Dublin Lockout
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The Dublin Lockout of 1913 was the most severe industrial dispute in the history of Ireland, a general lockout of workers in Dublin meant to contain the expansion of trade unions.
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[edit] Background
The chairman of the Dublin United Tramway Company, industrialist and newspaper proprietor William Martin Murphy, was determined not to allow the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU), led by James Larkin, to unionise his workforce. On 15 August he dismissed forty workers he suspected of ITGWU membership, followed by another 300 over the next week. On 26 August the tramway workers officially went on strike. Larkin timed the strike to take place in the middle of the Dublin Horse Show, when the inconvenience caused would be greatest and Murphy's business worst affected. At a pre-arranged time, the Tram drivers and conductors literally walked off the trams, leaving them unattended. Led by Murphy, over four hundred of the city's employers retaliated by requiring their workers to sign a pledge not to be a member of the ITGWU and not to engage in sympathetic strikes.
[edit] Course of the dispute
The resulting industrial dispute was the most severe in Ireland's history. Employers in Dublin engaged in a lockout of their workers, employing blackleg labour from Britain and elsewhere in Ireland. Dublin's workers, amongst the poorest in the United Kingdom, were forced to survive on generous but inadequate donations from the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and other sources in Ireland, doled out dutifully by the ITGWU. A scheme whereby the children of Irish strikers would be temporarily looked after by British trade unionists was blocked by the Roman Catholic Church, who protested that Catholic children would be subject to Protestant or atheist influences when in Britain. The Church supported the employers during the dispute, condemning Larkin as a socialist revolutionary.
The strikers used mass pickets and intimidation against strike breakers and the Dublin Metropolitan Police in turn baton charged worker's rallies. The DMP's attack on a union rally on Sackville Street (now known as O'Connell Street) in August 1913 caused the deaths of two workers and hundreds more were injured. This was provoked by the illegal appearance of James Larkin to speak out for the workers. It is still known in the Irish Labour movement as "Bloody Sunday" (despite two subsequent days in 20th century Ireland that are also described in this way). Another worker was later shot dead by a strike breaker. In response, Larkin and his subordinate James Connolly formed a worker's militia named the Irish Citizen Army to protect workers' demonstrations.
For seven months the lockout affected tens of thousands of Dublin's workers and employers, with Larkin portrayed as the villain by Murphy's three main newspapers, the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent and the Evening Herald. Other leaders in the ITGWU at the time were James Connolly and William X. O'Brien, while influential figures such as Pádraig Pearse, Countess Markievicz and William Butler Yeats supported the workers in the generally anti-Larkin media.
[edit] End of the Lockout - the employers' victory
The lockout eventually concluded in early 1914 when the calls for a sympathetic strike in Britain from Larkin and Connolly were rejected by the TUC. Most workers, many of whom were on the brink of starvation, went back to work and signed pledges not to join a union. The ITGWU was badly damaged by its defeat in the Lockout, and was further hit by the departure of Larkin to America in 1914 and the execution of James Connolly for his part in the nationalist Easter Rising in 1916. However, the union was re-built by William O'Brien and Thomas Johnson and 1919 its membership had surpassed that of 1913.
Although the actions of the ITGWU and the smaller UBLU were unsuccessful in achieving substantially better pay and conditions for the workers, they marked a watershed in Irish labour history. The principle of union action and workers' solidarity had been firmly established; no future employer would ever try to "break" a union in the way that Murphy attempted with the ITGWU. Perhaps even more importantly, Larkin's rhetoric, condemning poverty and injustice and calling for the oppressed to stand up for themselves, made a lasting impression.
[edit] Yeats' "September 1913"
September 1913, one of the most famous of Yeats' poems, was written to express the poet's supposrt of the workers in this struggle.
September 1913
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
For men were born to pray and save.
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all the blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
[edit] External links
- Dublin Lockout 1913 — from the BBC History website
