Scolaire Staire Vol 3 Issue 4 October 2013

The Free Online Irish History Magazine

Volume 3, Issue 4. October 2013

Lockout 1913 A Special Issue on labour and class history to mark the centenary of Ireland’s best known industrial dispute Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

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Background image: Bloody Sunday 1913.

Front cover: IGWU membership badge.

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Contents Volume 3, Issue 4, October 2013

4 Editorial

27 PhD Diary

5 Letters

34 Review article

7 News

37 Reviews

IN THIS ISSUE

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REGULARS

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Cork and the 1913 Lockout

16 Living in Plato’s Cave: Class history in Ireland

20 Interview: Padraig Yeates

28 Representing Class on Television

Editor:

Editorial Assistants:

Review Editor:

News Editor:

Dr Adrian Grant

Dr Joanne McEntee Deirdre Rodgers Barbara Curran

Áine Mannion

Gerard Madden

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Editorial As we reach the end of 2013, one could be forgiven for experiencing ‘Lockout fatigue’. Perhaps as a labour historian who has written about the period, and who has attended his fair share of commemoration events over the last eleven months, I am experiencing a fatigue that is not widespread amongst historians or the general public. The first events to be marked in the (long) decade of centenaries were the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force and the signing of the Ulster Covenant and Declaration last year. These centenaries made little impact south of the border, so the Lockout has been, in essence, the real beginning of the Decade of Centenaries in the twenty-six counties. For example, the government sponsored Century Ireland and Decade of Centenaries websites were launched in May and December 2013 respectively.

Whether you noticed it or not, there has been an onslaught of events, publications and broadcasts marking the Lockout. Strumpet City was Dublin’s ‘One City, One Book’ in 2013, and was serialised on RTE Radio One. The same station ran a multi-part series on the Lockout, while the television arm of the national broadcaster chipped in with a number of features too, although its decision not to broadcast the acclaimed television adaptation of Strumpet City was strange. There have been independent podcasts and newspaper supplements, re-issues of books and new publications, and even a graphic novel or two.

It would be no exaggeration to suggest that there was at least one commemoration event, seminar or conference taking place somewhere in Ireland most weeks this year. As we drew nearer to August, newspaper headlines and sound bites dealing with the state of the nation invariably invoked the spirit and legacy of the locked out workers of 1913.

The sheer number of events, broadcasts, publications and public utterances that accompanied the centenary of the Lockout, would suggest that we will be bombarded with much more next year, in 2016 and from 2018 un4

til 2023. The fatigue suffered by Irish labour historians in 2013 will be nothing in comparison to the international commemoration of the start of the First World War in 2014 and the inevitable tedious and uninformed debate that will take over in Ireland throughout 2016.

What will follow from 2017 onwards is anyone’s guess. However, it is possible that some kind of centenary fatigue could set in before, during or after the 1916 commemorations.

What does this all mean for the study and promotion of labour history? Some huge advances have been made this year in a discipline that is often ignored, not only by the public but also by academics. The various 1913 Lockout centenary events were very welcome and enjoyable, but what encouraged and excited me this year was the groundswell in debate about what the future of labour history in Ireland might look like. The Irish Centre for the Histories of Labour and Class (ICHLC) was established by a cross section of staff and students at NUI Galway in February 2013. Its inaugural conference in November proved without a shadow of a doubt that labour, or perhaps more accurately ‘class’ history is riding a wave of popularity, especially amongst a new generation of historians. The success of the ICHLC conference proved that people want to study and learn about Irish history through the prism of class.

It is of utmost importance that the momentum set by the various events, conferences and publications of 2013 is carried forward into 2014 and beyond. The fact that ‘labour history’s centenary’ occurred early in the decade should allow its practitioners to beat centenary fatigue and ensure that the class element is central to the rest of the commemorations. Labour and class historians now have the chance to revolutionise their genre and the discipline itself. Lets make the 2010s the decade when Irish labour and class history found itself.

Dr Adrian Grant Editor 11 Oakfield Court, Buncrana, Donegal. scolairestaire@gmail.com Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

Letters William O’Brien’s Voice

accessed freely HERE.

Sir,

Although fascinating to hear O’Brien’s rather generic Munster accent and elegant yet monotonous voice, most listeners will no doubt wistfully regret that Larkin had not lived a few years longer and been in a position to be recorded by the Bureau instead. Larkin died in January 1947, four decades after his arrival in Ireland from Liverpool, and would surely have been selected by the Bureau to represent the Irish Labour Movement rather than O’Brien had he still been alive in 1950-51.

One can only hope that a recording of his famous voice is out there somewhere and will soon come to light to complement the twelve seconds of silent video footage of him which has survived, viewable HERE. Yours etc.,

A recent appeal was made on a national radio station by Padraig Yeates, on behalf of the 1913 Committee which is helping to commemorate the forthcoming centenary of the famous Dublin strike and lockout later this year, for listeners who might have any knowledge of a possible audio recording of labour leader James Larkin’s voice to publicly come forward. Despite the fact that Larkin was one of the most naturally gifted orators of his era, and a legendary figure largely defined in public memory by his speechmaking, no audio recording of his voice has seemingly ever been preserved.

While unfortunately unable to shed any light with regards ‘Big Jim’, I would nonetheless like to alert Scoláire Staire readers to the existence of a little-known voice recording of his great Labour antagonist, William O’Brien, who dominated the Irish trade union movement for several decades following Larkin’s expulsion from the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union in 1924. A seven minute voice recording of O’Brien performing a reading of an essay he wrote about his good friend James Connolly, which was subsequently published in an extended version in Cathal O’Shannon (ed.), Fifty Years of Liberty Hall: the golden jubilee of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, 190959 (Dublin, 1959), is part of a special audio collection located within the Bureau of Military History. This series consists of twelve voice recordings collected by the Bureau with the co-operation of the Irish Folklore Commission in 1950-51, and O’Brien was one of the dozen figures deemed by those in charge to be ‘unique in some outstanding way from the point of view of historians’ and thus recorded. Others chosen included the likes of Maud Gonne MacBride, Oscar Traynor, Sean T. O’Kelly, William T. Cosgrave and Gavin Duffy.

All recordings are freely available to be listened to online by the public HERE while O’Brien’s enormous 148 page witness statement to the Bureau can incidentally also be Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

James Curry Moore Institute NUI Galway.

Distorting Larkin’s Legacy Below is a letter sent to the editor of the Irish Independent which was not published by the paper. It is a response to a piece by Kevin Myers in the same paper (9 Febraury 2013) in which he claimed that the trade union leadership’s representation of Larkin’s legacy was based on ‘factually baseless myths’. Myers’ article is available HERE. Sir, Kevin Myers’ attempt at labour history (‘The union cult of Larkin is based on factually baseless myths’) is a gross misrepresentation of Jim Larkin, and one which makes the ‘union cult’ of the man look tame in comparison. Myers’ attempt to counter the myths created around Larkin by union leaders only serves to illuminate his own bias. It is a concern that union leaders are beginning to misrepresent Larkin as someone who would be prominent in the mainstream Labour movement were he alive today, but Myers’ blatant twisting of the truth and omission of certain qualifying facts mean he doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to criticising 5

the myth-making tendencies of certain union people.

The image of a heroic Larkin, who could do little wrong, is a direct result his leadership during the Dublin Lockout of 1913. His many failings and his political career on his return from the USA in 1923 have almost been erased from the public consciousness.

This letter doesn’t allow elaboration on his entire career but anyone who wants a concise, balanced, warts and all account of Larkin’s life should read Dr Emmet O’Connor’s biography, James Larkin, published in 2002.

A number of points in Myers’ article should, however, be addressed here. Larkin was indeed imprisoned for embezzlement of union funds in 1910, but to compare this conviction to the actions of the modern banker is ridiculous. Larkin used the funds for strike pay during an unofficial action in Cork. This is hardly comparable to the actions of bankers in the twenty-first century. Also, the case in question had a lot to do with inter-union rivalry at a time of great upheaval in the Labour movement.

It is fairly well established that Larkin was a syndicalist and something very different from the Labour leaders of today, or even of the 1920s. However, he was known to show restraint in certain circumstances, and was not one to call a strike at the drop of a hat.

The success of the ITGWU after 1917 had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Larkin was no longer in charge. After Larkin left for the USA in 1914, James Connolly took over as the main figure in the union.

Following the Easter Rising, Liberty Hall was in ruins (due to a targeted attack by a British gunship), and the ITGWU faced bankruptcy for the second time in three years.

The huge increase in ITGWU membership figures quoted by Myers was the result of a wider economic and social context in the aftermath of the First World War. The vast majority of the new members were unskilled, agricultural labourers. The fact that Larkin had formed a ‘general’ workers’ union in 1909 meant, in actual fact, that tens of 6

thousands of rural labourers now gravitated towards the ITGWU, as rural Ireland witnessed increasing radicalisation in the 191723 period.

Myers’ short article could inspire an opus of corrections in response but a few more clarifications will have to suffice. Yes, Larkin did contest the North Dublin by-election of 1928 and the figures quoted are correct. However, he does not mention the reason why there was a by-election in the first place. At the general election of September 1927, Larkin was elected as a communist TD for the Irish Worker League, coming in third place out of sixteen candidates. On this occasion, 7,490 (11.49%) first preference votes were enough to see him elected without the need for transfers. He was forced to resign his seat due to his position as an undisclosed bankrupt, which triggered the by-election to which Myers refers. So, Larkin actually increased his vote to 8,232 (19.02%), and came third of three candidates in the very different context of a by-election, where only one seat was available.

Finally, where is Myers finding the evidence to refer to Larkin as a ‘mysteriously wealthy socialist paragon’? The house referred to by Myers on Beachwood Avenue, Ranelagh was purchased by his wife Elizabeth during his American sojourn, but there is little to suggest he was a rich man. In fact, when he and his wife became estranged, he lived with his sister, Delia, and her husband - neither of whom he was on speaking terms with.

Historians have shown that his extravagances extended to buying books and the odd cigar.

Kevin Myers’ trolling invective would not normally invoke any desire in me to respond, but his hypocrisy on this occasion has only added to the myth-making about Larkin that he set out to counter, hence my inclination, as a labour historian, to respond.

Yours etc., Dr Adrian Grant Moore Institute NUI Galway.

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News

Loach Makes Biopic of Leitrim Communist Ken Loach has long been noted as a filmmaker who has used

his films to convey radical or ignored themes, often in historical settings, such as Land and Freedom, set during the Spanish Civil War, and 2006’s Palme D’Or winning The Wind That Shakes The Barley, set in 1920s Cork. So it’s no surprise that the relatively little-known story of Jim Gralton, a Leitrim communist and the only Irishman to have been deported by the Irish state, is the latest story that Loach and Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty are striving to bring to the big screen. And there are no repeats of Julia Roberts’ dodgy Irish accent; like Loach’s last Irish film, Jimmy’s Hall draws on local talent from the areas in which his story is set.

As a young man, Gralton joined the British Army but is said to have deserted when his regiment was deployed to India. He then worked on Liverpool’s docks, perhaps contemporaneously with Jim Larkin, and the Welsh mines, before moving to New York in 1909 after gaining a job aboard a ship. He remained involved in left-republican politics in the United States, founding the James Connolly Club in New York after 1916. He later moved back to Ireland, founding a Pearse-Connolly Hall in rural Leitrim which became a venue for communist activity. But local parish priests denounced it, and on Christmas Eve 1932 it was set on fire - attacks on communist property in Ireland were common during these years, with an arson attack taking place on the Communist Party of Ireland headquarters in Dublin’s Great Strand Street the following year. In 1933, the Fianna Fáil government ordered Gralton to be deported, and he was expelled from Ireland later that year after a period of being on the run. He died in New York in 1945, and was both an active trade unionist and a member of the US Communist Party For those interested in learning more about Gralton in advance of Loach’s film, a 1977 RTÉ documentary on his life is available at: http://www.rte.ie/radio1/doconone/radio-documentary-jim-gralton-communist.html

James Gralton Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

Ken Loach

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Working Lives Photography Exhibit Opens In Dublin

The lives of ordinary Irish people at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century are on display in the Working Lives 1893-1913 exhibit, contained in the National Photographic Archive in Temple Bar. The exhibit was opened on Thursday, 24 October, and will continue till next May; it consists of 148 photographs of workers from across the island, taken from the Poole (1884-1954) and Mason (18901910) photographic collections. It is curated by Irish labour historian Mary Jones, author of These Obstreperous Lassies: History of the Irish Women's Workers Union, and admission is free. The lantern slides produced by Mason, a Dublin firm, were often used to illustrate Royal Commission or parliamentary reports, while Poole, which was based in Waterford, focuses heavily on the lives of people in the southeast of Ireland.

The photos are an important resource for historians; ‘Big House’ servants, turf-cutters, textile workers, and tie, hat and boot makers are among the workers recorded in the photographic collection.

The final installment of the Ulster-Scots History and Heritage lecture series will be

delivered by Professor Donald MacRaild of the University of Ulster. The lecture, entitled ‘The North West and the Scotch Irish Diaspora in the 18th and 19th Centuries’, will take place at the Tower Museum in Derry at 6pm on Wednesday 18 December.

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News

Conference Announcement: CnaB 100 Cumann na mBan conference to be held in Dublin.

The Women’s History Association of Ireland (WHAI) in association with the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, UCD Women’s Studies and Mater Dei Institute of Education (DCU) will present the Cumann na mBan 100 Conference: 1914-2014 on 4-5 April, 2014, Dublin, at a venue to be confirmed.

The confirmed keynote speakers include Dr. Margaret Ward, Dr Joost Augusteijn, Dr. John Borgovono, and Dr. Marie Coleman.

The WHAI is inviting proposals for its 2014 annual conference which will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the formation of one of the most significant women’s organisations in modern Irish history, Cumann na mBan. With much of the group’s legacy having been ignored by historians, 2014 provides an opportune moment to shine a fresh light on the contribution of nationalist women to the Independence struggle.

Proposals for papers of twenty minutes in length and / or panel proposals comprising panels of three should be 500 words long and be sent by 16 December 2013 to the organising committee at womenshistoryassociation@gmail.com.

Early career and postgraduate scholars are encouraged to submit papers.

The conference themes might include, but are not limited to the following: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

The formation, organisation and development of Cumann na mBan Cumann na mBan campaigns Gender and nationalism in Ireland, 1912-1923 Political participation of women 1912-1923 – nationalist, unionist, feminist, trade unionist etc. Cumann na mBan and the Irish Volunteers, Irish Citizen Army the War of Independence, Civil War. Leadership, development, activism Military activism, republican courts etc.

Feminism, nationalism, republicanism The Treaty/the split Local, national, international The decades after the treaty Folklore, stories, memoirs, literary history Issues of gender, war, and violence The public face of Cumann na mBan – demonstrations, marches and symbolism Sources/archives – researching female involvement in the revolutionary decade Commemoration/memory/history – a gendered issue?

Papers on all aspects of female involvement in the revolutionary decade and on individual women involved in revolutionary activism are also welcomed.

WHAI/Cumann na mBan 2014 Organising Committee: Dr Mary McAuliffe (UCD), Dr Conor Reidy (UL), Dr Leeann Lane (Mater Dei, DCU), Gerri O’Neill (Mater Dei, DCU).

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‘All for Labour’: Cork and the 1913 Lockout

Patrick Street, Cork, c. 1890-1900.

It was not a question of ‘All for Ireland’ or ‘Up de Mollies,’ or ‘Down with the Orange Lodge’; those were the things which divided the workers in Ireland. There should be only one ‘up’ for them, and that was ‘Up with the working classes’.

- Speech by Jim Larkin at the 1913 Irish Trades Union Congress at City Hall, Cork, reported in Cork Examiner, 14 May 1913.

Cork’s association with the Dublin Lockout of 1913 normally doesnt extend far beyond the fact that William Martin Murphy was from the County. Here, John O’Donovan presents a regional view of the labour unrest in the capital.

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Cork

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ork labour in 1913 was still recovering from the trauma of the 1909 strike in the city, when Jim Larkin and the fledgling Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU) was decimated in the teeth of strong opposition from the Cork Employers’ Federation (CEF). The chief labour body in the city, the Cork United Trades and Labour Council (CUTLC), which represented mostly skilled workers and craft unions, split in the aftermath of the strike. This split was not completely as a result of the strike. It mirrored splits in other political organisations in the city and county as a result of the foundation of William O'Brien’s Allfor-Ireland League (AFIL).

Labour in the city was not the sole preserve of the Labourites. For a number of years so-called ‘labour nationalists’ such as Eugene Crean claimed to represent the interests of the working person in City Hall as a member of the Corporation and in Westminster as MP for South-East Cork. Therefore the confused priorities of labour supporters had become even more so after the 1909 strike and the appearance of the AFIL. This situation was hardly helped by the lack of a proper labour newspaper in the city.

From 1911 Jim Larkin’s Irish Worker established a stable platform in the city, carrying notes penned for the most part by John Good, who was prominent in the Railway Union. However, the powerful presence of two morning newspapers, the Cork Constitution (and its weekly Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

sister paper the Cork Weekly News) and the Cork Examiner militated against a consistent advocate for labour. In June 1910 another voice was added to the mix, with the appearance of the AFIL newspaper the Cork Free Press. While this paper had strong labour sympathies, counting among its writers the Mid-Cork MP and co-founder of the Land and Labour Association, DD Sheehan, it was hardly sympathetic to Larkin’s movement or his style of trade unionism.

Therefore, by 1913 the voice of militant labour was barely audible among Cork political circles. Nevertheless, the scenes witnessed in Dublin between the end of August 1913 and January 1914 provoked differing reactions among all classes of Cork society. In this article I will examine some of these.

Congress On Monday 12 May 1913 the annual meeting of the Irish Trades Union Congress (ITUC) opened in the City Hall. At the opening a large number of political figures, many of whom were openly hostile to the labour movement or, to Larkin’s ITGWU, were present. This was commented upon in a letter to the Cork Examiner, which noted the anti-Larkin attitude of ‘stupid Corkies’ such as Michael Egan, Patrick Lynch and Alderman Jeremiah Kelleher.

The Examiner commented on the address of the ITUC chair William O’Brien of Dublin, hoping that the workers’ representatives would oppose

the adoption of the tactic of sympathetic strikes. It further noted that while labour unrest was currently prevalent in other countries, such as England and South Africa, it did not mean it was the correct tactic to be adopted in Ireland.

Lockout In August 1913 Larkin and his colleagues in the ITGWU decided to challenge the power of William Martin Murphy and the Dublin Employers’ Federation (DEF), and in doing so gain recognition for the union. Murphy, possibly the most powerful capitalist in the south of Ireland, was a native of west Cork.

Therefore, any clash between Larkin and Murphy would be greeted by people in Cork with mixed views. Indeed the Cork District Trades Council (CDTC), a breakaway from the CUTLC, rejected the notion of joining the ITGWU in late August 1913, arguing it ‘would be a disgrace to them as Corkmen if they weren’t able to manage their own affairs without the influence of Mr Larkin and Mr PT Daly.’

Thus, when the ITGWU targeted Murphy’s Dublin United Tramways Company (DUTC) on the week of the Dublin Horse Show (beginning on Monday 25 August) initial reaction in Cork was indeed mixed.

Writing in the Examiner a few days after the strike began, ‘A Mechanic’ argued against the idea of a general strike, claiming it ‘could never attain any useful end without years of preparation and enormous 11

expenditure’. Its AFIL rival, the Cork Free Press, as more anti-labour, reflecting its mixed relationship with both Murphy and the moneyed unionist community in the city: The industrial strength of Ireland is not stable enough to suffer many troublous days. The workers have to look to the future in taking the drastic step of joining a strike, while the employers themselves should hesitate before dismissing the demands of their servants without having a care to the good or ill effects of their action to the country at large ... We eagerly hope that the dislocation in Dublin will soon fizzle out and thus terminate what may bring loss, and perhaps ruin, to many Irishmen.

However, the paper also argued for a commitment to 12

‘the betterment of the masses; a state of solidarity amongst the units of nations, rather than amongst whole nations’.

The correspondent also lambasted the CUTLC, and its secretary Denis Dennehy, for his membership of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) and therefore his kow-towing to George Crosbie, the proprietor of the Examiner and a leading figure of the AOH in Cork.

Riots Reactions amongst the Cork papers to the Dublin riots of the weekend of 30-31 August 1913 are interesting. The Skibbereen-based newspaper the Southern Star described the scenes in Dublin as a result of ‘Larkinism gone mad’ a sentiment many other newspapers agreed with.

However the conduct of the Royal Irish Constabulary

(RIC) during the riot came in for heavy criticism amongst the nationalist papers especially.

The death of James Nolan from injuries sustained during the riots, the inquest into his death and his funeral attracted coverage and attention from all the papers in Cork. At a CUTLC meeting on Thursday 4 September, John Good declared that the RIC had been under the control of Murphy via Dublin Castle. He went on: I cannot see why the employer having a sentimental or imaginary grievance against his men should get the protection from the State any more than the men themselves should get the protection of the State if they want to strike. There is no justification for extending the protection of the State to these individuals.

Other members of the Council, including Alderman Kelleher, argued that the government discriminated against Dublin, especially as ‘Sir Edward Carson ... has been for the past six months openly proclaiming sedition Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

and insurrection against the British Crown’. This argument was reiterated by Jim Larkin’s brother Peter at an open-air meeting at Parnell Place a few nights later. The following week CUTLC chairman Thomas Walsh warned that Cork workers should be on their guard, as the tactics used by the DEF could be used by the CEF on their employees at any moment.

Perhaps the one aspect of the Dublin Lockout that produced general agreement of sorts came after the collapse of a tenement building on Church Street in Dublin on the evening of Tuesday 2 September. The Examiner published harrowing photographs of the aftermath of the disaster, and argued in an editorial that the disaster ‘has cast a shadow over the metropolis and made human strife appear trivial in the presence of Death’.

September to report on any houses ‘in a condition dangerous to the public ... in view of the lamentable tragedy in Dublin’.

At the end of October a public meeting at the City Hall launched a fund ‘for the relief of distress of women and children in Dublin’. This was criticised by the Irish Worker as ‘a milk-and-water meeting’. Maurice Healy MP was the target of much ire, due to his close connection with Murphy. It was highly ironic, the paper concluded, that a meeting largely composed of employers who refused to pay

Images: Page 10: Image from the opening of working class housing at Blackrock, on the outskirts of Cork City (Cork Examiner, 24 October 2013).

Page 11: Cartoon featuring John Redmond “fiddling” while Dublin is torn apart by industrial strife. (Cork Free Press, November 1913).

Page 12: The Church Street tenement collapse reported in the Cork Weekly Examiner, 20 September 1913.

The question of housing of the working classes in Cork had been brought into focus the previous January, when the Cork Free Press published a series of articles by DD Sheehan on the housing quality in the city and surrounding areas, including Passage West and Queenstown. But the Church Street disaster resulted in a renewed interest in housing in the city and county. The Mallow Town Surveyor was asked at a meeting of the town’s Urban District Council on 9 Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

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proper rates to their workers, could inaugurate a fund which they would coerce workers to support.

Also in October the AFIL launched a strong campaign in favour of improving the housing of the working classes in the city. This came shortly after a scheme of houses was opened in the village of Blackrock on the outskirts of the city, which had been constructed at the behest of the Cork Rural District Council, whose chairman Michael Egan was a prominent AFIL member.

Criticism was not in short 14

supply, from workers who argued that a wage increase would be preferable, and other nationalist organisations such as the United Irish League (UIL) and the AOH who condemned the AFIL for their opportunism ahead of municipal elections in January 1914.

Kiddies Scheme

In early October, while in London attending a special congress of the British Trades Union Congress (BTUC), Larkin met the social campaigner Dora Montefiore.

Shortly afterwards Montefiore

and a number of her supporters came to Dublin with the intention of bringing children away from the city to English locations until the strike and lockout came to an end. This scheme had the tacit support of the ITGWU Executive.

Archbishop William Walsh of Dublin, who had been trying hard to mediate between the employers and locked-out workers, was implacably opposed to such a scheme.

This was, suggested the Cork Weekly News, due to his fear that Montefiore and her supporters would place the children with known socialists in England.

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On October 22 a group of children, their parents and Montefiore supporters travelled to Kingstown pier to catch the ferry to Liverpool.

There they were met by a group that physically prevented the children from embarking; fights broke out and a number of people were badly injured. This was, in the words of the Cork Weekly News, an attempt to drive a wedge between the working classes and the Catholic clergy, ‘preventing the carrying out of relief measures for the distressed people’. Larkin and Montefiore, the paper later argued, had ‘become a menace to both employers and employees’.

Inevitably, given the polarisation of nationalist politics in the city (as alluded to by Larkin in the quote above), there was a certain amount of schadenfreude contained in the pages of reports and comment on the Dublin Lockout. The Cork Free Press in September reported on an attack by Murphy on Larkin in the pages of the Irish Independent. While Larkin did not succeed in inculcating his socialist gospel in Cork, the ‘Murphyite [sic]’ combination in Dublin was struggling ‘despite its alliance with the Castle, the Orange extremists and the Molly Maguires (a pejorative term used by the AFIL for the AOH)’; therefore the Independent’s attack was ‘a case of the pot calling the kettle black’.

The Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) came under sustained attack from the Free Press and Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

Weekly News for the lethargy and disinterestedness they showed for the plight of the working classes in Dublin.

The Free Press printed a rare cartoon in its issue of 8 November, depicting Party chairman John Redmond as the Roman Emperor Nero, playing the harp while Dublin burned under the concerted fires of Larkinism and capitalism. The paper also ascribed the Montefiore riots at Kingstown in October to hordes of AOH supporters, who were well-known for their rough-housing tactics at public rallies.

Municipal elections in January 1914 in the city saw taunts and insults being traded between AFIL and IPP-UIL-AOH candidates.

The Free Press was condemned from Party platforms for calling ‘The Leader of the Irish Race’ a ‘political blancmange’ for his failure to confront either Larkin in Dublin or Carson in Belfast.

That the Party could not find money to support starving families in Dublin, when the BTUC spent almost £12,000 in relief measures was the subject of many attacks from AFIL platforms. The results of the elections were, in the words of a Southern Star editorial, a resounding defeat ‘for Mr William O’Brien and his Larkinite and Sinn Féin colleagues’. The Party coalition captured control of Cork Corporation by a majority of twenty seats. Such a victory justified, in the eyes of many nationalists, the tactics adopted by the Party.

Conclusion Reaction to the Dublin Lockout in Cork may not have been as coordinated and public as in, for example, Galway and Sligo. No major industrial disputes occurred in the city during the period, though a strike at a laundry in Queenstown beginning in September lasted until February 1914.

Whether this was connected to the Dublin Lockout is not certain, but the presence of the militant Queenstown Trade and Labour Council (whose chairman was a regular correspondent with James Connolly) may suggest a connection that is worth exploring in more detail. Overall, the reaction of the press in Cork to the Lockout gives a good example of the complex relationship between labour and nationalism in early twentieth century Ireland.

Further Reading E. O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, 1824-2000 (Dublin, 2011).

P. Yeates, Lockout: Dublin 1913 (Dublin, 2000).

C. D. Greaves: The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union: The Formative Years, 1909-1923 (Dublin, 1982).

John O’Donovan is a freelance historian and writer, who blogs at http://turbulentcork. wordpress.com He is currently researching a comparative study on Canon PA Sheehan and James Connolly.

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Living in Plato’s Cave With this year being the centenary of the 1913 Dublin Lockout, David Convery explores the reticence which otherwise surrounds the topic of the working class in Irish history. Examining the social, cultural and political factors which have kept the working class ‘locked out of history’, Convery also looks at the damaging contemporary repercussions of this long established silence and calls for a re-examination of Irish history from a class perspective..

T

he working class.

What images do these words conjure in our minds? Men in cloth caps, working on the docks? The coal-stained faces of miners?

Pickets in Thatcher’s Britain?

In most cases, it will be something far in the past or across the Irish Sea. This year marks the centenary of the 1913 Dublin Lockout, the only event in Irish history it seems, when the working class is ever explicitly acknowledged.

The Lockout, which pitted Jim Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) against the might of William Martin Murphy and the Dublin Employers’ Federation in a battle over union recognition, has tended to be viewed as a tragic, but unique case in Irish histo16

ry. Its uniqueness, however, lies mainly in its scale. The working class continued to exist in Ireland after 1913. It continued to develop its own organisations, its own cultural and leisure activities, its own forms of self-representation and identity. It also continued to engage in strike action and other forms of protest against employers and the ruling establishment. Class divisions were and continue to be central to Irish life but go

unacknowledged. The notion that class rather than ethnicity, religion, or the idea of national identity could have a role to play in politics, culture and society is an alien one to mainstream Irish debate. The working class has been locked out of history.

Why this neglect of working-class history, culture and identity? Numerous reasons have been advanced – the lack of large-scale industrialisation for instance has certainly hampered the development of a coherent working class, concentrated in the cities. The power of the Catholic Church has also cut across the development of classbased politics.

These reasons alone however, do not offer a sufficient explanation. There have been other countries such Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

Class History as Russia and Spain where similar conditions have not hindered the development of working-class identity and with it, political strength.

The triumph of nationalism and the lack of a strong and politically independent and determined labour leadership have further facilitated the neglect of the working class in Ireland.

Jim Larkin, James Connolly and the ITGWU were vociferous in their efforts to create an independent working-class identity and politics. After the union’s defeat in the Lockout, Larkin left for the United States and would not return until 1923. Connolly meanwhile, would be executed for his role in the Easter Rising in 1916. Despite the huge role of the labour movement from 1918-23 – a period of intense radicalisation which witnessed mass strikes, occupations, and ‘soviets’, most famously the Limerick Soviet in April 1919 – the new labour leadership lacked the willingness to use its industrial muscle to go beyond the current political boundaries.

Labour would consequently take a backseat in politics, allowing the nationalist movement to take centre stage. The nationalist movement was a pan-class alliance that saw nation, not class, as the key determinant in politics and society.

That the two main parties in independent Ireland – Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil – came from this movement, coupled with the weakness of the Labour Party which was content to latch onto the coattails of Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

one or the other as occasion presented, ensured nationalist ideology a dominant role in Irish society. Ireland would be defined by the commonality of people based on ethnicity and religion, united in the task of building an independent state. A Gaelic, Catholic identity was what mattered as opposed to an English, Protestant one. Class differences, although patently in existence to those who would look, were submerged. Those who presented an outlook at odds with this often encountered censorship, incarceration and ostracism from society. The only viable option for many was to take the boat.

its history. Instead of the working class we have the ‘poor’.

People described as poor can be said to have merely fallen on misfortune, or were not industrious enough. If they were ‘working class’ that would mean there was some economic element to it – that their condition was determined by their economic position in society, and was not entirely in their control.

Children of ‘poor’ families made up the predominant proportion of those incarcerated in industrial schools and Magdalen laundries. Those who were ‘poor’ – unless extremely lucky – were, until the 1960s, denied a secondary education. Efforts to improve the health of working-class people such as Noel Browne’s

It has often been claimed that Ireland is a ‘classless’ society.

The negative effect of this sort of proposition is clear.

Rather than Protesting PAYE workers in Dublin, facilitate a level 1979. playing field, it has reinforced the privileged status of those who already had wealth and access to power and through this, has advanced their cultural hegemony.

Historiography and cultural Mother and Child scheme criticism is thus marked by a were blocked by the interconservative and insular oriests of the Church and State. entation with a distinct focus The reason given that it was on constitutionalism, instithe family’s responsibility tutions and high politics and to provide for the health of culture, rather than on the the child, not the state’s, was lives, history and expression in reality, a class argument. of the great mass of people.

For those with money could Furthermore, this neglect of afford the best treatment class covers over the fundafor their children, and those mental and systemic inequalwithout had to depend upon ity in our society throughout whatever was possible with-

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in their family’s means and the charity of others. Too often this was not enough.

The contrast with the United Kingdom at this time was stark. The access to free and comprehensive health care that was provided to all with the creation of the National Health Service in 1948 despite a war-wrecked and rationed economy showed what was possible if the will was there. This contrast speaks volumes about the priorities and nature of independent Ireland.’

The notorious censorship of independent Ireland is another example of the denial of working-class existence.

While we herald the work of people like Yeats, where is Paul Smith’s The Countrywoman (1961), with its denunciations of poverty in independent Ireland? Where is Lee Dunne, author of Goodbye to the Hill (1965)? There are more subtle forms of exclusion than censorship that further hinder the widespread acceptance and availability of the product of working-class cultural endeavours. Fund18

ing from government bodies, inclusion in the school curriculum, and the lack of coverage in the media all play their part. Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1912), written by an Irishman, is widely hailed as a classic in Britain but is barely acknowledged in Ireland.

In contemporary Ireland, when the working-class is portrayed, it is often as criminals, scroungers, or subject to ridicule as in reality shows such as Tallafornia. In the media at large, there is a blatant attempt to hide the reality of class as it actually exists. Working-class people are often passed off as ‘middle class’, with an attempt to get them to buy into the values of the establishment. This idea, along with the myth of ‘social partnership’ between the unions and employers, allows the rich off the hook by claiming ‘we’re all in it together’, when the reality is the exact opposite. In a society where hundreds of thousands are unemployed or underemployed, when tens of thousands more are emi-

grating each year, and where austerity is inflicted to pay for the debts of the rich, the idea that Ireland is classless is farcical. The centenary of the 1913 Lockout offers us an opportunity to reflect on our methods and our scholarship, and change our perspective to examine class as it has really existed in Ireland – both in the past and in contemporary society. There are two approaches that I think historians and other scholars can adopt that will aid this.

The first is to study the working class. This may sound obvious enough but it is by no means straightforward.

The Irish Labour History Society (ILHS) was established in 1973, and its journal Saothar, in 1975. These have provided a focus and given an enormous boost to the study of Irish working-class history, even though it remains largely neglected by mainstream historiography.

However, although they have investigated certain aspects of Irish working-class life and culture from time to time, both have been characterised by an overly empirical approach focused on biographical studies of labour activists and the history of institutions such as the trade unions and the Labour Party.

This is understandable given the lack of mainstream interest and meant that much of the groundwork of merely Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

gathering documents and developing an outline of Irish working-class history had yet to be done. However, it has meant that the study of the Irish working class is behind that of other countries. The pioneering efforts of the ILHS have succeeded in creating a scaffold which we can build upon by an examination of aspects of the culture, mentality and everyday life of the Irish working class, as well as the interactions of the working class with the dominant state discourse. This entails adopting an inter-disciplinary approach that draws upon methodologies, sources and ideas from disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, literature, cultural, women and gender studies, as well as history, to examine aspects of Irish working-class life that have hitherto been neglected, or if examined previously, to offer a new and fuller perspective.

Secondly, we need to examine all aspects of history and culture from a class perspective.

Scholarship has long investigated what various actions, writings and policy say about religion or national identity, but what do they say about class? Who benefits most from government policy in regards to health, education and other provisions? What does the poetry of Yeats say about his attitude toward the working class? What is the language used in newspaper reports when describing the working class? Was there a class element to the Irish Civil War, or partition?

Investigating history from a class perspective offers us new insights into seemingly familiar history. Unless we adopt both of these approaches, the great mass of people throughout our history will remain but a shadow as its passive, voiceless victims instead of the thinking and active people they actually were, and moreover, we will never gain a true understanding of the nature of power and the dynamics of change in Irish society.

Further Reading D. Convery, Locked Out: A Century of Irish Working Class Life (Dublin, 2013).

E. O’Connor, ‘Presentations 2: Labour history in other lands.

Ireland’, Labour/Le Travail 50 (2002). Available at http://irishlabour.com/?p=12 F. Lane, ‘Envisaging labour history: some reflections on Irish historiography and the working class’ in F. Devine, F. Lane & N. Puirséil, Essays in Irish Labour History (Dublin, 2008). www.ichlc.wordpress.com www.irishlabourhistorysociety.com David Convery’s research focuses on working class politics and culture in twentieth century Europe. His PhD thesis, completed at UCC, focused on the history and memory of the Spanish Civil War. He has published numerous articles on the same subject.

E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class revolutionised history writing when it was published in 1963. Ireland has yet to be afforded similar treatment.

Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

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Interview: Padraig Yeates Prior to the publication of Padraig Yeates’ Lockout: Dublin 1913 there was no comprehensive account of what is generally recognised as a seminal event in Irish labour history. The original book, published in 2000, has been reprinted by Gill and Macmillan and is more widely available in paperback in this centenary year.

Yeates was centrally involved in the many attempts to mark the centenary of the Lockout and is the leading figure in the 1913 Committee – a group set up to coordinate the many and varied events happening throughout the country.

Scoláire Staire’s editor, Adrian Grant, met Padraig Yeates in Liberty Hall over the summer to talk about the Lockout, his book and research, labour history, marking the centenary and various other things.

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I

had never been inside Liberty Hall before arranging to meet Padraig Yeates on the ninth floor on a Friday morning during the summer of 2013. He’s been busy during the first half of the year organising various events and speaking throughout the country, giving his take on the events of 1913. I began by asking him how he found himself writing labour history and where his interest in history comes from.

Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

Interview Padraig Yeates: I’ve always been interested in history. I left school after my O-Levels basically, and went to work, but I’ve always been involved in politics so I suppose from that, there’s an interest in history. My father served in the British Army in the Second World War, so, again as a kid I’d be asking about the war and I’d be reading about it and what happened before that, the Russian Revolution and that type of thing. So I think that it all came from there, but the Lockout and the involvement of me in labour history was by accident. It was because I worked in journalism. I was the Industry and Employment correspondent with the Irish Times at that stage and Fergal Tobin, in Gill and Macmillan, rang me up and asked, ‘had anyone done a book on the Lockout’.

I thought about it and said, ‘no’. Lots of books, starting with Donal Nevin’s first little [book] on Larkin and the Lockout in 1963 contain references to the Lockout, but no one had actually sat down and written the history of it. So he just said, ‘you might be interested in doing it’, so I said I would. The only reason the book ended up so big was because I knew so little about it. Like a lot of people I thought the Lockout began with a bang in August/ September 1913 and then, like any industrial dispute, it dragged on for months and petered out. So, I started writing it very intensively, because I knew they wanted 100,000 words at least. So, I thought the only way to do Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

this is to make it as detailed as possible. I only realised when I went back over the actual sources that it just kept happening, more and more things happened. I eventually ended up with nearly 400,000 words. I took out about thirty or forty thousand and that got it down to about 330,000 and then I gave it to Fergal and said, ‘well, you know, you cut the rest’. And then he came back and said, ‘I don’t think we can cut it, but we can’t afford to publish it’.

I went along to John Dunne, who was then director general of IBEC [Irish Business and Employers’ Confederation], and asked him would he give me a subsidy for it. I went on the basis that if I could get money out of IBEC I could then sort of blackmail the union side, and in fairness to John, within a week he sent a cheque. He read the book, I know he read it, you could tell that from his comments. He took the trouble to read the book and he sent me a cheque within a week, from IBEC. It was much harder to get money out of the unions than it was to get money out of the CIF [Construction Industry Federation] and IBEC. But eventually everybody chipped in a few bob. IMPACT and SIPTU were the biggest contributors, IMPACT in particular, Shay Cody and Peter McLoone, you know very kindly, I think, put up more than anyone else. This time around SIPTU provided a subsidy for the Centenary year reprint. Looking back it would probably have made more sense to write a shorter book that could’ve remained

in print.

Adrian Grant: But it is an exhaustive study...

PY: Yeah, for its time...I mean obviously new material comes along and you’d revise your attitudes to different people and events. But I wouldn’t change my overall assessment of what happened. It’s still the only comprehensive account we have.

AG: Why do you think that is? That no one wrote it before you or even since? Well, Francis Devine has edited a collection out now... [Capital in Conflict, reviewed p. 37] PY: Yeah, a very fine collection.

AG: But, do you have any thoughts on why there wasn’t a book before yours?

PY: Well it’s partly because it’s fated to be seen as a curtain raiser for 1916 so nobody saw it as a big event in its own right, and then it cuts across the traditional Irish historiography because of the link with Britain. It’s the one event in all those years where the alignments...Catholic and Protestant employers, unionist and nationalist employers all banded together, and the same on the other side. There were comparatively few Protestant working class people in Dublin at that time but there were people in Merseyside, Liverpool, Clydeside, northwest London and the midlands, all those people, or the vast majority of them, were Protestant in their religion.

They were English, or Scot21

tish, or Welsh. So it’s the one event really that’s different and it’s one of the ironies that in fact that it could only have happened because we were in the United Kingdom. We’ve never had anything like it since. I think that’s one of the tragedies, if you like, of the Irish working class.

I like to quote Karl Kautsky, who is making a bit of a comeback now. He made the point in 1922 that it [independence] was a victory for the Irish people against imperialism and it had been won, largely, by the working class...but they were now going to pay the price for that, which was to be dominated by a peasant society. Anna Haslam said something very similar in 1918 when she was campaigning for Maurice Dockrell, I mean she was a veteran suffragist and her background would have been Protestant and unionist, and middle class...She was about eighty at that stage but she campaigned on platforms and she told women to stay in the Union [United Kingdom] because they would be better off in a middle class, urban liberal democracy than in an independent Ireland that would be dominated by farmers and shopkeepers. To that extent she was right. It took 100 years, nearly, for women to come out from under that. There were those inconvenient things about it that people didn’t want to probe, and which cut across the traditional historiography... and also it’s not very interesting. I know from writing about industrial relations and being a trade union activist 22

myself – no one is interested in strikes apart from the people involved in them, unless it’s something like the power stations are closed, you know, hospitals and services are threatened, people want to know what’s going on. But, generally speaking I think it’s subliminal. Most people don’t like work, and when they get away from it, they don’t want to be reading about somebody else’s work! So I think that’s a big factor in public attitudes to labour history. I wouldn’t underestimate that.

AG: I never thought about it that way...you know, reading about someone else’s work.

PY: Well, you know, guns and bombs are quite exciting – if you’re reading about them rather than experiencing them...

AG: I suppose that’s another reason why 1916 is going to be the big one. Even the Limerick Soviet seems to have had more written about it than 1913…

PY: The outcome [of the Lockout] was never really at issue. There was never any chance of the workers’ side winning, but it was the nearest thing we had to a debate in this country about the type of society we wanted. People talk now about the 1916 Proclamation or the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil, both of which could only have been written in Dublin, but they were never debated at the time. They were very radical, progressive documents. Connolly and Pearse presumably wrote the

Proclamation. There was a story that one of the signatories didn’t want to sign it because it advocated equal rights to women. We don’t know who that was by the way. It was Kathleen Clarke who claimed that, and I don’t know how she knew, but she said that the signatory who was reluctant to sign wasn’t her husband!

The Democratic Programme was read into the record of the Dáil, which was quite incredible. It was only really debated, as far as I know, by Harry Boland, Tom Johnson, Bill O’Brien and Cathal O’Shannon. Michael Collins, who was so exercised about it didn’t even bother turning up for the meetings. He was busy, obviously, with other stuff. It’s ironic that they [the IRB] wanted it changed, and then they couldn’t even be bothered to change it themselves. They said, ‘you go and redraft it’. It was [Seán T.] O’Ceallaigh and Boland who basically engaged with the union and labour side and agreed the changes.

And, in fairness, they didn’t make huge changes. They just took out some of the more progressive elements about nationalising industry, which was a pity, but at least most of it survived...

AG: Whether or not it was implemented...

PY: ...I think it was a consolation prize for the trade union movement, particularly in Dublin, where Labour could have contested some of those seats [in the 1918 general election] and I think that Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

would have resulted in the Unionists winning more seats or the Redmondites. Certainly I think it’s possible that a Redmondite or a Unionist would have won south county Dublin if Labour had run and split the radical nationalist vote. And again, in the Harbour division. It’s one of the ironies – James Connolly never ran in the Harbour division in 1915 when it was probably there for the taking. In 1918 they [Sinn Féin] ran Philip Shanahan because Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, who was nominated, for some reason wouldn’t run. She would have been elected alongside Countess Markievicz, who felt she’d been dumped in St Patrick’s Division because she was a woman. Ironically enough, because women felt so outraged that she’d been given this bad constituency, as they saw it, they all went to help her, so she had a big election machine and she won very comfortably. And I think Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington would have won comfortably in the Harbour division if she had accepted the nomination. So you had two leading socialist republicans, James Connolly and Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington, who both passed up nominations to the most working class constituency in Ireland, and they ended up by default allowing Alfie Byrne [Nationalist] to represent it.

AG: And talking about Larkin and Connolly, they’re obviously the most remembered figures of 1913, but obviously there were a lot more people involved and a lot of unsung heroes. Is there anybody in Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

particular...

PY: I think P.T. Daly and William Partridge, in particular.

P.T. Daly had an unsavoury reputation because of the row about IRB funds years before.

There’s no doubting that it happened, but he did have a young family, he was in the States at the time. I presume the family were in a bad way and he sent over the money he’d collected for the IRB when he was on the Supreme Council. He had to resign and they accepted that there were exceptional circumstances, but that scandal dogged him right through his life. As you

probably know, there was a big inquiry about it – O’Brien insisted on it - during the War of Independence, so all that stuff was dragged out again. But, he was a major figure in the union [ITGWU] and in the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.

And then William Partridge was another major figure. He was a fitter by trade. Larkin was one of the first people to headhunt good organisers from other unions. Daly was a printer, Partridge was a fitter. Some of his [Larkin’s] other people were home grown, like....James Byrne, 23

The funeral of James Byrne, 1913. (Image courtesy of 1913committee.ie)

a coal heaver out in Dun Laoghaire. Larkin recruited a whole echelon of people.

Some of them worked out, some didn’t. James Byrne is one of the forgotten figures...

AG: Is this James Byrne who was on hunger strike?

PY: Yeah, some people are querying that now. We don’t actually know what happened for certain. All we know is that he was up on a couple of occasions for intimidation, which was technical assault, which was happening all the time in the Lockout. On this occasion some workers went back to the coal port in Dun Laoghaire. He went down with a couple of other men and argued with them to come out, and the police charged him with intimidation. I suppose one man’s intimidation is another man’s 24

lobbying or whatever. But, whatever the outcome, he felt he had been set up, so when he came up before the magistrate he was remanded and he said he wasn’t going to accept bail. I said in the book, and I thought that was the case, that he’d gone to Mountjoy, but he didn’t go to Mountjoy.

We don’t really know what happened. All we know with absolute certainty is that he was taken very seriously ill, within a few days he was taken to Monkstown hospital and he died there immediately of pneumonia.

The oral tradition is that he was locked up, and we think that he was locked up in Dun Laoghaire, in a police cell.

You have to remember that in those days, stations held prisoners, and they also had holding stations where you could...hold them on re-

mand. There was one by the old Irish Times building on Fleet Street. The vacant site is still there beside Doyle’s pub.

It took overflow prisoners from College Street station...

So we think that maybe he ended up there, which would make sense. If he’d been in Mountjoy, then obviously you wouldn’t take someone who’s seriously ill all the way to Monkstown, rather than the Mater. It’s possible he just got pneumonia and died. But he was a big strapping figure, he was in the prime of life, he was relatively young – he was in his early thirties. He suddenly goes from being fit and healthy one day to dying in a week. The other thing is that it was Connolly who made the tribute to his memory at the funeral...

AG: Yeah, it was a big propaganda boost...

Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

PY: Well I think there was an element of guilt involved.

Suddenly this man had died on them and no one had paid attention because it happened in the middle of the big Dora Montefiore controversy...so I think there was a guilt element but they did turn it into an affirmation of workers’ rights.

It was Connolly who said this man had suffered on hunger and thirst strike and died for his beliefs and so on, so that’s where it comes from.

While Connolly, like anyone, was capable of gilding the lily, I don’t think you could fabricate all that and somebody, somewhere in Dublin wouldn’t say – hold on, that’s complete rubbish ... especially on the employers’ side.

AG: And in the press...

PY: Yeah, which was controlled by the employers. It was the Freeman’s Journal that carried the report, the fullest report of Connolly’s speech.

I think you have to accept that it was more or less true.

It was amazing then, that after he died and so much else happened, he was totally forgotten. It was a project by Seamus Fitzpatrick of IMPACT and Emer Costello, who I think was then INTO, working on a community education project out in Dun Laoghaire who rediscovered him and they got some FÁS money to do up the grave and put a headstone up, and do a legacy project on him.

But, until then he was totally forgotten.

AG: There’s a campaign at the Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

moment to re-name, or name the new bridge [across the Liffey] after Rosie Hackett.

PY: And Connolly. I know SIPTU’s policy is to support James Connolly’s nomination but I think it would be nice if it was maybe Rosie Hackett instead. I mean we do have Connolly station, we have the statue and there are other things named after Connolly.

So yeah, I think it would be nice to...

AG: It would be the only bridge named after a woman, across the Liffey.

PY: So far anyway, there might be more, you never know.

AG: Just to move onto the celebration, or commemoration events, that you’re centrally involved with…Can you tell us a little bit about the composition of the 1913 committee.

PY: It’s a bit amorphous really, it started off in SIPTU and then Congress [Irish Congress of Trade Unions] got involved. The key members I suppose would be Sally Anne Kinahan, who is the assistant general secretary of Congress, myself and Joe O’Flynn, who is general secretary of SIPTU and treasurer of Congress.

We have other people sort of coming and going. We have a good working relationship with other groups like Dublin Trades Council, Dublin City Council, the Irish Heritage Trust, Dublin Port, CIE. In fact CIE provided us with premises for the Lockout Tapestry. They don’t want much

publicity for it. They’re afraid of being attacked by Shane Ross or someone for wasting resources but…you see Tara House, that grey nondescript low rise building [pointing from the window of Liberty Hall across the Liffey]…The bottom floor of that is empty, because of the recession, so they gave us most of it as a production centre. To be honest we’d have never done the tapestry without that.

It’s central, people can come and work on it, we can store stuff…so that there is a good working relationship there.

Ironically that stems from the fact the CIE is a unionised company. They may have disputes from time to time but there is a shared culture, a shared way of looking at the world of work and its traditions.

We were hoping to do something in the CHQ, an exhibition of trade union banners.

They [Dublin Port] were given responsibility for it when the Dublin Docklands Authority was wound up, but now they’ve been told they have to sell it or lease it as soon as possible. It cost a lot of money to do the banners so we’re now hoping we’ll get the Riding School of the National Museum [which eventually happened]. So a lot of things are in flux. We’re doing another partnership with the National Library in Kildare Street. Myself and Peter Rigney, we curated material so that’s going to go on in August/September. [The NLI Exhibition is being extended until the summer of 2014 because of the high footfall.]

25

The big one, which will be a temporary project, but is important, is the Tenement Museum. Dublin City Council have charge of three houses in Henrietta Street, and one of them, Number 14, they’ve agreed to use it as a base for a Tenement Museum. Charles Duggan, who is the conservation officer, did a great job saving the buildings. He’s been working on them for years, and if it wasn’t for this the Tenement Museum project wouldn’t be possible. But our Lockout committee, Dublin Heritage Trust and Dublin City Council are working on the project so that, from July through to the beginning of September, ANU Productions, a theatre company who are highly acclaimed and very well known, are producing an interactive theatre experience for the public in the building, on the ground floor. It’ll portray life during the Lockout.

And the thing about Number 14 is that it was never been anything since its fall from grace as a townhouse for the aristocracy, it was never anything other than a tenement up until the early 1980s and then it closed and gradually crumbled. But if you walk into that building today, you can recognise it instantly as a tenement. We looked at other buildings but there are very few original tenements left. So the aim is to have a temporary installation with ANU initially and then over the coming years to actually develop it incrementally. At present it is only possible on the ground floor because that’s the only floor where the original floorboards have 26

been reinforced to make it safe. We hope that ten or maybe twenty people at a time will be able to go in and enjoy the Lockout Experience. It’ll be on a loop so each performance will probably last around thirty to forty minutes and then there will be a break and then another one so we expect a lot of people will get through it. ANU did something similar with Laundry in Sean McDermott Street and the Boys of Foley Street over the past two years.

AG: What about the longevity of commemorating 1913 and the benefits of it for the study of labour history? Do you think this year is something that labour historians, and historians in general, can build on to increase awareness?

PY: Yeah, absolutely. I think the one thing we’ve got going for us is that it’s at the beginning, more or less, of the decade. I don’t mean to sound parochial but events such as the Covenant and the UVF are not going to resonate very much down here. So it’s the first big event that people will be interested in. It does give us the chance to introduce labour elements to the interpretation of what’s coming, that we wouldn’t otherwise have, because 1916 has become so big in the hagiography of Ireland that it’s unlikely to be dislodged. At least we can throw some alternative lights on it. And it [the Lockout] is still relevant in a way that the Somme and what happened in the GPO aren’t. At the end of the day they are ancient history but collective

bargaining is still a core issue, much more so than simple trade union recognition. The latter is important, but the key thing is collective bargaining and the reality is that collective bargaining is the main mechanism by which you redistribute wealth, other than taxation, in a capitalist economy.

AG: What can people expect to find on the 1913committee.ie website and how can people get involved if they want to get involved?

PY: We’re trying to overhaul it at the minute and hopefully the new one will be launched quite shortly but it’s taking longer than we thought and I’m not a techie person. But, people can go on the site and they can go to the events page and that will tell them what’s coming up. They’ll also find the chronology, which will give them a detailed chronology of the Lockout, day by day, and it’s probably the most comprehensive one you’ll get anywhere so it’s a handy reference for anyone who wants to do anything themselves… _______________________ You can also find blogs or send in blog pieces to the website.

For those who wish to contact the 1913 Committee, you can do so through the website or by writing to the committee care of SIPTU, Liberty Hall or the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. Thanks to Joanne McEntee for arranging the interview and conducting background research.

1913committee.ie

Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

PhD Diary

THE FINAL COUNTDOWN Shay Kinsella Last week I registered for my third (and hopefully final) year on this programme. The greatest difference in my becoming a full-time PhD student has been the improvement of focus on my topic. I now have a one-track mind and the reduction in stress is considerable. The work is intense but I know it is a short-term thing, with a tentative completion date pencilled into next year’s calendar. I am genuinely enjoying the life of a historical researcher/writer, and can properly afford to recharge in my downtime, guilt-free.

I have spent the last month following up new sources in Carlow and Dublin, some of which are private collections of manuscripts (where tact and patience with the owners is crucial), and am just about to start writing my next chapter. My work has been greatly energised by the growing interest in the study of Irish ‘big houses’ and estates, a subject which is now enjoying great popularity in history, the arts and the world of popular entertainment. The by-products of the success of the soap-opera Downton Abbey have legitimised the Irish curiosity about the local big house and those who owned and worked in it. Previously dismissed as non-Irish bastions of colonialism, the time has now arrived where their place in the national narrative is assured and they are begging to be explored and interrogated —an invitation which was generally only accepted before the 1990s by those inside the Anglo-Irish circle. The recent The Big House series on TV3 was clearly produced to feed this growing interest. Half of this year’s publications in the Maynooth Studies in Local History series are studies of big house and/or estates and the number of related conferences is rocketing. All of which is reassuring in terms of my subject matter, but poses a challenge in terms of establishing the similarity or uniqueness of the estate under study.

However, so much of my time continues to focus on finance that I’m becoming increasingly irritated by that side of things. Following my previous entry, I sent out forty-five begging letters to the notables of Carlow society (business people, financial and civic institutions, and private individuals), promoting my study as a potential information base for the future promotion of Carlow tourism, particularly along its waterways. I included a detailed outline of my Scoláire Staire JULY OCTOBER 2013 2013

proposal, with links to how the study could directly benefit their business, group or personal interests. I also guaranteed that I would acknowledge all assistance in the completed thesis, in exchange for a donation towards my fees. I never had high hopes of a good response and satisfied myself that at worst, the exercise would promote awareness of the project. Two months later, I have so far received replies from just three recipients —none of whom are in a position to contribute financially to the project, but who sent their best wishes and assured me of their interest in the project. Three out of forty-five, roughly a 7% response, with 0% success in terms of hard cash. I am sure there are readers out there who are in no way surprised at this statistic, crying out ‘But of course!’ or ‘What did you expect?’ given the current state of the economy and the impending budget. Perhaps it was incredibly cheeky (and innocent) of me to request third parties to dig into their pockets for my benefit. However, I remain genuinely convinced (especially in terms of the civic and tourist groups I contacted) that my research will be of assistance to them in developing and promoting Carlow as a tourist and business destination. Apparently, this view was not shared by most of those I contacted, and the failure to acknowledge my letter, or send a reply is, I feel, simply bad manners. I can accept refusal, but being ignored is a different matter entirely.

I am lucky to be in the position to take up some substitute teaching work if and when it suits me, and if things get extra tight in the new year (which I fear they will), I will have to undertake this work on a more regular basis. This has made me select Christmas as a sort of interim deadline to assess whether progress on the thesis is satisfactory or not.

Determined to get the thumbs up at that time, I have a couple of months of hard work ahead. See you in 2014!

Shay Kinsella is in the final stages of a PhD programme at St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra.

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John Simm in BBC’s The Village

Representing Class on Television Do Irish television producers have a lot to learn from their counterparts in Britain and the USA? David Toms casts his eye over some recent dramatic outputs from Ireland and beyond.

A

representation of working class life on Irish television, particularly in a historical fashion, is a rare occasion.

Indeed, with the exception of Strumpet City, produced by RTE Television in 1980 as a miniseries, it is hard to think of historical dramas produced

by Irish television for an Irish audience that looks at the lives of working people in Ireland. TV3/Big Mountain’s recent programme, The Tenements (2011), about life in the Dublin slums, was a half-way house between documentary and reality TV. The Big House, (TV3/Big Mountain, 2013) shifted the focus towards the rural working class using the 28

same format. These programmes are perhaps the most recent attempt to look at Irish working-class life in a non-contemporary, but also entertainment driven way.

Historical fiction is much harder to come by, while fictionalised accounts of Irish working-class life are even more scarce.

The way working-class life is projected onto Irish television screens leaves much to be desired. Typically it centres, like in RTE’s Love/Hate, on drug dealing, drug use and drug abuse in inner-city Dublin, neglecting the wider experiences of working-class people in these communities, or

indeed acknowledging that a working class exists outside of Dublin. One of the few major Irish shows in recent times to show drug use outside of an urban working-class (that is to say Dublin) context was RTE’s extremely popular mid2000s series, Pure Mule.

Even recent comedy, Damo and Ivor, derives its apparent humour from the contrasting of two rather lazy stereotypes of Dublin, one of a northside ‘skanger’ called Damo, and the other of an equally lazy Ross O’Carroll-Kelly imitation called Ivor, supposedly two identical twins separated at birth. Andrew Quirke, the actor who plays both characScoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

Television ters, is the son of a millionaire. In the case of both such stereotypes, Lenny Abrahamson has achieved a great deal more than all of these RTE shows in his trio of films dealing with Irish life from a range of perspectives; Adam & Paul (2004), Garage (2007), and What Richard Did (2012).

Given the apparent interest among Irish television viewers for representations of class of some description or another, and the appetite for historically based entertainment among the public at large, it seems particularly unusual that there be such a dearth of home produced historical dramas on TV, a medium which still holds a real power for public engagement.

In Britain by contrast, largescale historical drama and

fiction series, focussing specifically on working-class life is much more standard fare.

If TV seemed to be dying out only a few years ago, then its power to engage has in recent times been rediscovered with the increasing popularity of many long form series, especially on American cable channels HBO (The Wire, The Sopranos) and AMC (Mad Men, Breaking Bad).

The development first of the DVD boxset, then on-demand television, as well as internet streaming and torrent downloading has caused a change in the way in which people watch television. Episodes are often viewed back to back, offering a rare moment for historical representation on television to be more immersive than ever before. Two new British

shows produced this year point the way for a similar show in an Irish context.

While Downton Abbey (ITV) has proven hugely popular, its at times almost ahistorical approach to class relations has seen something of a backlash against it, and that is where both The Village (BBC) and The Mill (Channel 4) come in.

The Village opens with the viewer meeting Bert Middleton as he begins to recall life in his Derbyshire village to an invisible interviewer. We are cast back in time to 1914, just before the First World War begins and our guide, the young Bert Middleton (played superbly by Bill Jones) shows us his family, his village, and his world as they encounter change, driven in large part by the oncoming war. Over the course of

Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, as ‘Nidge’, gets in bother in Love/Hate.

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to some, but the show is worth sticking with.

Aidan McArdle as John Doherty in The Mill.

the six episodes we see the shifting world of Bert Middleton as he grows from boy to young adult, with all of the intrigues of village life, from the hysterical young lady of the big house, Caro Allingham, to the missionary zeal of Martha Lane (played by Irish actress Charlie Murphy). One of the most noticeable things about this world, given the war and the call up of men, is that it is a world populated largely by women.

Secondly the working-class represented here, in the Derbyshire village, is not that which one most readily associates with social-realist drama of a British kind; this is not a world peopled by the characters out of Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. The story, told in six one-hour episodes covering the years 1914 to 1920, revolves around a family of small farmers, a 30

rural rather than an urban working-class. A boot factory opens in the village once the war gets underway, but the labour in this village and its surrounds is determinedly agricultural.

This alone means the show avoids clichés about ‘The North’, and how working-class people are portrayed on screen. As screenwriter Peter Moffat himself has noted, in an interview with the Radio Times, ‘Life at the start of the 20th century was hard... it's vital not to imbue the past with a kind of Ready Brek glow... In British television there's a tendency to look at this period from the point of view of the officer classes.’ This show does anything but that and through its slow burning pace, people develop and change, while the village changes with them.

This pace might appear turgid

There is great humour in The Village but it is subtle rather than ridiculous, is genuine and warm, and arises naturally instead of being shoe-horned in for a moment of levity.

This is perhaps the series’ most realistic trait; the humorous moments arise often from their impropriety or the incongruity of the situation. They do not exist to show - in that awful clichéd fashion - how working people faced hardship with wit and humour, or resignation. It is in dealing with the First World War, and more specifically the issue of commemoration, where the show also displays its strength. Given the obsession with commemoration that has and will continue to engulf Irish people in the coming decade, the final episode, which deals with commemoration of the village’s war dead, the erecting of a monument and the debate surrounding what should happen to a deserter, whether he is to be listed among the war dead of the village and given pride of place, rings especially true.

More recently, Channel 4 aired a four episode mini-series called The Mill. Set in the 1830s, the series is based on the records of the Quarry Bank Mill, situated outside Manchester, and tells the stories of the people found in those archives. The Mill is Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

principally concerned with the Greg family, owners of the mill and also of a slave plantation in the West Indies. However, it also tells the stories of workers like Esther Pryce, an orphan in search of her real birth date so she can unyoke herself from the mill; Daniel Bate, an engineer and labour activist; and another labour activist, John Doherty, who was born in Buncrana, Co. Donegal. Much of the Caricatures? show revolves around the Damo & Ivor personal lives of those working in and running the mill, as Doherty and others attempt to see the 10-hour bill enacted into law through the houses of parliament. In essence, the story is one of the awakenings of class consciousness.

A much faster paced drama than The Village, remarkably charges of bleakness and grimness were again levelled at The Mill by Guardian columnist Sam Wollaston, while Bernice Harrison of the Irish Times bemoaned its greyscale colouration, saying that it ‘makes the BBC’s most recent historical shadesof-grey gloomfest, The Village, look like Downton Abbey. But where the writer of The Village cleverly wove fact into fiction, creating a strong dramatic story, The Mill wears its research heavily’.

Interestingly, when The Village aired earlier in the year, much of the coverage of the show in the TV pages of the British press tended to decry Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

the apparently unrelenting bleakness of the series. One review in the pages of the Independent wished that screenwriter Peter Moffat ‘would occasionally lighten his touch a little, which would intensify the pathos not weaken it’. Reviewing the final episode in the Daily Telegraph, Ben Lawrence wondered if perhaps ‘viewers tend not to want challenging fare on

Sunday nights. The costume dramas that have succeeded on Sundays…have seduced audiences by rejecting any sort of reality and aiming for a cosy candlelit view of the past’.

Sam Wollaston of the Guardian likewise felt that the series was ‘an utter joy vacuum’, though he also acknowledged

the show had been ‘bold, beautiful, powerful’. There is some merit to all of these assessments, yet one cannot help but feel, watching the six episodes back to back, that in all of this criticism they failed to appreciate that as historical dramas go, The Village achieved a rare thing when dealing with working-class life on the screen; it utterly confounds expectation, and avoids cliché.

Both The Mill and The Village do a good job of showing us an untinted view of the past and many of its more banal hardships. Ultimately these were more manual worlds; it may not be cosy television, but it gives people a view of history from the perspective of working-class people. In fact, I would argue that the research is one of the The Mill’s best features. By drawing the story directly from the mill’s archive, the writers show the potential of using primary sources to provide us with factually-based historical drama. Indeed, the accompanying 4oD site provides plenty of context for the interested watcher, plus digitised images of many of the key sources from the mill. In this respect, the show manages to pull together all that is best about the current possibilities of televised history; episodes available back to back, interaction with primary sources, historical context provided.

Esther Pryce’s baptismal certificate is movingly included 31

Doing it right? The Wire (below) and Breaking Bad (opposite).

on the dedicated Mill website.

The miniseries itself was good, though far from perfect, and offers a vision of what historical drama can aspire to be and do in the future, given the potential of the internet as a resource for entertainment and historical research. A key weakness of The Mill is that the demand to ensure dramatic turns is more readily felt, given its shorter run, and so characters are pulled towards plot twists. This does not occur in The Village, where drama is realised in the slow unfold-

32

ing of tensions. The charges of ‘bleakness’ aimed at both programmes are, in essence, complaints that what is being shown to people is not merely distraction-television, or escapism, but something engaging. Whatever the apparent bleakness of The Village, in particular, it still maintained decent viewing figures around the five million mark, and so Moffat’s hoped for English Heimat, comes into the 1920s in series two, due on our screens in 2014. Make sure you catch up in time for that.

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Much has been written and argued about the suitability of television as a medium through which people might learn history, whether in the form of documentaries or fictionalised accounts of the past. Generally we might say that while there is no substitute for history in the printed word, television and film can nevertheless offer a powerful entry point for those who are not historians, either professional or amateur, but who have a nascent interest in history. That is why, when good historical drama comes along, it ought to be applaudScoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

ed and recognised. Given the success of both shows, despite the criticisms, Irish television may consider the long-form series (RTÉ have proven their capability with Love/Hate) as a means to bring new historical drama to our screens.

services such as 4OD, BBC Player, RTE Player, Netflix, Sky Go. For the creative reader, there are ways of sourcing television shows on the internet that we couldn’t possibly endorse. (Ed).

While not without faults, The Village and The Mill offer a vision of what historical drama can aspire to be and to do in the future.

Dr David Toms is a regular Scoláire Staire contributor.

He recently passed his viva at UCC with a PhD thesis on sport in Munster. As well as history writing, David also writes poetry and his first collection Soma | Sema was published by the Knives, Forks and Spoons Press last year.

Most of the dramas and other television programmes referred to in this article are available to watch on various streaming

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Commemorating 1913 With a raft of publications and other outputs evident this year, Áine Mannion asks who has been commemorating the 1913 Lockout and why?

Stripped of its historical context, the 1913 Strike and Lockout has become an easy story to celebrate. Engaging, well-known, and with clear heroes and villains, it possesses a generally-accepted narrative. But had it not been grouped within the ‘Decade of Centenaries’, the Lockout could have been easily overlooked as a commemoration-worthy event.

While this decade-based marking highlights the significance of the Lockout within the national story, it also continues the binding of labour history within a narrative of national independence and state formation.

There is one idea which should be kept in mind while reading the following reviews: commemoration of the Lockout was never inevitable. Although the products and the producers of these Lockout projects share many surface similarities, the meaning of the events and the purpose of commemoration differ immensely. Although the end products could be noted as similar in that they often make use of new methods of communication or aim to engage the audience with unknown entities, what is most noteworthy is the way in which so many trajectories have overlapped and intersected and in so doing have created a moment of commemoration.

Interviewing some of the people involved in the various Lockout projects it becomes clear that those producing the works were very rarely aware that others were engaged in similar projects and have only been offered the chance to interact in the promotion of their work.

Paddy Lynch was only ‘vaguely aware’ of the Lockout when he was asked to do the artwork for Big Jim, a graphic novel on the topic. For Lynch and Rory McConville, Big 34

Jim’s author, preparation involved a process of discovery for themselves about the Lockout and the Dublin of the time. Insisting that ‘it had to be accurate’, Lynch explained the importance of a graphic novel as a means of expressing the story of the Lockout. Firstly, Big Jim was to serve as an entry point for those who mightn’t ‘have time to read an 800 page weighty tome on the thing; it immediately brings them in and [can] give them an overview of the main events’.

But the medium was also central to the story’s effect on the audience: ‘we purposively put in archival photographs more or less as they were … so you’re reading this where you’ve all these drawn figures and you’re in the story. It’s very “comic-y”, it’s traditional comic storytelling. And then in key sequences we wanted to present a few photographs – like, you know this happened? This is something that was real. And maybe shock the reader out of it momentarily.’

Rather than acting as an entry point for an interest in the Lockout, 1913 Unfinished Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

Review Business (UB1913) aimed to act as a starting point for analysis. Shane Fitzgerald explained that the ‘idea was to counter the Decade of Centenaries coming along – not just the Lockout but other things’.

Eoin Griffin added that UB1913 aimed to ‘use the past as a means of talking about the present’. Noting the complex relationship between the event and the memory, the men recognised that the memory of the Lockout could not be peddled by anyone for any purpose; Griffin explained that while he disagreed with the possibility of reinvigorating ‘a memory from so long ago’, there were ‘lessons that can be learned and it’s scary to compare now and, say, the return of zero-hour contracts or the return of unpaid labour, unpaid internships’.

The creation of the podcast series was certainly tied up with the concept of memory: Fitzgerald noted that the impetus had been ‘the general idea that there was going to be a whole lot of misinformation and misremembering being put out there’. And while the process of self-education about society in the period of the Lockout recalls the ‘small library’ Lynch collected on 1913, the purpose of presenting a complete image of Irish society was less about shocking the audience into recognising the reality of the images as Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

demonstrating to the audience the connections between 1913 and 2013.

Through interviews, actions taken at official commemorations, and the content of the podcast series, UB1913 has been clear about the purpose of commemoration. Yet alongside this forthrightness about the hope to change the trade union movement, Fitzgerald and Griffin also described the desire to counter the prevalence of a nationalist historiography in Ireland. Griffin explained that ‘the idea of a decade of commemorations puts the 1913 Lockout as a direct precursor to the 1916 Rising and to the War of Independence and the establishment of the Free State’ and yet ‘the Lockout doesn’t fit very neatly into Irish nationalist ideology’. Through this understanding of these conflicting narratives, it becomes clear that UB1913’s conception is not as linear as appears at first glance but in fact recognises the possibilities inherent in allowing audiences to form their own ‘questions about oppression and class relations’.

The aspirations of UB1913 are tied to that of Locked Out, a new book published on the history of the Irish working class in the twentieth century, through this recognition of the possibilities available 35

to that coherent overall history is the recognition of Ireland’s international place. This means not only recognising Ireland ‘as integrated with the rest of the world and part of a worldwide process’ but accepting that the worldwide movement of people was part of that history: emigrants did not simply disappear but ‘could bring ideas back to Ireland as well and vice versa’.

when an audience is enabled to question.

Locked Out’s editor, David Convery, explained that the book came about because he not only thought that it would be ‘important to mark the 1913 Lockout in some way for the centenary’ but also saw that many of the young scholars working around him were often from working class backgrounds, or were studying working class history, and were taking an interest in methodologies which had been developed in Europe and North America but had yet to be introduced to Ireland. He recognised that ‘there is actually a new generation of people out there that are taking a different look at things’ and that together they could make a strong impact on our historical knowledge.

When pressed whether 1913 had formed a focal point for the interest in a new historiography, Convery disagreed. Although ‘everyone [involved in Locked Out] would have an interest in 1913 […], I think that the general thing is that people are looking at something new and are looking at the working class and a load of people who are excluded from history, other oppressed groups and [are] trying to find their experiences, trying to integrate them into a coherent overall history’. Central 36

It is striking that just as Big Jim refuses to leave 1913 to those with the time to investigate all the details and just as UB1913 refuses to leave the Lockout to official commemoration or nationalist historiography, Locked Out does not leave the history of labour and the working class in Ireland up to academics. Convery explained that he hoped the book could ‘contribute to a process of re-evaluating what [working class] means and especially of giving working class people a sense of an identity that’s not reflective of these images that they see on television’.

If anything truly connects the projects on the Lockout reviewed here, it is not the Lockout itself but the insistence on widening participation in Ireland’s history. Convery put it well: ‘I don’t think that history should belong to academics. I don’t think history should be written primarily for academics. I think history should be written for everyone. And that we need to be bringing history into the communities and hearing what people in the communities are saying, letting them take ownership of their own history and having a pride in it and not allowing education to belong to a minority of people in society. But an educated population is a dangerous thing in times of austerity.’ Áine Mannion completed a B.A. (International) in English and History in NUI Galway in 2011 and a Master of Studies in Global and Imperial History from the University of Oxford in 2013.

Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

Review Francis Devine (ed), A Capital in Conflict: Dublin City and the 1913 Lockout (Dublin City Council, 2013, 405pps, €45.00 HB, €24.95 PB). have been forthcoming over the years and during 2013, but this book is a long overdue academic study of the Lockout from a variety of angles.

Irish labour history is years behind many of its counterparts across the globe. The discipline in Ireland has been characterised by institutional histories, biographies of leading figures and analysis of major events. There has been little movement towards the ‘history from below’ approach, and theoretical excursions, developed elsewhere more than half a century ago. In fairness, this is beginning to change as a new generation of Irish historians are beginning their careers and showing that labour history is perhaps on the cusp of a great leap forward. This is not to say that Irish labour historiography to date has been sub-par or lacking in dedicated practitioners. Those who led the Irish labour history charge since the 1970s have taken a practically non-existent field and tilled it into a healthy entity with a wealth of publications and an annual journal.

Due to the fact that labour’s story is largely absent from mainstream history, one could be forgiven for assuming that the 1913 Lockout represent the start and end of class as a consideration in Ireland’s past and present. Even labour historians appear to have shied away from the epic showdown in Dublin. Although Padraig Yeates’ extensive chronicle of the dayto-day events of the Lockout is unlikely to be surpassed, there is surely still room for interpretation. Granted, some other publications Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

A Capital in Conflict is edited by Francis Devine, one of Ireland’s most tireless labour historians, who also authored the opening chapter. The chapter guides the reader through the various twists and turns of the subsequent essays while also attempting to provide an overview of the Lockout itself, chronologically then increasingly thematically. Yet it is difficult to understand the purpose of this. It might have made more sense to include a short introduction of a few pages and follow that with a chapter exploring the major themes and events. More referencing in the opening chapter would also have been welcome. For example, what is the source for Jim Larkin having shouted, ‘I’m Larkin’ from the balcony of the Imperial Hotel on Bloody Sunday? It is not clear if this is a story related to Devine by someone or if it came from reportage of the event. While this may seem a trivial point, it contradicts the impression that the people present on Sackville (now O’Connell) Street recognised the man on the balcony from his oratory, accent and build rather than him having to explain who he was.

Over the course of the other fifteen chapters, the contributors focus on themes such as housing, health, women and children, politics, art, and the press. Enda Leaney’s chapter offers a visual record of working class life in Dublin at the time. He draws on information gleaned from the 1911 census and contemporary accounts of life in the Dublin slums to present a horrendous story. The photographs really bring home the reality of the depravation described in the text and are well-placed throughout the chapter.

It is encouraging to see a number of forays into areas that have not been afforded much attention in the past. David Durnin, for example, looks at the impact of the National Insurance Act of 1911 on healthcare and the medi37

cal profession in Dublin. The Act in question had a huge effect on the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and deserves more attention generally. Niamh Puirséil examines the Labour politics at the time of the Lockout, a subject which has been largely ignored. Noticeably, the centenary of the foundation of the Irish Labour Party passed by last year without much fanfare (the reasons for which are open to debate). Tom Morrissey is on board to give William Martin Murphy right of reply to the popular narrative of villainy associated with Larkin’s Dublin nemesis.

John Cunningham contributes a chapter entitled ‘From Disturbed Dublin to Strumpet City: the 1913 history wars, 1914-1980’. In this he concentrates on the ‘public history’ of the Lockout beginning by looking at Arnold Wright’s pro-employer ‘history’ of the Lockout, published in 1914, and Connolly’s response in the Irish Worker. The split in the Labour movement, which began in 1923 and lasted for decades, had a major impact on how 1913 was remembered by the ITGWU. William O’Brien was able to write a short history of the Lockout without once mentioning his enemy, Larkin, while also emphasising the role played by his friend, Connolly. Cunningham shows how the ITGWU’s anti-Larkin attitude coloured its memory of the Lockout and ensured that it would be Connolly and the Easter Rising of 1916 which were emphasised as the major figure and event in the union’s history.

Connolly’s role in 1913 would be given prominence in yet another example of his post-1916 legacy being projected onto his career, pre republican martyrdom. A large proportion of the chapter is devoted to James Plunkett’s Strumpet City in its many forms. It is quite telling that the account of the Lockout that would seem to have had the most impact on the public mind is not a history of the event, but a play/novel/television adaptation. A Capital in Conflict: Dublin City and the 1913 Lockout is a move in the right direction by the historians and will hopefully not be the last word on the Lockout after the din of centenary celebrations has faded.

Adrian Grant is a labour historian and the editor of Scoláire Staire.

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David Convery, Locked Out: A Century of Irish Working Class Life (Irish Academic Press, 2013, 304pps, €65 HB, €24.95 PB) Coming as it does on the centenary of a year which has become synonymous with trade union struggle in Ireland, 2013 has seen an increased focus on labour historiography.

Locked Out: A Century of Irish Working Class Life is a product of this increased focus.

Edited by Dr. David Convery, the book represents an opportunity for a group of 12 emerging Irish historians to outline their research on the history of the Irish working class. As Convery makes clear in the introduction, the title is intended to be read on multiple levels; it refers to the events of 1913, the ‘locking out’ of the working class in post-1922 Ireland, and the ‘locking out’ of the working class from Irish historical scholarship. Not unfairly, he sees most current Irish historians as largely similar to their counterparts in England at the publication of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working-Class in 1963: ‘largely ignorant and, moreover, unconcerned with investigating English working class life’. Convery explicitly notes that the book’s publication marks the 50th anniversary of Thompson’s study and expresses the hope that Locked Out will help end the marginalisation of working class history in Irish academia, just as Thompson’s Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

Review work did across the water.

Unsurprisingly, given the year that’s in it, the first three chapters deal with the events of 1913. Prominent labour historian Dr. Conor McCabe provides an analysis of class divisions in Ireland during the Lockout, while Convery himself follows with a discussion of 1913’s place in popular memory. James Curry’s chapter on Andrew Patrick Wilson – the Scottish dramatist and contributor to Larkinism’s flagship paper, the Irish Worker – demonstrates how the union movement used drama to expose the class prejudices of the time and reminds us that the paper is one of the most fascinating primary source materials on Ireland during that era. Culture and class is a theme which reoccurs throughout the book; Dr. Michael Pierse perceptively deconstructs Yeats’ poem September 1913 in the final chapter. Explaining that the poem was intended to condemn not the Lockout but Dublin Corporation’s decision not to fund Hugh Lane’s offer to help found an art gallery in Dublin, Pierse argues that the Irish left is misguided in using the poem to commemorate the Lockout.

He also notes the classist themes common in some of Yeats’ other writings while working class Irish writers such as Paul Smith are virtually unknown in their own country. Pierse discusses the classist nature of contemporary Irish TV shows like Love/Hate, RTÉ’s pale imitation of The Wire, and TV3’s Tallafornia, echoing the analysis of the British media contained in Owen Jones’ Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class.

Both Dr. Alan Noonan’s chapter on Jim Larkin’s relationship with Irish-America and Sara Goek’s discussion of Irishmen in post-war Britain show an awareness of the importance of transnational history (to use the profession’s currently favourite buzzword). Both chapters note how class tensions in Ireland played out within extensions of the diaspora: tension between Irish miners and mine-bosses in Butte, Montana, saw verbal clashes between Larkin and the local Irish-American establishment in the period after the Lockout, while the traditional music scene in post-war Britain was seen as beneath middle-class emigrants in a pre-folk revival era when Irish music was associated with rural poverty. Transnational Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

history is also touched upon in Dr. Fiona Devoy McAuliffe’s chapter on trade union resistance to British government attempts to impose conscription on Ireland during the First World War. McAuliffe notes that a consequence of the refusal by female trade union activists to take positions vacated by their male counterparts was that the amount of females in the Irish workforce was lower than elsewhere.

Disappointingly, and perhaps surprisingly, only one chapter deals with Ireland’s industrial heartland. Dr. Christopher Loughlin’s chapter on the 1942 shipyard strike in Belfast reveals that even the unifying event of the Second World War could not wholly end class divisions within Northern Ireland.

Both communists and leading Unionist Party figures found unlikely common ground in opposing the disruption to shipbuilding at the height of the struggle against Nazism. The fact that the strike was partly prompted by the appointment of a worker from the Free State shows the ability of sectarianism to sow division among workers in Northern Ireland.

Ireland’s third city is discussed in Liam Cullinane’s chapter on the predominantly female textile workers in Cork. While noting that Irish workers did not use the language of class, Cullinane argues that they were no less aware of class division: interviewees told him how school reunions they attended were segregated in terms of class, paralleling their time in school, with the middle class ‘grandies’ situated at the front while ‘ordinary’ people were confined to the back.

One positive feature of the book is that it does not confine the discussion of working class history solely to the analysis of the labour movement. Donal Fallon contributes a chapter on the ‘animal gangs’ of 1930s Dublin, presenting a more complex picture than the anti-communist mobs which have gone down in the folklore of the Irish left. NUIG’s Dr. Sarah-Anne Buckley also discusses working class experience in the industrial school system, something which has received a lot of attention in recent years. David Toms’ article on the workplace and pub leagues of 20th century Ireland combines both the histories of labour and sport. The latter has long suffered neglect from mainstream academics, who view it as 39

trivial, despite the centrality of Gaelic games and association football to both Irish society and the daily lives of countless numbers of Irish people. Toms notes how workers succeeded in organising their own leisure pursuits, in the face of little or no encouragement from their employers, and created common ties with their workmates in the process.

While inevitably only a fragmentary look at the current state of working class studies in Ireland, and not ideal in terms of the gender balance of the contributors, Locked Out is an important read for anyone interested in modern Irish history and shall no doubt act as a springboard for further research. With the book’s publication taking place alongside events like the inaugural conference of NUIG’s Irish Centre for the Histories of Labour and Class, perhaps 2013 will be known as a watershed year for academic appreciation of Irish working class history.

Gerard Madden is a first year history PhD candidate at NUI Galway. _____________________________________

1913 Unfinished Business, 1913 Lockout: Unfinished Business podcast (Total running time 178 minutes, 2013). ub1913.wordpress.com In their mission statement Moira Murphy and the team behind the 1913 Unfinished Business (UB1913) blog highlight concerns also held by many professional historians regarding the 40

way we commemorate contentious issues in Irish history. Past centennial and bi-centennial public commemorations have been overtly influenced by the politics of the time, and political agendas have regularly triumphed over the need and duty to remember. As a historian who firmly believes that a decade of commiserations would be more fitting than a decade of commemorations, it was heartening to read that the UB1913 team were intent to ‘critique and oppose elite commemorations’ and attempts to ‘sanitise [1913], this important moment in Ireland’s history of class conflict’.

However, while the stated aim of UB1913 is to ‘ensure that the workers’ story is told’, the recurring tenuous comparisons made between the socio-economic conditions endured by Dublin’s working poor in the early twentieth-century and the conditions with prevail today is not only disingenuous to those we are duty bound to remember but does much to ensure that those who participated in, or were affected by, the 1913 Lockout remain ‘locked out’ of their own history.

The six-part series opens with a comprehensive overview of the changing political landscape in Ireland from the Act of Union to the first decades of the twentieth century, during which time ‘the rich marched out of Dublin city centre and the poor marched in’. Here we are introduced to the main protagonists of the 1913 Lockout: Jim Larkin and William Martin Murphy. While the attention given to Larkin borders on the obsequious, contributors do not shirk from acknowledging the complex character that is Murphy. Historian Dr. Conor Kostick brings an authoritative voice to proceedings, contextualising the emergence of the labour movement, trade unionism, and syndicalism in Dublin within international developments. However, Dr. Kostick’s contribution is followed by an attempt to draw a comparison between the working class of 1913 and modern day ‘working class people in institutions who find themselves squeezed once again’. For the listener the latter cohort remain difficult to identify, and a subsequent comparison between the striking transport workers of 1913 and the recently striking Bus Éireann workers argues unconvincingly that both groups were ‘fighting for similar reasons’.

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Review In the episode Housing-Then & Now, Folklorist Terry Fagan of the North Inner City Folklore Project highlights the fact that the physical state of the Dublin tenements remained practically unchanged until the 1950s (and in some cases even later). However, Fagan remains forceful in his assertion that Dublin City Council have for some time maintained a policy of inclusion, consulting with local tenant committees to inform their housing strategy. Although analysis of the extreme close quarter living conditions endured by the working poor in 1913 is largely ignored in this episode, contributors insist on drawing a precarious connection between modern ‘bedsit landlords’ and the ‘slum landlords’ of 1913.

Consideration of A. M. MacSweeney’s contemporary report Poverty and the wage earning classes (1914) which describes in striking detail the plight of the working poor in 1913 may serve to highlight how erroneous such a comparison really is.

‘In one of these tenements there were seven families occupying eight rooms. In another of them I found a family of thirteen persons-father, mother, and eleven children whose ages ranged between four and seventeen- all living in two rooms and a hole called a kitchen.

There were four other families in the same house…thirty people living in eight rooms, and for sanitary accommodation having one water tap and one closet…All the persons living in these houses were miserable looking; the grown people had starvation written on their faces, while the children, and strangely enough the very young were almost naked’.

Anyone who has studied the living and working conditions endured by the working poor in urban centres during the early twentieth century will identify with Ann Matthews’ contribution in the episode Women of 1913. Matthews paints a vivid picture of the nightmarishly overcrowded, undernourished, diseased and poverty-stricken existence which characterised the life of Ireland’s urban poor. Drawing on her own family history, she asserts that the failure of the Lockout exacerbated already horrendous living conditions among the wives and children of striking workers forcing them to rely on charitable organisations such as the Dublin Children’s Distress Fund for food and Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

clothing. She rightly asserts that the history of this ‘struggle from below’ is still written from above and that a focus on Markievicz, Montefiore and Delia Larkin dominate a historiographical landscape content to ignore the role and contribution of ordinary working class women. Mary McAuliffe asserts that the women workers of 1913 suffered a dual oppression: being working class and women. They were denied membership of the Irish Transport & General Workers Union as they were viewed as being ‘a threat to the valid household income’; as far as Larkin was concerned, ‘the Worker’ equated to ‘the Man’.

John Cunningham’s fascinating contribution to the episode New Unionism & Beyond Dublin highlights lesser-known labour disputes in Ireland and contextualises the Dublin Lockout within a general upsurge in labour militancy across Britain and Ireland during 1912 and 1913. Cunningham asserts that while events in Dublin may have been the most dramatic, similar less well-known disputes in Wexford, Sligo and Galway were of equally ‘epic’ importance, and in some instances were on a scale equivalent to the Dublin strike. Equally fascinating in this episode is the section dealing with Larkin’s involvement in the Belfast Dock Strike of 1907 when syndicalist tactics united the city’s working poor, transcending deep-rooted sectarianism. In this case, informed contributions are harnessed to forward the argument that New Unionism, which marked labour relations in the early twentieth century, should serve as a model for modern day workers so as to encourage a ‘blossoming of working class organisation and militancy’.

Fair enough!

The strong point of this podcast series rests with the historical scholarship presented by some of Ireland’s foremost social historians, whose contributions serve as an important and informed frame of remembrance. However, UB1913’s attempt to ‘reinvigorate class politics using the centenary of the Lockout as an inspiration’ is more appropriation than commemoration and is doomed to repeat the failures of the past.

Michael Dwyer is a PhD student in the School of History, UCC. 41

Rory McConville & Paddy Lynch, Big Jim: Jim Larkin and the 1913 Lockout (O’Brien Press, 2013, 80pps, €12.99 PB)

Big Jim: Jim Larkin and the 1913 Lockout marks the first collaboration between Rory McConville, a writer and graphic novelist from Cork, and Paddy Lynch, a Dublin-based designer and cartoonist. Eighty pages in length, it is one of two graphic novels specially commissioned by O’Brien Press to mark the centenary of the Lockout, with Gerry Hunt’s 1913: Larkin’s Labour War also released earlier this year.

Beginning on the eve of the Lockout in late August 1913, and concluding with the defeated Larkin’s departure for America in mid-October 1914, Big Jim offers a fairly balanced account of the most iconic industrial dispute in Irish history. William Martin Murphy is introduced as a figure ‘vehemently opposed to trade unions’ yet later allowed to argue that he was ‘not opposed to trade unionism’ but merely Larkin and the militant ITGWU. Members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police are shown to have brutally batoned workers during the Lockout yet been overworked and essentially placed in an impossible situation. And Larkin comes in for criticism on several occasions but ultimately emerges as a heroic figure who ‘made a difference’ in 1913 and fought bravely for workers’ rights his entire life.

Dora Montefiore’s attempts to liaise with the ITGWU in temporarily removing children of strikers to foster homes in Britain collapsed in the face of enormous opposition from the Catholic Church. In Big Jim we see Montefiore increasingly shrink in size the more she protests in vain that she is only ‘trying to help’ before being forcefully prevented from taking children away by an army of demonic looking priests, and observe one priest being interrupted by a photographer mid-rant to be asked to move slightly to his left while he proudly poses alongside a Dublin boy whom he had helped keep in Ireland.

Indeed, there is a decent argument that Big Jim is the most interesting of the various O’Brien historical novels published to date. The subject matter certainly helps, with Larkin’s fiery charisma and the extraordinary suffering and defiance of the locked out Dublin workers in 1913-14 providing great material for any author or artist to work with. McConville’s writing is heavy on (very authentic) dialogue and light on exposition, an ap-

Considering its subject matter the book is surprisingly humorous in places, particularly during its coverage of the ill-fated “Save the Kiddies” campaign, when English socialist 42

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Review Larkin, Dora Montefiore, William P. Partridge and Captain Jack White all appear in the book, in the absence of any brief explanatory notes most readers will no doubt react to their sudden appearance with some confusion.

proach which creates a rather breathless pace throughout. The book also possesses very good panel to panel storytelling, and to this end McConville’s efforts are ably complimented by Lynch’s artwork, which for the most part vividly brings his words to life.

Lynch’s minimalist, cartoon drawings – together with an appropriately dark choice of colour palette – helps create an atmospheric feel to the book. Seemingly influenced by King, Ho Che Anderson’s acclaimed 2005 graphic novel on the life of Martin Luther King, Lynch has also opted to occasionally incorporate archival photographs and cartoons into his artwork. This not only leads to the creation of numerous striking montages that are interesting for the eye to linger on, but also proves a powerful technique in reinforcing to the reader that the events in Big Jim did actually happen.

On the negative side one cannot help but feel that things might have been explained more clearly for the casual reader, with details perhaps included on the circumstances surrounding Larkin’s arrival in Ireland in 1907 and subsequent founding of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU), the involvement of the Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU) in the Lockout, Larkin’s complex relationship with James Connolly (who appears out of nowhere on page 52), and the ITGWU’s eventful history in the immediate years following the Lockout. And while it is entirely appropriate that the likes of Delia Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

There are also quite a few minor historical errors in the text. For example, the Dublin Employers’ Federation was launched in June 1911 rather than September 1913 (as suggested on page 33), it was Nellie Gifford rather than her sister Sydney who accompanied the disguised Larkin to the Imperial Hotel on the afternoon of the infamous “Bloody Sunday” riot (page 17), while the ITGWU continued under the leadership of Connolly rather than William O’Brien following Larkin’s departure for America in 1914 (page 79). The ITGWU also had considerably more than ‘10,000’ members by 1913, and it was Peter Larkin rather than his more famous brother who ‘founded’ the Workers’ Union of Ireland as is stated in the inside cover.

Nonetheless, one needs to remember that this is a graphic novel rather than an academic history book so these criticisms should not be dwelt on too much. Attractively produced and reasonably priced, Big Jim will hopefully help stimulate interest in 1913 and Irish labour history for younger readers who now have the opportunity of studying the Lockout as a case study for the Leaving Certificate history syllabus.

When James Plunkett’s radio play Big Jim (an early template for his famous historical novel Strumpet City) originally aired on Radio Éireann in October 1954, one contemporary reviewer described it as an ‘imaginative presentation of the tumultuous meetings and beatings which followed in the trail of Larkin, until the struggle [in 1913] ended in a moral victory for the workers.’ McConville and Lynch’s effort of the same name might not be in the Plunkett class, but this description also accurately describes their entertaining and at times innovative collaboration.

James Curry is a Digital Humanities Doctoral Scholar at the Moore Institute, NUI Galway, and author of Artist of the Revolution. The cartoons of Ernest Kavanagh (Mercier Press, 2012).

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Paul O'Brien, The 1913 Lockout (People Before Profit Alliance, 2013, 34pps, €3 PB).

Cillian Gillespie (ed.), Let Us Rise ! The Dublin Lockout: Its Impact and Its Legacy (Ashfield Press in Association with the Socialist Party, 2013, 142pps, € 5PB).

Padraig Mannion (ed.), Lockout Centenary: Dun Laoghaire, 19132013 (Dun Laoghaire 1913 Commemorative Committee, 2013, 59pps, € 10).

Liam O'Meara, Emmett Hall: From the Lockout to the Rising in Inchicore (Riposte Books, 2013, 40pps, £5).

The year 2013 marks the centenary of the 1913 Lockout, an event of considerable importance in Irish history. Despite the apparent victory of capital over labour in this instance, the significance of the 1913 Lockout as an iconic historical event is acknowledged unequivocally today, on its hundredth anniversary, not only in poetry, drama, and song, but also by the appearance of a plethora of books and pamphlets commemorating the event. Some of these publications have been written by academic and popular historians, others have been penned by authors with a clear political agenda. The purpose of this review is to examine four publications concerned with the Lockout mentioned above belonging to the latter category, with a view to understanding how the Lockout is interpreted and remembered today and to ascertain what form of inspiration, if any, the workers' revolt of 1913 has on present-day trade union politics.

At first glance, all the aforementioned publications are at once a glorification of the workers' revolt of 1913 and a tribute to the leaders of the ITGWU for their courageous attempt to better working conditions for poverty-stricken Dubliners. The two publications that deal primarily with working class histories of the period are Lockout Centenary and Emmett Hall. These booklets were published with a 44

view to giving a voice to less known activists of the Lockout, and therefore offer a fascinating insight into the many contributions of local heroes on both the personal and the political level during the struggle for workers' rights, and, in the case of Emmett Hall, beyond this time.

Lockout Centenary has several contributors, most notably Padraig Yeates, who has written extensively on the social and political circumstances in the city of Dublin during the revolutionary period. Yeates examines the impact of the Lockout in the town of Kingstown, which is present-day Dún Laoghaire, a port town with a significant Protestant and Unionist population. Other contributors include Padraig Mannion, who draws attention to the case of James Byrne, the ITGWU branch secretary in Kingstown, a local hero who is remembered as Dún Laoghaire's 'Lockout martyr'; Martina Devlin, who exposes the plight of Dublin's working class children during the dispute; and Michael Lee, who attempts to put a human face on one of Dublin's employers, Edward Lee. The latter case-study is an unusual departure for histories of the Lockout, as Edward J. P. Lee is presented as an honourable employer, interested in his workers' welfare, in direct contrast to William Martin Murphy, who is presented as the very personification of evil in most treatments of the event. These histories for the most part neglect to mention other employers, such is their almost obsessive focus on the bellicose actions of the employers' leader Murphy Scoláire Staire OCTOBER 2013

Review and his frequently nameless cohorts. From this perspective, Lee's contribution is a valuable addition to studies of the Lockout, as are the contributions of the other authors, who reveal that the struggle of 1913 went beyond the boundaries of Dublin city, and thus affected the lives of many other previously unknown activists, who sacrificed much for the cause.

While the book Lockout Centenary is focused in the main on the Lockout period itself, the publication Emmett Hall extends the narrative further by making direct connections between the 1913 Lockout and the 1916 Rising. This publication begins with the history of Emmett Hall in Inchicore, which was purchased by Jim Larkin in 1912 as a branch office of the ITGWU. In 1913, Larkin appointed William P. Partridge as branch manager of Emmett Hall, and over the course of time Partridge was to become one of the most influential and high profile figures of the ITGWU, after Jim Larkin and James Connolly. The life and death of activist Michael Mallin is also discussed, along with the circumstances leading to the formation of the Irish Citizens Army, the Irish Volunteers, and the 1916 Rising.

This booklet attempts to directly link the 1913 Lockout with the 1916 Rising, and while some labour historians of today support this version of events, it is important to note that it is a highly contested position. Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in The Age of Empire (1975) has argued that the workers' revolt of 1913 was part of a wider movement of social struggle that went well beyond the city of Dublin, and indeed the rest of Ireland, and echoed similar workers' struggles in other countries such as Britain, the United States, Italy, and several others. The dispute of 1913 in Dublin was an industrial dispute affecting thousands of workers, who were attempting to assert their rights to belong to a particular union, the ITGWU. It was not an attempt to overthrow an oppressive leviathan, as was the case in 1916.

The historian Diarmuid Ferriter in a 2013 RTÉ1 documentary argued convincingly that those who view the Lockout as a precursor to the Rising are in effect reading history backwards. He points out that after the workers' defeat, many working class Irishmen joined Scolåire Staire OCTOBER 2013

the British Army in 1914, much to the chagrin of James Connolly. Ferriter poses the question 'is it the defeat of the Lockout or the outbreak of WWI that defines 1916 ?' The idea of continuity, therefore, between the two iconic events in modern Irish history as presented in Emmett Hall needs more careful consideration.

The two other booklets under scrutiny in this review are The 1913 Lockout and Let Us Rise!

These overtly politically motivated booklets both use forceful language to castigate present-day SIPTU leaders for their conciliatory 'sell out' tactics in protecting workers' rights and argue that trade union leaders today should take example from the workers of 1913 in their dealings with government. Let Us Rise! has numerous contributors, including Cillian Gillespie, who writes about class warfare in the city of Dublin, with particular emphasis on William Martin Murphy; Oisin Kelly, whose chapter 'The Gathering Storm' investigates the rise of trade unionism in Ireland; Fiona O'Laughlin's chapter, which reveals the extent of workers' solidarity between the Irish and British workforce during the struggle; and, very significantly, Ray McLoughlin's contribution 'No More the Slaves of Slaves' deals with the many sacrifices of working class women, whose support of the strikers and particular role in the movement was a vital adjunct to the workers' struggle.

McLoughlin pays tribute to the actions of the socialist and feminist Dora Montefiore, the 45

Review architect of the doomed Kiddies Scheme, for her ill-fated humanitarian efforts on behalf of Dublin's working class children. By offering many examples of the courage of the workers in 1913, this publication accuses present-day trade union leaders of compliance with the government's 'draconian austerity attacks on workers', which are in essence a betrayal of 'the movement of Larkin, Connolly and outstanding men and women of 1913'.

The 1913 Lockout booklet continues in the same vein. Kieran Allen's Foreword in this publication is particularly scathing in this regard. Allen argues that the workers of 1913, in spite of the personal cost to themselves and their families, proved to the employers that they were not just passive victims of capitalist enterprise. Rather, they were capable of organizing themselves to stand up for their rights. Allen, echoing the views of Let Us Rise! criticizes the passive present-day trade union leadership, whose adherence to the idea of social partnership with the government has ensured that, in the present economic crisis 'a series of terrible defeats have been inflicted on the workers'.

While there can be little doubt that the central message of these publications has validity, the feasibility of the means the authors advocate for the realization of a more militant and effective form of trade unionism today is, at the very least, questionable. The idea of a complete rejection of a social partnership would seem to be counterproductive. The social and political circumstances of today differ markedly from those of 1913, and therefore the same proposed remedies cannot be applied to the ailments of the present day. The workers of today have, at least, the possibility of negotiation and compromise and are free to join appropriate unions as they see fit; the men and women of 1913, conversely, had little means of redressing their grievances, particularly as the traditional champion of the poor, the Catholic Church,

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was suspicious of Larkinism, and therefore, offered little support to poverty-stricken workers during the dispute.

The workers had fought the good fight in search of justice, yet their gains in immediate terms at least were dismal. With no social welfare to fall back on, they were forced back to work to tend the ever grinding machinery of capitalism. The Lockout employers were not interested in compromise or negotiation.

They were determined to make an example of impoverished workers, and they appeared to have won the day. Yet, to use the words of the author Paul O'Brien in The 1913 Lockout, 'the strikes of 1910 to 1914 led to a growth in the unionisation of the general worker, and a number of victories in Britain and Ireland for better conditions'.

Overall, the general argument of all four publications reviewed is that the story of the 1913 Lockout stands as a symbolic reminder of the courage, tenacity and solidarity of Dublin's working class population, who stood together to defend their rights as workers. This sort of fighting spirit and the solidarity and concern expressed by the workers, according to the authors, is a model for today's trade union members and leaders to emulate. These publications are well written, and at first glance convincingly argued. However, it would be prudent to be aware that the militant tone of the arguments expressed, particularly in the latter two publications reviewed, can be viewed by some as an example of (socialist) propaganda. Yet, their contributions to a history of the Lockout that includes some of the least known episodes and protagonists, together with the major and better known ones, is undeniable, and has done much to extol the memory of the courageous workers and their leaders in 1913.

Bernadette M. O’Connell is a first year PhD candidate at NUI Galway.

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