Congress (TUC) and other sources in Ireland, doled out dutifully by the ITGWU.[4][5]
The "Kiddies' Scheme" for the starving children of Irish strikers to be temporarily looked after by British trade unionists was blocked by theRoman Catholic Church and especially theAncient Order of Hibernians, which claimed that Catholic children would be subject toProtestant oratheist influences when in Britain. The Church supported the employers during the dispute and condemned Larkin as a socialistrevolutionary.[6]
Notably,Guinness, the largest employer and biggest exporter in Dublin, refused to lock out its workforce. It refused to join Murphy's group but sent £500 to the employers' fund. It had a policy against sympathetic strikes and expected its workers, whose conditions were far better than the norm in Ireland, not to strike in sympathy; six who had done so were dismissed. It had 400 of its staff who were already ITGWU members and so it had a working relationship with the union. Larkin appealed to have the six reinstated but without success.[7]
TheIndustrial Workers of the World (IWW) leader,Bill Haywood, was inParis when he heard of the lockout. He collected 1000 francs to aid the strikers and travelled to Dublin where he addressed a crowd in front of City Hall.[8][9]
Strikers used mass pickets and intimidation against strike-breakers, who were also violent towards strikers. TheDublin Metropolitan Police carried out abaton charge at worker's rallies. On 31 August 1913, the DMP attacked a meeting on Sackville Street (now known asO'Connell Street) that had been publicly banned. It caused the deaths of two workers: James Nolan and John Byrne. Over 300 more were injured.
The baton charge was a response to the appearance of James Larkin, who had been banned from holding a meeting, to speak for the workers. He had been smuggled into William Martin Murphy's Imperial Hotel byNellie Gifford, the sister-in-law ofThomas MacDonagh, and spoke from a balcony. The event is remembered as Bloody Sunday, a term used for three subsequent days in 20th-century Ireland and for the murderous charge of police in the Liverpool general strike. Another worker,Alice Brady, was later shot dead by a strike-breaker as she brought home a food parcel from the union office. Michael Byrne, an ITGWU official fromKingstown, died after he had been tortured in a police cell.[10]
Connolly, Larkin and ex-British ArmyCaptainJack White formed a worker's militia, theIrish Citizen Army, to protect workers' demonstrations.
For seven months, the lock-out affected tens of thousands of Dublin families. Murphy's three main newspapers, theIrish Independent, theSunday Independent and theEvening Herald, portrayed Larkin as the villain. Influential figures such asPatrick Pearse,Countess Markievicz andWilliam Butler Yeats supported the workers in the media.
The lock-out eventually concluded in early 1914, when the TUC in Britain rejected Larkin and Connolly's request for a sympathetic strike. Most workers, many of whom were on the brink of starvation, went back to work and signed pledges not to join the ITGWU. It was badly damaged by its defeat in the Lockout and further hit by the departure of Larkin to the United States in 1914 and the execution of Connolly, one of the leaders of theEaster Rising in 1916.
The union was rebuilt byWilliam O'Brien andThomas Johnson. By 1919, its membership had surpassed that of 1913.
Many of the blacklisted workers joined theBritish Army since they had no other source of pay to support their families, and they found themselves in the trenches ofWorld War I within the year.
Although the actions of the ITGWU and the smaller UBLU had been unsuccessful in achieving substantially better pay and conditions for workers, they marked a watershed in Irish labour history. The principle of union action and workers' solidarity had been firmly established. No future employer would ever try to "break" a union as Murphy had attempted to with the ITGWU. The lock-out had damaged commercial businesses in Dublin, with many forced to declare bankruptcy.
September 1913, one of the most famous ofW. B. Yeats' poems, was published inThe Irish Times during the lock-out. Although the occasion of the poem was the decision of Dublin Corporation not to build a gallery to house theHugh Lane collection of paintings (Murphy was one of the most vocal opponents of the plan), it has sometimes been viewed by scholars as a commentary on the lock-out.[11] In the poem, Yeats wrote mockingly of commerciants who "fumble in a greasy till, and add the halfpence to the pence" and asked:
Was it for thisthe wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For thisEdward Fitzgerald died,
AndRobert Emmet andWolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
