TY - JOUR
AU - Colm, Murphy,
AB - Abstract The 1913 Dublin Lockout dominates Irish labour history. With at least 20,000 workers ‘locked out’ of work for joining James Larkin’s assertive Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, it was one of the most dramatic responses to radical trade unionism, socialism and syndicalism in the early 1910s. Yet, in this period Ireland was also fractured by sectarian divides and the polarizing politics of the Home Rule controversy. In the rhetorical whirlwind that engulfed Larkin and his union, we can see how these different political and social conflicts overlapped. Close examination of the hostile reactions of both employers and large sections of Dublin’s vibrant print media reveal that the Lockout was fundamentally understood in the wider context of the ‘progress’ of the Irish nation. Radical trade unionism was perceived by many groups, including Catholic-nationalist employers and both moderate and ‘advanced’ Irish nationalists, as hugely damaging to the national cause, and ideals of a united nation were used to criticize and attack Larkin’s union. The charged public debate over the Lockout thus helps us to understand the fate of political ideologies such as socialism during the ascendancy of Irish nationalism in the early twentieth century. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide The employer and newspaper magnate William Martin Murphy. Line illustration by Bernard Canavan after a newspaper photograph. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide The employer and newspaper magnate William Martin Murphy. Line illustration by Bernard Canavan after a newspaper photograph. The 1913 Dublin Lockout dominates Irish labour history. Partly, this is because it attracts hagiographies, especially of the trade-union activist James Larkin, who is immortalized in a statue on Dublin’s O’Connell Street. Despite the mythology, the Lockout deserves more attention and careful analysis. With at least 20,000 workers ‘locked out’ of work for joining James Larkin’s assertive Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, it was one of the most dramatic responses to the rise of radical trade unionism, socialism and syndicalism in the early 1910s.1 Yet Ireland in the 1910s was also fractured by sectarian divides and the polarizing politics of the Home Rule controversy. We should not study this industrial conflict in total isolation from these other divisions, nor shoehorn it into traditional narratives of Ireland’s independence. Instead, by scrutinizing the rhetorical whirlwind that engulfed Larkin and his recently-formed Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU, 1909), we can see how these different political and social conflicts overlapped. Close examination of the hostile reactions both of employers and of large sections of Dublin’s vibrant print media (mainstream and radical) reveals that the Lockout was understood in the wider context of the ‘progress’ of the Irish nation. Radical trade unionism was perceived by many groups, including Catholic-nationalist employers and both moderate and ‘advanced’ Irish nationalists, as hugely damaging to the national cause. The charged public debate over the Lockout therefore helps us to understand the fate of political ideologies such as socialism during the ascendancy of Irish nationalism in the early twentieth century. Initially, it is worth recalling why the Lockout merits continued historical examination. The industrial conflict was monumental. Hundreds of Dublin city and county employers locked out somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 workers, some for half a year, until they gave up membership of Larkin’s ITGWU. However, quite apart from the fact that the Lockout emerged during fevered political times, featuring the arming of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Home Rule controversy, the strike occurred in an Ireland that possessed a ‘significantly smaller’ industrial sector than Britain, and in a city whose economy was not as industrial as others on the island, notably Belfast.2 Hence, the 1913 Lockout was a complicated conflict which defies familiar models of industrial disputes. The existing historical literature on the 1913 dispute has yet to capture this complexity, despite the opportunities presented by the recent centenary. This is not to say there has been no new research. Scholars have enhanced our knowledge of business magnate William Martin Murphy, the traditional ‘villain’ of Lockout histories, and some material on female activism during the strike has been uncovered. Also, Padraig Yeates’s scholarship has proved a boon for students of 1913, drawing from a large number of sources to give an arresting narrative account.3 Yet histories remain largely focused only on chronological retellings, the strikers, or the personal battle between the ‘titans’ Larkin and Murphy.4 Continuing in the hagiographical tradition, Larkin and fellow trade unionist and future 1916 rebel James Connolly still attract biographies.5 Notably, except for Murphy, there has been little extended analysis of the motivations or justifications of the 400 employers who collectively locked out thousands of workers or of the arguments of their allies in the public sphere. This is surprising. The ITGWU’s activities after Larkin’s formation of the union in 1909 generated a considerable number of hostile reactions, providing ample opportunity for historical examination. Contemporaries fumed in private correspondence, and occasionally word of Irish labour trouble reached the Houses of Parliament, but opposition was particularly strong in print. This was, as Roy Foster recently put it, the era of ‘hardnosed journalistic polemic’.6 It is not surprising that many were antagonistic to the claims of labour. Larkin had been involved in several embittered strikes across the island, from Belfast to Cork, since his arrival from Britain in 1907.7 Employers, with only a few exceptions, were strongly opposed to his new union. So was most of the mainstream media, which was largely either conservative unionist or owned by prominent Catholic-nationalist employers such as Murphy.8 Indeed, while most in the Irish and British labour movement recognized the 1913 dispute on principle, a small number of trade unionists broke ranks and publicly attacked Larkin for a range of ideological, tactical and personal reasons. Furthermore, not enough histories of this class conflict have fully exploited recent developments in a British historiography, in which ‘class’ is considered as to an extent a discursive construct – or an ‘imagined community’ – which should be situated alongside overlapping identities.9 Both sides in the 1913 conflict relied on languages of class, and of ‘respectability’, gender, religion and nation, to assert their side of the argument polemically. This is not to say that these rhetorical battles occurred in a social vacuum. The low wages and appalling living conditions of Dublin’s tenement-dwelling poor at the turn of the twentieth century are well known. An informant for Archbishop of Dublin William Walsh alleged that Murphy’s tramway drivers, whose strike sparked off the Lockout, were paid around ten shillings a week less than similar workers in other cities, for long hours and insecure tenure. Female workers were often paid even less. The high rate of unemployment depressed wages, to the extent that they were considerably lower than in Belfast or Glasgow, prompting Larkin to call for a wages conciliation board. Moreover, the housing for Dublin’s poor was abominable. Indicative of decaying, insanitary and overcrowded living conditions was the fatal Church Street tenement collapse which helped inflame passions during the Lockout. To take one example, in 1914 the tenement 10 Francis Street contained just two WCs – to be shared by 107 inhabitants. It was significant that not only were seventeen city councillors tenement ‘slum landlords’ in 1913, but so too were a number of prominent employers, including Murphy.10 Nevertheless, social disputes are never simply a directly traceable outcome of social conditions and relations. The dispute happened because the syndicalist-influenced activists Larkin, Connolly and Countess Markievicz argued that the economic and housing plight of Dublin’s poor could not be solved by an Irish industrial revival led by paternalist elites, but only by general unionism – and agitated accordingly. The reactions to this ‘ideological innovation’ were complex and reflected an intersection of various social, political and cultural contexts and relations.11 They provide us with a window into Edwardian Ireland and, as we shall see, into nationalist Ireland – revealing the importance of nationalist assumptions and thus the implications of both constitutional and advanced nationalism for Irish working-class politics. THE RHETORICAL TOPOGRAPHY OF ANTI-LARKINISM Indispensable to a study of these hostile responses are the records of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce and the personal diaries and correspondence of significant Irish employers such as barley merchant John H. Bennett in Middleton and the Quaker mill-owning Shackleton family in Lucan. The latter, who were closely involved in the co-ordinated Lockout, also collected polemical anti-Larkin pamphlets, both anonymous and attributed.12 These appear to have been designed for a wide audience, but the fact that the Shackletons collected them suggests that they placed value on the arguments they contained. These pamphlets form a part of the second chief repository of source material: Dublin’s print media, which can be used to sketch the polemical topography of the dispute. Hence, a variety of contemporary newspapers, with their reports, editorials, readers’ letters and cartoons, have been examined, as has a partisan contemporary account of the Lockout, commissioned by the anti-Larkinite employers and published in 1914 by English journalist Arnold Wright.13 Other sources have yielded valuable evidence, such as the 1911 census, memoirs of mediator Sir George Askwith and the plays of ITGWU member Seán O’Casey. The backlash to Larkin’s activism and ‘Larkinism’ reveals several themes. Opponents often relied on claims of the dangers of syndicalism and the illegitimacy of the ITGWU – as Emmet O’Connor has argued, syndicalism was ‘at the heart of the matter’ for many contemporaries.14 Also common were partial explanations of breakdowns in law and order which associated violence and ‘tyranny’ with Larkin, and pejorative, class-infused discourses which viewed slum dwellers and unskilled workers as easily misled and ill-suited to manage themselves.15 While fear of syndicalism was important, particularly for some trade-unionist opponents of Larkin, condemnations of the ‘rabble’, couched in languages of status and class, reveal the importance of a reactive hostility to Irish new unionism and unskilled unionization. Most striking, however, is the prominence and recurrence of Irish nationalist language and arguments in the attacks on Larkin. This strongly suggests that Irish nationalism’s place in the Lockout has been hitherto underplayed or misrepresented. Popular discussion sometimes cheerfully slots the Lockout into a nationalist story, mainly because of the creation of the Irish Citizen Army (participants in the Easter Rising).16 In fairness, scholarship on Larkin, the ITGWU and the Dublin Lockout, and indeed on Irish nationalism, avoids this trap.17 Despite this, the existing literature often gives only fleeting attention to national identities in the conflict. When there is discussion, it tends to focus on the exclusively Irish concern of the ITGWU which, it has been argued, worked to ‘decolonize labour consciousness’.18 Yet Irish nationalism was a highly important ideological weapon deployed by opponents of the Transport Union as well. Larkin himself was repeatedly attacked as an English impostor misleading the Irish workers. The geographical origins of left-wing ideologies, and the support of the British Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, meant that the ITGWU was framed as anti-Irish, especially in the fevered atmosphere of the Home Rule crisis. In the context of a nationalist interest in industrial revival, it was also accused of harming nascent industry in Ireland, while unwittingly helping English industry. It is revealing that nationalist rhetoric was a key aspect of ‘respectable’ Ireland’s reaction to new forms of organized labour, and of the responses of some figures in advanced nationalist circles. It significantly complicates the idea of the Transport Union as somehow ‘decolonizing’ for contemporaries, and instead draws attention to the competing priorities of Irish nationalist and socialist activists. Nationalist attacks partly reflected the bitterness of the Lockout and the willingness of partisans to use any available weapon. Nevertheless, the idea of a nation requires a concept of an ‘imagined political community’: invisible bonds connecting a geographically, religiously and occupationally dispersed people.19 Class conflict can undermine this by inspiring rival allegiances. The anti-Larkinites’ reliance on nationalist tropes thus highlights that, in pre-revolutionary Ireland, nationalism and socialism often had rival agendas. In flashpoints such as the Lockout, they dramatically clashed. Given the trajectory of Ireland after 1913, nationalist rhetoric during the Lockout therefore illuminates the significant obstacles facing the Irish labour movement and working-class politics, and helps to explain their fates after independence. WORKER AND EMPLOYER MILITANCY It is clear from the evidence that industrial unrest increasingly preoccupied Ireland’s captains of industry from around 1911. This is not surprising. During this period ‘every country in the industrialising world … was racked with civil unrest’.20 In Great Britain the annual number of stoppages, which had not risen above 600 since 1901, was 872 in 1911 and had more than doubled to 1,459 by 1913, according to the Board of Trade. In Ireland a wave of strikes in 1911 included a national dispute on the Great Southern Railway which caused such disruption that it was raised in the House of Lords by an enraged Earl of Mayo. In 1913 thirty major strikes occurred in Dublin alone from 29 January, before Murphy took matters into his own hands in July to August 1913.21 This demonstrably rising militancy in 1911–13 was affecting the opinions of significant Irish employers. As an illustration, the diaries of Protestant malt and barley merchant John H. Bennett from Middleton, Co. Cork contain several references to the 1911 disputes, and when the strikes ended Bennett wrote he was ‘very thankful that labour troubles are well over’. In 1913, Bennett’s correspondence with the Guinness St James’s Gate Brewery shows a preoccupation on both sides with ‘labour difficulties’. When debating a new system of divided loading, letters from Guinness repeatedly acknowledged the ‘risk’ of labour strife cited by Bennett. They recommended on 7 March that Bennett should ‘revert, for the time being, to the old system of working’ as ‘the Board would not like to run to any serious chance of having any labour difficulties’.22 Notably, Guinness owner Lord Iveagh later secretly donated to the Dublin Employers’ Federation during the Lockout.23 Many employers also feared that behind this militancy lay an ideological threat, or a ‘continental socialist plague’, as Catholic spirit and wine merchant B. J. O’Reilly memorably put it in a Dublin Chambers of Commerce general meeting of 27 September 1911.24 That meeting was convened in order to debate whether to follow the Cork employers’ lead and combine into a federation, specifically to beat ‘Larkinism’. This was what led to the establishment of the Dublin Employers Federation, which, led by Murphy, took the decision in 1913 not to employ any ITGWU members. It should be noted that Larkin himself often whipped up fears of socialism with provocative speeches, as in Manchester where he is reported to have declared ‘I am out for revolution … they can only kill me, and there are thousands more coming after me’.25 Unsurprisingly, the increased number of strikes, and especially the activities of the Transport Union, incited a whirlwind of condemnation. Several tropes recur. One of the most significant was a focus on Larkin’s syndicalist-influenced tactics, premised on the idea that an ‘injury to one was an injury to all’: especially the ‘sympathy strike’ and the ‘blacking’ of goods from marked employers. The sympathy strike was regularly blamed for the spike in stoppages and branded as a ‘tyrannical’ tactic and the enemy of entrepreneurial autonomy. This argument dominated public rhetoric. Moreover, the private correspondence of employers suggests that this was not just public posturing, and that the sympathy strike was genuinely feared and hated. Letters from sympathetic members of the public often referred to ‘unreasonable demands’, and private discussions between employers about the threat of sympathy strikes show that it preoccupied their thoughts.26 Aversion to Larkin’s tactics fed into a frequently drawn contrast between ‘respectable’ and ‘disreputable’ trade unions: a rhetorical tactic regularly deployed to delegitimize the Transport Union.27 The employers often insisted that they were attacking ‘Larkinism’ not trade unionism. Former chairman of the Corporation Electricity Committee John Irwin for instance contended in the Freeman’s Journal that he was not against trade unionism in principle, but only ‘the Syndicalist and revolutionary methods of the gentleman who at present dominates the Dublin working classes’.28 Genuine fear of syndicalist-influenced tactics made the Lockout acceptable in much of Dublin’s public sphere. Yet strong partiality was displayed by opponents of Larkinism. For instance, they frequently associated the IGTWU with violence and intimidation. ITGWU agitation sparked denunciations of ‘scab’ rhetoric during the attempted mediating commission led by Sir George Askwith, and of ‘intimidation’ in newspaper adverts (and in the Houses of Parliament during the 1911 disputes).29 Hostile pamphleteering focused on the formation of the Irish Citizens Army, and cartoons suggested menace and physical violence, such as one depicting a young girl surrounded by unsavoury men while distributing boycotted Murphy-owned newspapers.30 This association reinforced the ‘illegitimate ITGWU’ narrative. There was a grain of truth to their accusations – the ITGWU’s Irish Worker argued in an editorial that it was acceptable to shoot ‘scabs’ as ‘deserters’.31 Nevertheless, it was not just the strikers who were violent. The police were undoubtedly brutal on ‘Bloody Sunday’ (31 August 1913), and some employers armed ‘free’ (non-union) labourers with guns. Furthermore, anti-Larkinites could not unproblematically decry violence as many were closely linked with the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) and thus with the land agitation in Ireland, in which violent practice and intimidation were regularly deployed by the farmers.32 Indeed, despite their protestations to the contrary, the spectre of organized unskilled workers was a significant factor in provoking employer militancy.33 Many employer pronouncements were profoundly paternalistic, and in practice large employers such as Murphy often only accepted unionization of their skilled workers – not the unskilled.34 The ITGWU, as a general union, explosively challenged this. Moreover, Dublin’s unskilled were also repeatedly distinguished from (often unionized) skilled workers. In the anti-Larkin propaganda, pejorative discourses about the ITGWU ‘rabble’ and Dublin slum-dwellers permeated the rhetoric of employers, pamphlets and newspaper editorials.35 Employers argued that general unionism meant skilled workers had to ‘lower their status’ by being in the same union as ‘scum like Larkin and his followers’.36 An anonymous unionized ‘Skilled Artisan’ attacked Larkinism as a ‘stench’ in a newspaper letter and called for artisanal unions to denounce the ITGWU.37 Such hierarchical language, along with denunciations of striker violence and aspersions on the Transport Union as ‘illegitimate’, supported the claim that unskilled workers and slum dwellers (demographics which often overlapped in Edwardian Dublin) were an unruly underclass, in need of firm guidance.38 These ‘status-class’39 hierarchies also overlapped with the opposition to syndicalist tactics: the Murphy-owned Irish Independent claimed that one ‘tyranny’ of the sympathy strike was that skilled workers had to leave their stations if unskilled workers were out.40 Indeed, it is likely that the sympathy strike itself was controversial partly because it allowed workers perceived as ‘unskilled’ to unionize to a greater degree than previously possible.41 It should be said that these ideas were not universal among the anti-Larkinites. Prominent opponent of Larkin and trade unionist William Richardson sent a handwritten letter to Shackleton trying to organize unskilled workers for his ‘responsible’ organization the Irish National Workers’ Union (INWU). He was evidently not opposed to organization as such. Nevertheless, the INWU was disbanded in 1915 – its short life emphasizing that overall the cultural and socioeconomic environment for unskilled unionization was inhospitable.42 THE ‘TRAMP FROM LIVERPOOL’ The nationalist themes of the anti-Larkinite languages are particularly striking. Reading the diverse anti-Larkin literature, it becomes increasingly clear that forms of Irish nationalism were an important rhetorical resource for opponents of the ITGWU. This raises the intriguing possibility that, to an extent, the Lockout was the dramatic collision of, in the schema of James Thompson, two ‘imagined communities’: nation and class.43 Of course, Larkin and many others involved in the ITGWU considered themselves Irish nationalists, but this was often not how contemporaries saw matters. An anti-Larkinite leaflet in Shackleton’s collection even asserted that the Transport Union’s Irish pretensions were a deliberate lie. It claimed the ‘Sinn Fein “ideals”’ of having an ‘independent Irish organisation’ were a ‘dishonest pretence, which, of course, is now finally abandoned’.44 We see regular nationalist attacks, firstly, on Larkin himself. This has been previously noticed by Padraig Yeates, who insightfully remarked that for ‘Irish-Irelanders’ Larkin was ‘objectionable’ because he ‘was the son of dispossessed [Irish] emigrants returning to preach the brotherhood of man, a doctrine they associated with the cultural impoverishment that British capitalism brought in its wake’.45 However, this was not just the case for Irish-Irelanders: a broad section of anti-Larkinites found it advantageous at certain points to incite doubt regarding Larkin’s Irish heritage and to suggest he was an English imposter or saboteur. This attack was used in Dublin as early as 1912, in the scorching one-penny pamphlet A History of Larkinism, written by E. W. Stewart, a hostile trade unionist and former member of Connolly’s Irish Socialist Republican Party (who by this stage had moved considerably to the right). Stewart claimed that: ‘The man whose name has given this term [Larkinism] to the civic life of Dublin is admittedly not a native of the city; but he claims to be an Irishman’. Under the sub-headline ‘NOT AN IRISHMAN’, Stewart challenged Larkin to produce a birth certificate and compared his accent to ‘the most approved manner of an English slum’.46 On the 28 August, a letter from one Thomas Hynes was published in the Evening Herald. Hynes began by championing Murphy as a man who had ‘provided employment – and good employment – for thousands’, and added ‘this is the man that this tramp from Liverpool has singled out’.47 Another newspaper correspondent who relied on this trope was a self-described ‘ordinary man on the street’, John Sweetman, whose letter to the Irish Independent is a prime example of how nationalism could be repurposed to challenge Larkinism: We Irishmen have suffered much from England for the last eight hundred years and now when we thought we were at last to be allowed to work out our own salvation, Mr. Larkin comes from England, supported by English Socialists, to set Irishman against Irishman, and thus to destroy our attempt at an Irish industrial revival … Englishmen are always hypocrites. They come, now, to free the workingmen from the tyranny of the employer – they came in the time of Henry the Second to free the Catholic Church from abuses.48 FOREIGN SOCIALISM AND AN IRISH INDUSTRIAL REVIVAL Sweetman was not the only one who associated foreignness with ideologies such as socialism. Increased militancy in Europe and America was exacerbating the fears of socialism and syndicalism.49 For instance, the Independent’s editorial on 2 September 1913 called for the employers to ‘lead the way in emancipating the city from the thraldom of the international Socialist disguised as a Labour leader’.50 An IPP MP and solicitor P. J. Meehan attacked Larkin in an open letter as an ‘adventurer who is exploiting Irish workmen’ and condemned ‘the syndicalist doctrines of continental anarchists’.51 While this kind of opinion was put forward in mainstream print by members of the middle classes, it could have been more widespread. For instance, one is reminded of the tenement-dwelling Fluther in Seán O’Casey’s 1926 play The Plough and the Stars, which is set in late 1915 and 1916 Easter Week. After Young Covey again tries to force his (rather repetitive version of) socialism onto an unwilling Dublin poor, this time by referencing Karl Marx, Fluther angrily replies: ‘What th’ hell do I care what he says? I’m Irishman enough not to lose me head be follyin’ foreigners!’ O’Casey was not only a committed socialist, but also a sacked railwayman who joined the ITGWU in 1911.52 The idea of agitators from outside Ireland ‘exploiting’ the nation was used repeatedly to attack Larkin both by the mainstream press and the employers. In the 1911 meeting of the Dublin Chambers of Commerce which led to the establishment of the Dublin Employers Federation, E. H. Andrews criticized ‘a small party of agitators [who] have thought well to make Ireland the cock-pit for their experiments’ while Sir Maurice Dockrell accused them of experimenting on what they perceived to be the ‘wild Irish’.53 A 1913 leaflet also warmed to this theme in its sub-chapter ‘Deluding the Workers’: Larkin and his Syndicalist friends across the Channel are endeavouring to develop the Dublin industrial disturbances into an ‘international fight’ … They promise help from France, Germany and America, where Syndicalism is rife, for the men who are the tools of the ‘internationals’.54 All of this mattered because it implied that the labour leaders had divided allegiances and did not prioritize the interests of Irish workers. Another pamphlet spelled this out: ‘His [Larkin’s] duty, whatever it is, to his Socialist patrons and allies, transcends, of course, any allegiance he owes to the Dublin workingmen or to the country in which he has, unfortunately, made his temporary home’.55 This fear gained plausibility from the fact that many genuinely believed that the strike would harm a nascent Irish industry which was only now recovering after years of colonially-driven retardation. At the time, a popular narrative of Ireland having been constrained by colonial rule was current. Murphy himself had previously championed this interpretation in an 1887 lecture to the Wood-Quay Ward National Registration Club on the ‘Irish Industrial Question’. He argued that English rule had led to the ‘artificial destruction of our industries’. Now, Ireland needed its citizens to ‘patronize Irish manufactured goods’ and its businessmen to strive for ‘INDIVIDUAL ENTERPRIZE with capital letters’.56 Through this framework, the progress of industries was implicitly associated with progress of the nation. By the 1910s, Ireland’s perceived economic vulnerability still occupied minds. During a special general assembly of the Dublin Chambers of Commerce on 18 February 1910, in a debate on a resolution which criticized the higher taxes of the 1909 Finance Bill, the seconder complained that ‘To-day Ireland needs help but when she asks for bread she is offered a stone’, which was greeted with acclamation. Hence, there were campaigns to encourage Irish industry, such as the Irish Trade Mark, advertisements for which appeared in contemporary newspapers.57 In Shackleton’s correspondence, there is an information leaflet sent from the Irish Industrial Development Association secretary, E. J. Riordan, 1 February 1912, which detailed some of their aims, such as: ‘a) to promote Irish trade and Commerce (b) to impress on the public the importance of using Irish made goods’.58 In this context, many employers, hostile trade unionists and members of the public alike saw the advent of Larkinism as both industrial and national sabotage. The argument was made by Nationalist politician and defender of the employers, Tim Healy, at the Askwith commission (a Court of Inquiry set up by the Board of Trade to investigate and try to resolve the dispute). He ‘warmly’ questioned Larkin: ‘Why don’t you attack the English biscuit people and the Edinburgh people?’, which was greeted by ‘Applause’. He also asserted: ‘Wherever any nascent industry raised its head Larkin drew his sword against it’.59 Hynes, in his letter to the Evening Herald on 28 August, argued: ‘There are, unfortunately, a large section of the labour class who have neither patriotism nor common sense, every strike will bring permanent injury to the country’. The Herald declared on the previous day that Larkin ‘is a distinct menace to such industries as Ireland possesses’.60 Industrial conflict was constantly framed in national terms during the rise of Larkinism. This improves our understanding of the widespread revulsion against the sympathy strike: if Ireland’s industry was seen as vital yet vulnerable, then Larkin’s tactics became untenable for a patriot. Entrepreneur John Irwin, who specified he was an ‘original member’ of the Irish Industrial Development Association in his letter to the Freeman’s Journal, made this connection: ‘I say deliberately that it is a crime against our country to see Dublin manufactories closed down through the operation of the “sympathetic strike”’.61 Larkinism was not only perceived to be harming Irish industry, it was also sometimes seen as helping the competition – specifically England. A pamphlet with the subtitle ‘Destruction of Trade and Commerce’ similarly accused Larkin of ‘Jeopardising Irish Trade’, but further argued that the Lockout and ‘Ireland’s loss’ was ‘England’s Opportunity’, referencing the British TUC’s support for the strike.62 The ‘English’ or ‘British’ labour movement was regularly attacked by anti-Larkinites. According to the report of the Dublin Chambers of Commerce annual general meeting at the start of January 1914, the strike was beaten ‘notwithstanding the large financial support given to it by the British Trade Unions’. In this report, Murphy added that the support of the strikers from the ‘English Labour Party … gave colour to the suggestions which have been made, though I do not believe them, that a sinister design to crush Irish industry was at the back of the support given’.63 Murphy’s sly insinuation suggests he believed this claim was rhetorically effective, despite his protestations of disbelief. Nationalist rhetoric was even used to denounce the charitable food ships for Irish strikers funded by the British TUC. Much later, this support was cited by left-wing activists as class ‘solidarity’ in order to encourage Irish donations to the British National Union of Mineworkers during the 1984–5 strike.64 Yet at the time, the food ships were seen by many as unpatriotic and shameful. For instance, a letter to the Independent in October from a soup-ticket recipient, James Brady, attacked ‘English “hare” soup’ and “Carsonite stew”’, while also parodying the sympathy strike tactic.65 A more explicit nationalist and Anglophobic (and gendered) condemnation can be found in an anti-Larkin leaflet in Shackleton’s collection: Larkinism has brought humiliation and disgrace to the workingmen of Dublin … Through want and fear the unfortunate dupes are obliged to accept charity in the shape of food from the Saxon. Wittingly or unwittingly, they have thrown all patriotism, manhood, and National pride to the winds in allowing themselves to become the tools of the Syndicalists … Even in the awful days of the famine the starving thousands did not look to the Saxon for bread … The advent of the charity ship has stamped the mark of disgrace on the manhood of Ireland.66 HARMING HOME RULE By situating nationalist attacks in the political context of the time, we can begin to appreciate their rhetorical power. A hugely important context to the strike was the simultaneous and troubled campaign for Home Rule. Led by the Irish Parliamentary Party, this had dominated politics since the late nineteenth century, and Murphy himself argued in his 1887 lecture that it would help Irish industry.67 Yet in 1913 the movement seemed increasingly vulnerable, mainly because of the creation of the Ulster Volunteer Force in the north. Sir Edward Carson was arming a paramilitary unionist, Protestant force, which by August 1913 was already 85,000 strong, to stop Home Rule.68 In the newspapers at the time the visual juxtaposition of news from the strikes alongside reports from Ulster is striking. The Manchester Guardian even published a piece on 1 September called ‘Carsonian Methods in Dublin’, which, while criticizing the actions of the Dublin Metropolitan Police and the plight of Dublin workers, also directly compared Larkin to Carson and attacked ‘labour Carsonism’.69 In this heated atmosphere, the Transport Union’s activities were seen by many opponents and observers as damaging the prospect of Home Rule by dividing Ireland. The Chief Secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell, wrote to Prime Minister Asquith at the time, saying that the 1913 dispute ‘has lifted the curtain upon depths below Nationalism and the Home Rule movement’.70 This opinion, as James McConnel has previously noted, was also held by some of the IPP leadership. While journalist and MP T. P. O’Connor expressed some sympathy with the workers in private, and MPs such as Joe Devlin had attacked the railway bosses in 1911, most Nationalists stayed silent during the 1913 dispute. They were distracted by Carson, and in any case were not enamoured of Murphy, who was also a former IPP MP but an opponent of the party leadership.71 In addition, the Lockout brought them away from land agitation, in which they were comfortable political actors, and into the ‘uncharted territory’ of urban industrial disputes.72 Privately, they lamented the strike and its implications for their cause. IPP politician John Dillon regarded Larkin as a ‘very dangerous enemy to Home Rule, the government and the Nationalist Party’. He wrote to T. P. O’Connor saying: ‘Larkin is a malignant enemy and an impossible man. He seems to be a wild international syndicalist and anarchist, and for a long time he has been doing his best to bust up the party and the National Movement’.73 This view of the Transport Union as antithetical to Home Rule and the interests of the nation was also expressed publicly before the dispute. Edward Stewart, in his History of Larkinism, accused Larkin of being a political ‘quick-change artist’ who pretends to be a ‘Home Ruler’ but really is an ‘anti-Home Ruler at heart’. He goes on to quote Larkin saying that the Labour Party would ‘FIGHT THE NATIONALISTS ALL OVER’, adding ‘There stands Larkin’s real opinion’.74 One of Shackleton’s collected pamphlets argued during the strike that Larkin ‘has sneered at Home Rule, and attacked prominent Irish leaders, because under Home Rule, Larkinism and Syndicalism would find no place’.75 The front page of the Evening Herald on 15 September 1913 declared that ‘Larkin Tells a Crowd of Englishmen That the Great Question in Ireland is Not Home Rule’. A sermon given by Rev. J. C. O’Flynn in Cork in November accused Larkinites of ‘treachery’ and ‘Anti-Catholic, Anti-National Spleen’, saying that they threatened to ‘wreck the seat of Ireland’s Parliament on the very eve of victory’.76 It should be recognized that the Larkinites sometimes unwittingly encouraged these arguments. In the past, ITGWU leaders had publicly criticized Home Rule. Connolly claimed in the 1890s that Home Rule was merely the cause of an Irish bourgeoisie who would try and boost manufacturing through competitive wage cuts, making the Irish ‘the lowest blacklegs of Europe’, though later he expressed support for Home Rule.77 Mistakes were also made during the dispute. For example, the propaganda disaster that was Dora Montefiore’s ‘Save the Kiddies’ scheme, which Larkin approved, fuelled Catholic-nationalist opposition to the strike by invoking fears of backdoor conversion of Irish children to Protestantism or atheism. The well-meaning but ill-advised plan to house the children of strikers in volunteer English homes enraged high-profile and powerful enemies, such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians and Archbishop Walsh.78 Also, during the dispute Connolly had called for voters to reject the Liberal Party in two by-elections in November 1913 as retaliation for Larkin’s imprisonment. This led to the bizarre spectacle of nationalist, anti-imperialist socialist Connolly and nationalist suffragette Hannah Sheehy Skeffington conducting a fireworks display celebration at Liberty Hall (the headquarters of the ITGWU) after the Unionist Party won a by-election in Reading, England.79 The nationalist daily Freeman’s Journal was furious: ‘On top of their monstrous proposal to deport the children of Dublin these blind guides of the unlucky workers of Dublin pile their treachery to the Nationalist Cause’. The editorial continued by calling the celebration ‘treason to the Irish nation’.80 ‘CATSPAWS OF ENGLAND’ So far, we have not distinguished enough between established and radical or ‘advanced’ nationalism, nor noted that many radical nationalists supported the strike. It is true that some future 1916 rebels, such as Constance Markievicz, were firm supporters of the strikers, and Connolly himself was famously executed by the British for the Easter Rising. However, other prominent advanced nationalists such as Arthur Griffith were decidedly hostile, and Patrick Pearse, although he later attacked the employers, made a point of riding on the tramways in defiance of the ITGWU strike at the beginning of the dispute.81 This highlights the potentially fractious relationship between Irish nationalism and Larkinism. The impression of ambivalence is substantially reinforced by studying the published articles and editorial line of advanced nationalist newspapers such as Sinn Féin. During the Lockout, it began as cautiously sympathetic with the workers, but hostile to Larkinism. It also repeatedly drew on the trope of ‘English Socialism’. After ‘Bloody Sunday’, the anonymous ‘Lasarfhiona’ wrote on 6 September that the riot was a result of ‘denationalisation’, as ‘Anglicisation has spread like a canker’, which made people ‘un-Irish’. The author called for better provisions for the working classes, because otherwise they would turn to the ‘English Labour Party, who at least give them smooth words and specious promises’.82 The author went on to articulate the fundamental problem with class-based politics for early twentieth-century Irish nationalists: ‘The title of “the people” is not to be usurped by any one class or section of a class in Ireland – it is the common property of all sections and classes.’ Unity was crucial for nationalists, and class conflict undermined it. Hence, the author argued, ‘so long as any section of Irishmen can be led to think that … there is no colourable difference between the green flag of Irish Nationalism and the red banner of English Socialism so long will such a section of Irishmen be catspaws of England’.83 Acceptance of a socialism that was perceived to be irretrievably ‘English’ was viewed as a further submission to colonial rule, rather than the path to liberation. Advanced nationalists also balked at the suggestion that Dublin workers shared interests in common with English workers. Sinn Féin reported in disgust on 13 September that ‘in Dublin an Englishman told many thousands of Irishmen that there was nothing between them and England but a drop of water’.84 The advanced nationalist Rosamund Jacob was also horrified at this idea of cross-border class unity, after Larkin was reported as suggesting it, calling it ‘a revolting unwholesome Englishness’.85 The newspaper Sinn Féin did try to adapt to the increasingly militant social atmosphere of Dublin. The editor, prominent nationalist and future President of Dáil Éireann Arthur Griffith, may have hated Larkin, and had previously attacked him as a ‘tool of an English Labour Union’ during the 1908 Dublin Carters strike.86 However, the Lockout forced Griffith to take a more nuanced position, especially as public opinion briefly shifted after the Askwith commission. We can see this in his essay ‘Sinn Fein and the Labour Question’ on 25 October. In response to claims that capitalism, not England, was the real enemy he took the rhetoric a step further, and anglicized capitalism itself. Capitalism ‘denied its obligation to the moral law and the law of the nation’, and it had ‘its germ in no Celtic or Latin civilisation, but in the Teutonic Hansards[,] and its modern development the world owes to England’.87 This ethnic-nationalist conception of political economy is, incidentally, somewhat similar to Connolly’s ‘Celtic Communism’ which asserted (by glossing over the inconvenient existence of slavery) that Celtic clans in Ireland’s ancient history were communistic or democratic – ethnicizing and nationalizing modes of production.88 However, as sections of the public increasingly turned against the strike following the demonized ‘Save the Kiddies’ scheme, the opinion of Sinn Féin shifted once more. The editorial of 1 November attacked the ‘deportation’ of Irish children, and an ‘English Socialism’ which claimed ‘that the first duty of a true Socialist is to smite the Germans and keep the Union Jack proudly floating over the “subject races” – which include ourselves’. Ultimately, despite the nationalism of Larkin and Connolly, many advanced nationalists could not reconcile their ideology with assertive trade unionism or socialism.89 RIVAL IMAGINED COMMUNITIES AND THE FATE OF IRISH LABOUR The fact that various forms of nationalism were so prominent in the many condemnations of the ITGWU’s activism has significance beyond Irish labour history and has implications for our understanding of modern Ireland after the revolution; it could also be relevant to the history of many post-colonial states. It highlights the conflicting aims of the nationalists and the socialists in early twentieth-century Ireland. It also suggests that nationalism became the hegemonic ideology of the new state to some extent at the expense of labourism and socialism. Some historians have rightly viewed the project of creating a successful Irish Labour Party, a social-democratic Ireland, or a revolutionary-socialist Ireland, as a failure, at least when compared with the British Labour Party or with the hopes of those such as Connolly. Dermot Keogh has said that, despite the enduring romantic image of ‘Big Jim’, the ‘philosophy of William Martin Murphy has been the more enduring and influential in the shaping of modern Ireland’.90 Moreover, while it is often recognized that Ireland’s economy and the trade-union civil war of the 1920s between William O’Brien (co-founder of the ITGWU with Larkin and Connolly) and a returning Larkin significantly contributed to the weakness of the Labour Party, this article corroborates the arguments of those who suggest that nationalism’s dominance was another important factor.91 Niamh Puirséil, in her history of the party, argues that it was ‘eclipsed by the national question’, and Claire Fitzpatrick has highlighted ‘the struggle of Irish Labour to deal with the over-riding nationalist movement’.92 Socialism also faltered in modern Ireland, and activists waged an ‘unsuccessful struggle to square the circle of framing a nationalist socialism’, in the words of Eugenio Biagini. Éamon De Valera’s ‘Labour must wait’ may be apocryphal, but it nevertheless captures the trajectory of the Irish labour movement in the twentieth century.93 It is not likely that, had Connolly not allied the radical labour movement with the Catholic-nationalist cause, labour would have succeeded in establishing significant hegemony. The defeat of the 1913 strikers by employer militancy, and the lack of a specifically ideological radicalism among ITGWU members, should place doubt on the likelihood of such an outcome.94 In any case this type of counter-factual history, as Eric Hobsbawm once argued, is unproductive.95 Nevertheless, nationalism undoubtedly hindered the Irish labour movement. This was noted by some at the time; in March 1923, the Irish Times argued that ‘Sinn Féin as a body, is anti-socialist’.96 Connolly’s later prominence in the nationalist movement should not mislead us regarding the popularity and viability of republican or Irish nationalist socialism in the 1910s. The evidence of nationalism’s rhetorical utility for opponents of Larkinism therefore takes on a particular significance. Enough nationalists must have been either ambivalent or actively hostile to Larkinism, social radicalism and militant trade unionism for those attacks to make illocutionary sense for the opponents of the strikers, and indeed we have identified several constitutional and advanced nationalists who vocally opposed the ITGWU. All of this bolsters the impression that nationalism (both the constitutional and advanced kind) and labour activism or socialism in Ireland had competing agendas. In his studies of the theatre of Connolly and O’Casey, James Moran has explored this in terms of ‘conflicting counter-hegemonies’. But given the dominance of nationalism in the imminent new state, the division is perhaps better described as rival imagined communities of nation and class.97 In parts of early twentieth-century Ireland, especially Dublin, these communities clashed, and as the country slipped into an increasingly bitter period of violent struggle, one of them had to give way. CONCLUSION The Dublin Lockout and the rise of the ITGWU deserve attention. They do not fit easily into the standard narrative of early twentieth-century Irish history, which addresses the move from constitutional to violent nationalism, the guerrilla action of rural farmers against the Crown, the creation of the new state, and the persistence of sectarian divides. Nevertheless, we should note that the number of workers locked out in 1913 was nearly ten times the number of combatants fighting for the 1916 republic.98 Just as modern historians have recently drawn attention to the Irish who fought in the First World War, so they should not forget that, during the 1910s, there was an unprecedented spike in union militancy, working-class agitation and labourist and socialist political activity – unparalleled since.99 An influential minority shared the socialism of The Covey in O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, and a higher number of people took part in radical industrial action. This divided both urban and parts of rural Ireland, and marked a newly significant area of social conflict. Moreover the ITGWU’s existence, by posing a new challenge to the politics of the period, shows much about the worldview of the Irish middle classes. The evidence examined here demonstrates the influence of a powerful ethnic-nationalist paradigm, which was used to delegitimize class-based political action and working-class cross-community allegiances. This reinforced obstacles to the independent unionization of the unskilled, nearly twenty-five years after the symbolic 1889 London Dock Strike. It also had wider implications for Irish working-class politics. The agenda of Irish nationalism, with its demands for a unified push for Home Rule or more radical goals, weakened trade-union, labourist and socialist popularity. Effective general trade unionism relied, essentially, upon pitting ‘Irishman against Irishman’, which many nationalists could not abide. The Lockout exposed these normative beliefs, and they can help us understand the trajectory of Ireland after 1922. Bearing Ireland’s weaker industrial base in mind, is it any wonder that the Irish Labour Party failed to make substantial gains, when a more assertive socialist or trade-union movement faced an increasingly powerful nationalist movement, in which many were ambivalent or actively hostile to their politics? In Britain by contrast, despite the obstacles to Marxism which Ross McKibbin has discussed, nationalist objections to socialism were weaker, and indeed a seizing of patriotism helped Clement Attlee’s social democratic Labour eventually make headway.100 Although many more factors influenced Ireland’s history in the period leading up to the 1940s, this widespread prioritization of the national over the social question among key political actors does help to explain the longer history of Ireland’s weak social democratic movement. Due to the key fault-lines it exposed, the Lockout was more significant than has hitherto been recognized in establishing the dominance of nationalist over socialist politics in Ireland. Colm Murphy is a PhD candidate in History at Queen Mary University of London, with a longstanding interest in theories and histories of nationalism. His current research focuses on ideas and practices of ‘modernization’ on the British left, primarily in the Labour Party, in the late twentieth century. I am immensely grateful to Eugenio Biagini, Jon Lawrence, Gareth Atkins, Tom Kelsey, Imogen Shaw, Richard Nicholl, Muireann Murphy and the reviewers at History Workshop Journal for their invaluable comments on this article, though any mistakes and omissions are the responsibility of myself alone. Heartfelt thanks must also go to Mary Murphy, Niamh Ní Charra, and Mary and Denis Murphy for providing a roof over my head during archive visits to Ireland. Finally, this project would have been impossible without the support of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the dedicated hard work of staff at the National Archives of Ireland, the National Library of Ireland, and the Cork City and County Archives. Notes and References Footnotes 1 Emmet O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, 1824–2000, Dublin, 2011, p. 92. 2 Andy Bielenberg, Ireland and the Industrial Revolution: the Impact of the Industrial Revolution on Irish Industry, 1801–1922, Abingdon, 2009, pp. 6, 128–41, 77–105. 3 Dermot Keogh, ‘William Martin Murphy and the Origins of the 1913 Lockout’, Saothar 4, 1979, pp. 15–34; Andy Bielenberg, ‘Entrepreneurship, Power and Public Opinion in Ireland: the Career of William Martin Murphy’, Irish Economic and Social History 27, 2000, pp. 25–44; Thomas Morrissey, William Martin Murphy, Dublin, 1997; Patricia McCaffery, ‘Jacob’s Women Workers during the 1913 Lockout’, Saothar 16, 1991, pp. 118–29; Padraig Yeates, Lockout: Dublin 1913, Dublin, 2000. 4 Dermot Keogh, ‘Clash of Titans: James Larkin and William Martin Murphy’, Thomas Davis Lecture 1997, in James Larkin: Lion of the Fold, ed. Donal Nevin, Dublin, 2006. pp. 47–56; A Capital in Conflict: Dublin City and the 1913 Lockout, ed. Francis Devine, Dublin, 2013; Dermot Keogh, The Rise of the Irish Working Class: the Dublin Trade Union Movement and Labour Leadership, 1890–1914, Belfast, 1982. 5 James Larkin: Lion of the Fold, ed. Nevin; Donal Nevin, James Connolly: ‘a Full Life’, Dublin, 2005. 6 Roy F. Foster, Vivid Faces: the Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890–1923, London, 2014, p. 146. 7 O’Connor, Labour History of Ireland, pp. 74–86. 8 Padraig Yeates, ‘The Life and Career of William Martin Murphy’, in Independent Newspapers: a History, ed. Mark O’Brien and Kevin Rafter, Dublin, 2012, pp. 14–26, at p. 14. 9 David Feldman and Jon Lawrence, ‘Introduction: Structures and Transformations in British Historiography’, in Structures and Transformations in Modern British History: essays for Gareth Stedman Jones, ed. Feldman and Lawrence, Cambridge, 2011, pp. 1–24; James Thompson, ‘After the Fall: Class and Political Language in Britain, 1780–1900’, Historical Journal 39: 3, 1996, pp. 785–806, at p. 787. 10 The Manchester Guardian, 7 Oct. 1913; Joseph V. O’Brien, ‘Dear Dirty Dublin’: a City in Distress, 1899–1916, London, 1982, pp. 135, 149, 210; Francis Devine, ‘Who Dared to Wear the Red Hand Badge? Reflections on the 1913 Dublin Lockout’, in Capital in Conflict, ed. Devine, pp. 1–27, at pp. 3–4; Yeates, Lockout, pp. 5–6, 109; Roy F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972, London, 1989, p. 436. 11 Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Volume 1. Regarding Method, Cambridge, 2002, p. 149. 12 Not only did the Shackletons lock out their ITGWU employees on 27 August 1913, but George Shackleton personally delivered copies of the Evening Herald in defiance of Larkin’s boycott of Murphy-owned newspapers. Murphy thanked him for this in a handwritten letter: Letter from William Martin Murphy to George Shackleton, 23 Aug. 1913: National Archives of Ireland (hereafter NAI/) 999/644/6. 13 Arnold Wright, Disturbed Dublin: the Story of the Great Strike of 1913–14 with a description of the Industries of the Irish Capital, London, 1914. We can see that Wright was commissioned by the employers from his letter to George Shackleton on 13 April 1914: NAI/999/644/51. See also John Cunningham, ‘From Disturbed Dublin to Strumpet City: the 1913 “History Wars”, 1914–1980’, in Capital in Conflict, ed. Devine, pp. 353–79, at p. 353. 14 O’Connor, Labour History of Ireland, p. 92. 15 Larkinism was regularly associated with ‘tyranny’ and with historical dictators, for example, Wright, Disturbed Dublin, p. 112. 16 Joe Mooney, ‘My 1916: From a Lockout to a Rising’, Irish Independent, 16 July 2016: http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/1916/my-1916/my-1916-from-a-lockout-to-a-rising-31377381.html, accessed 4 Aug. 2016. 17 John Gray, City in Revolt: James Larkin & the Belfast Dock Strike of 1907, Belfast, 1985; James McConnel, ‘The Irish Parliamentary Party: Industrial Relations and the 1913 Dublin Lockout’, Saothar 28, 2003, pp. 25–33; James McConnel, The Irish Parliamentary Party and the Third Home Rule Crisis, Dublin, 2013, especially pp. 20, 164–82; Yeates, Lockout, pp. xxix–xxx, 571–88. 18 Francis Devine, ‘Larkin and the ITGWU, 1909–1912’, in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, pp. 30–8, at p. 35; O’Connor, Labour History of Ireland, p. 76. In fairness, Irish labour historians have pointed to the dominance of nationalism in Irish historiography: see O’Connor, Labour History of Ireland, pp. xi–xii 19 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983), London, 2006, p. 6. 20 Kenneth Brown, ‘The Strikes of 1911–13: their International Significance’, in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, pp. 56–64, at p. 56. 21 Harold A. Clegg, A History of British Trade Unions since 1889. vol. 2, 1911–1933, Oxford, 1985, p. 24; Hansard, fifth series, vol. 10, cc. 224–4, 16 Nov.1911; Yeates, Lockout, p. xxiv. 22 John H. Bennett’s diary, 1911: Cork City and County Archives (hereafter: CCCA/) B609/9/A/31; John H. Bennett’s diary, 1913: CCCA/B609/9/A/33; Letter from A. Guinness and Sons to John H. Bennett, 7 March 1913: CCCA/B609/1/A/1. 23 Thomas Morrissey, ‘William Martin Murphy, the Employers and 1913’, in Capital in Conflict, ed. Devine, pp. 165–93, at p. 181. 24 Dublin Chambers of Commerce (DCC) General Meeting, 27 Sept. 1911: NAI/1064/2/2. 25 Manchester Guardian, 15 Sept. 1913. 26 DCC Annual General Meeting (hereafter: AGM), 27 Jan. 1914: NAI/1064/1/10; County Dublin Employers’ Committee, The Labour Situation: NAI/999/644/78; DCC AGM, 29 Jan. 1915: NAI/1064/1/10; Rev. M. Barrington to George Shackleton, 28 Aug. 1913: NAI/99/644/10; Joseph Gough to George Shackleton, 28 Aug. 1913: NAI/999/644/11; Joseph F. Thompson to William Shackleton, 28 Aug. 1913: NAI/999/644/12; Domhnall Ó Buachalla to Mr Shackleton, 15 Sept. 1913: NAI/999/644/23. 27 For instance, see the DEF’s resolution claiming the ITGWU was a ‘union in name only’ and ‘a menace to all trade organisation’. Irish Times, 4 Sept. 1913. 28 Freeman’s Journal, 10 Nov. 1913. 29 Irish Times, 2 Oct. 1913; Irish Independent, 23 Aug. 1913; Saturday Herald, 23 Aug. 1913; Hansard fifth series, vol. 10, c. 225, 16 Nov. 1911. 30 Anon., Abstracts from the leading article in The Worker’s Republic. Edited by James Connolly. Dublin, Saturday, October 30th, 1915: NAI/999/644/54; Saturday Herald, 23 Aug. 1913. 31 Wright, Disturbed Dublin, pp. 57–8. 32 Yeates, Lockout, pp. 60–8; Devine, ‘Who Dared to wear the Red Hand Badge?’, p. 2; Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid and Colin Reid, ‘Introduction: the Constitutional and Revolutionary Histories of Modern Ireland’, in From Parnell to Paisley: Constitutional and Revolutionary Politics in Modern Ireland, ed. Nic Dháibhéid and Reid, Dublin, 2010, pp. 1–15, at p. 1; 6; David Howell, A Lost Left: Three Studies in Socialism and Nationalism, Manchester, 1986, p. 122. 33 Emmet O’Connor, ‘The Pioneers: Big Jim Larkin’, in 100 Years of Liberty Hall: Papers given at the Irish Labour History Society Conference, 22 October 2009, ed. Rayner O’Connor Lysaght, Dublin, 2013, pp. 21–7, at p. 22. 34 Paternalism can be seen, for instance, in B. J. O’Reilly’s statement at a DCC meeting of 1911: he denounced the ungrateful worker ignoring the employer’s generosity in ‘giving him better light, better sanitation’: NAI/1064/2/2; Morrissey, ‘William Martin Murphy, the Employers and 1913’, p. 169; Keogh, Rise of the Irish Working Class, pp. 17–18; Yeates, Lockouţ pp. 5–6. 35 See interview with Murphy in the Irish Independent, 27 Aug. 1913. Also an Irish Catholic editorial from 6 September with memorable references to the ‘wretches’ and ‘foul reserves’ of the slums, quoted in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, pp. 194–5. 36 The first quotation is from Joseph Thompson, a Wexfordian engineering employer, in a scolding speech to his workers who had joined the ITGWU, a copy of which was later sent to Shackleton: NAI/999/644/12; the second comes from Murphy’s interview in the Irish Independent, 27 Aug. 1913. 37 Irish Independent, 27 Aug. 1913. 38 For instance, Wright, Disturbed Dublin, pp. 13–14. 39 Marilyn Silverman, An Irish Working Class: Explorations in Political Economy and Hegemony, 1800–1950, Toronto, 2001, pp. 7–8. 40 Irish Independent, 2 Sept. 1913. 41 O’Connor, Labour History of Ireland, p. 95. 42 William Richardson to George Shackleton, 5 Dec. 1913: NAI/999/644/40. Richardson’s opposition to Larkin can be seen in his many published letters, for instance: Irish Independent, 26 Aug. 1913, 9 Oct. 1913; J. B. Smethurst and Peter Carter, Historical Directory of Trade Unions, vol. 6, Surrey, 2009, p. 169. For more on unskilled unionization, see: Devine, ‘Larkin and the ITGWU’, p. 30; O’Brien, ‘Dear, Dirty Dublin’, p. 201. 43 Thompson, ‘After the Fall’, p. 787. 44 Anon., Larkinism: the Man, his Methods and Motives. Further points for the people.(Leaflet No. 2): NAI/999/644/79. 45 Yeates, Lockout, pp. xxix–xxx. 46 Edward. W. Stewart, The History of Larkinism in Ireland, fifteen-page pamphlet, November 1912: National Library of Ireland (hereafter NLI), O’Brien Collection, LO P 92, pp. 1-2. 47 Evening Herald, 27 Aug. 1913; 28 Aug. 1913. My emphasis. 48 Irish Independent, 9 Oct. 1913. 49 Brown, ‘The Strikes of 1911–13: their International Significance’, pp. 56–64; Alastair Reid, United We Stand: a History of Britain’s Trade Unions, London, 2005, p. 225. 50 Irish Independent, 2 Sept. 1913. 51 Quoted in McConnel, ‘The Irish Parliamentary Party’, p. 30. 52 Sean O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays: The Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock, The Plough and the Stars, London, 1998, p. 197; R. A. Cave, ‘O’Casey, Sean (1880–1964)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 2004, online edn, January 2008: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35283, accessed 1 March 2016. 53 DCC general meeting, 27 Sept. 1911: NAI/1064/2/2. 54 Anon., Larkinism … Further points for the people: NAI/999/644/79. 55 Anon., Larkinism, Some Aspects and Effects: Destruction of Trade & Commerce. (Leaflet No. 3): NAI/999/644/80. 56 William Martin Murphy, The Irish Industrial Question: a Lecture delivered for the Wood-Quay Ward National Registration Club, 10th January, 1887, Dublin, 1887, pp. 6–7, 11, 16–17. 57 DCC general assembly, 18 Feb. 1910: NAI/1064/2/2. For a sample advertisement, see Irish Times, 4 Oct. 1913. 58 Letter from K. J. Riordan to E. Bennett, 1 Feb. 1912: NAI/999/644/3; Irish Industrial Development Association (no date): NAI/999/644/73. 59 Irish Times, 2 Oct. 1913, 3 Oct. 1913. 60 Evening Herald, 27 Aug. 1913, 28 Aug. 1913. 61 Freeman’s Journal, 10 Nov. 1913. 62 Anon., Larkinism … Destruction of Trade and Commerce: NAI/999/644/80. 63 DCC AGM, 27 Jan. 1914: NAI/1064/1/10. 64 Des Bonass, ‘Ireland and the Miners’ Strike’, Red Banner 23, 2005, pp. 54–61. Available online: http://www.redbannermagazine.com/Miners%20strike.pdf, accessed 11 Nov. 2015. 65 Irish Independent, 4 Oct. 1913. 66 Anon, Larkinism … Destruction of Trade and Commerce: NAI/999/644/80. 67 Murphy, Irish Industrial Question, p. 5. 68 Yeates, Lockout, pp. xix–xx. 69 Manchester Guardian, 1 Sept. 1913. 70 Quoted in James Larkin, ed. Nevin, p. 168. 71 McConnel, ‘Irish Parliamentary Party’, pp. 25, 28–9, 33, 173–81. 72 Dermot Meleady, John Redmond: the National Leader, Sallins, 2014, p. 245. 73 Quoted in Meleady, John Redmond, p. 246 74 Stewart, History of Larkinism, p. 12. 75 Anon, Larkinism … Further points for the people: NAI/999/644/79. 76 Evening Herald, 15 Sept. 1913; Freeman’s Journal, 10 Nov. 1913. 77 James Connolly, Erin’s Hope: the Ends and Means, 1897: https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1897/erin/hope.htm, accessed 4 March 2018; Howell, A Lost Left, p. 35; Nevin, James Connolly, p. 411. 78 Theresa Moriarty, ‘“Who will look after the Kiddies?”: Household and Collective Action during the Dublin Lockout, 1913’, in Rebellious Families: Household Strategies and Collective Action in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Jan Kok, New York, 2002, pp. 110–25, at pp. 119–20. 79 Yeates, Lockout, pp. 385–6. 80 Quoted in John Newsinger, ‘Reporting the 1913 Lockout: ‘The Freeman’s Journal’, Larkinism and the Dublin Labour Troubles’, Saothar 28, 2003, pp. 125–33, at p. 131. 81 O’Connor, Labour History of Ireland, p. 95; James Moran, ‘Conflicting Counter-Hegemonies?: the Dramaturgy of James Connolly and Sean O’Casey’, Kritika Kultura 21/22, 2013/2014, pp. 516–32, at p. 520. 82 Sinn Féin, 6 Sept. 1913. 83 Sinn Féin, 6 Sept. 1913. 84 Sinn Féin, 13 Sept. 1913. 85 Quoted in Foster, Vivid Faces, p. 18. 86 Keogh, Rise of the Irish Working Class, pp. 140–1. 87 Sinn Féin, 25 Oct. 1913. 88 Howell, A Lost Left, p. 32. 89 Sinn Féin, 1 Nov. 1913. See also Howell, A Lost Left, pp. 32–9, 89. 90 Keogh, Rise of the Irish Working Class, p. 249. 91 Dermot Keogh, Twentieth-Century Ireland: Nation and State, Dublin, 1994, p. 38. 92 Niamh Puirséil, The Irish Labour Party, 1922–73, Dublin, 2007, p. 8; Claire Fitzpatrick, ‘Nationalising the Ideal: Labour and Nationalism in Ireland, 1909–1923’, in Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles, 1865–1931, ed. Eugenio. Biagini, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 276–304, at p. 276. 93 Eugenio Biagini, ‘Introduction: Citizenship, Liberty and Community’, in Citizenship and Community, pp. 1–18, at pp. 16–17; Rayner O’Connor Lysaght, ‘“Labour Must Wait”: the Making of a Myth’, Saothar 26, 2000, pp. 61–7. 94 Keogh, Rise of Irish Working Class, p. 198. 95 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Some Reflections on the “Break up of Britain”’, New Left Review 1: 105, 1977, pp. 3–23, at p. 11. 96 Quoted in Fitzpatrick, ‘Nationalising the Ideal’, p. 297. 97 Moran, ‘Conflicting Counter-Hegemonies?’, p. 520. 98 See the Military Pensions Project: http://www.militaryarchives.ie/fileadmin/user_upload/MSPC/documents-34/Veterans_of_Easter_Week_1916_with_recognised_military_service.pdf, accessed 1 March 2016. 99 Diarmaid Ferriter, ‘Powerful Drama tells Story of Irish Soldiers at Gallipoli’, Irish Times, 22 Feb. 2015: http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/diarmaid-ferriter-powerful-drama-tells-story-of-irish-soldiers-at-gallipoli-1.2111539, accessed 16 March 2016. 100 Ross McKibbin, ‘Why did Marxism Fail in Great Britain?’, English Historical Review 99: 391, 1984, pp. 297–331; Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain! a New History of the Labour Party, London, 2010, p. 280; Martin Pugh, ‘The Rise of Labour and the Political Culture of Conservatism, 1890–1945’, History 87: 288, 2002, pp. 514–37, at p. 535; Paul Ward, Red Flag and Union Jack: Englishness, Patriotism and the British Left, 1881–1924, London, 1998. For a comparison between the British and Australian Labour parties on approaches to nationalism and anti-imperialism, including different attitudes to race, see Neville Kirk, Labour and the Politics of Empire: Britain and Australia 1900 to the Present, Manchester, 2011. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Rival Imagined Communities in the Dublin Lockout of 1913
JO - History Workshop Journal
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