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Respondent
Dr John Cunningham, NUI Galway
Recovering Imagined Futures: A Spirit of Revolution? Dr John Cunningham An Dr John Cunningham
In 1967, Martin O’Sullivan, a retired Athlone train driver, contributed two articles to the Irish Independent. Martin was originally from Galway, and he grew up in a railway family in the shadow of the Augustinian church in Middle Street before joining the Midland Great Western Railway himself.1
If the trade union embargo had a major impact on the conflict in 1920, it did not have the same impact on historical narratives, and nearly fifty years later Martin O’Sullivan concluded his account in the Independent by expressing his bewilderment that ‘those important events were not recorded in any recent history of Ireland’.3
In the articles, he discussed his part in the munitions embargo, a trade union action which impeded the movement of British military equipment between May and December 1920 and which, for that reason, loomed large in the calculations of Michael Collins and his colleagues.2
The embargo is the subject of a recent publication by railway and labour historian, Peter Rigney, and it features obliquely in the opening scene of Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley, but it would be fair to say that it remains part of the hidden history of the period. The same might be said, more or less, about other contemporary labour mobilisations. To give two examples: the Irish Trade Union Congress’s anti-conscription strike in April 1918 played a large part in changing the course of events during that fateful year; while the
That it involved large numbers is established by the figures for those dismissed or suspended for taking part – 1000 railway workers and 500 dockers.
1
I am grateful to Peter Rigney for his help with the following biographical note. Joining the MGWR as a fireman in 1911, Martin O’Sullivan (1891-1977) worked as a fireman and as a locomotive driver until his retirement from CIE in 1957. He married Mary Hughes, and the couple raised a large family at Bogginfin, Athlone. In retirement he was a long-serving national secretary of the CIE Pensioners Association. (Birth certificate for Martin Sullivan, Water Lane, Galway, 22 October 1891; 1911 Census, Household Schedule No. 4, Middle Street, Galway East Urban; ‘CIE Pensions’, Irish Independent, 9 December 1963; ‘He wins pension increases for 800’, Irish Independent, 2 December 1974; ‘Obituary: Mr M. O’Sullivan’, Westmeath Independent, 18 March 1977).
2
Peter Rigney, How Railwaymen and Dockers Defied an Empire: The Irish Munitions Embargo of 1920, Dublin: Iarnród Éireann with Umisken Press, 2021.
3
Martin O’Sullivan, ‘How Railwaymen Defied an Empire’, Irish Independent, 13 August 1967. The articles were published together in a historical journal after the author’s death: Martin O’Sullivan, ‘The Irish Munitions Strike of 1920’, Cathair na Mart: Journal of the Westport Historical Society, vol. 11 (1990), pp. 132-6.
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