Overview of Irish labour history from the rise of New Unionism to the end of the civil war

1. HHIS403 - Political & Social Movements in Twentieth-Century Ireland
The Irish Labour Movement, 1889 – 1924
Friday @ 10am: 20 September – 1 November 2013
20 September - Introduction: Irish Labour movement, 1889-1924
27 September – Jim Larkin and Larkinism
4 October - James Connolly and the Irish Socialist Republican Party, 1896-1904
11 October – The 1913 Lockourt and Irish Citizen Army
18 October - Syndicalism
25 October – Civil War and Retreat
08 November – The Economics of the Irish Free State
Required Reading:
Emmet O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland 1824-2000 (Dublin: UCD Press, 2011): 51-127.
Supplementary Reading:
Conor McCabe, ‘Your only God is profit’: Irish class relations and the 1913 Lockout ’ in David Convery (ed)
Locked Out: A Century of Irish Working-Class Life (Dublin: Irish Academic Press 2013)
Lorcan Collins, James Connolly: 16 Lives (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2012)
Fintan Lane, The Origins of Modern Irish Socialism, 1881-1896 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997)
David Lynch, Radical Politics in Modern Ireland: The Irish Socialist Republican Party, 1896-1904
(Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005)
Emmet O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland, 1917-1923 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1988)
Emmet O’Connor, James Larkin (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002)

2. Essay title:
“The 1913 Lockout was about the future landscape of an
independent ireland .” Do you agree or disagree? Discuss.

3. New Unionism in Ireland, 1889-1906:
How to organise the unskilled?
How to develop political consciousness?
Do we build an indigenous movement or join with the British-based Unions?

4. New Unionism in Ireland, 1889-1906:
How to organise the unskilled?
How to develop political consciousness?
Do we build an indigenous movement or join with the British-based Unions?
New Unions:
Offered low subscription rates
Gave priority to wages and conditions over friendly society benefits
Greater use of strike action rather than scarcity of labour through apprenticeship
system
Offered the possibility of displacing craft with class-consciousness

5. Thirty ‘new’ unions formed in Ireland between
1885 and 1891
Notable developments:
NUDL - National Union of Dock Labourers
(liverpool)
ASRS – Amalgamated Society Railway Servants
(London)
NAUL – National Amalgamated Union of Labour
(Tyneside)

6. ‘New’ Politics
April 1894 – Irish Trade Union Congress convened
in Dublin

7. ‘New’ Politics
April 1894 – Irish Trade Union Congress convened
in Dublin
“Oblivious to the contrasts in employment structure, trade unionism and politics
between Ireland and Britain, the ITUC was a miniature version of the BTUC.
Herein lay a damnable design fault. The BTUC’s political influence rested on its
industrial power. Trying to copy the British model meant that the ITUC would be
primarily an industrial rather than a political body, pursuing its objectives on the
basis of union organisation, where it was weak, rather than through the national
movement, where it would have some leverage.
Congress rejected reality by abjuring the nationalism which most workers
believed in for a strictly Labour politics which most of them did not.
The result was not a seedling socialism, but depoliticisation.” (O’Connor, p.63)

8. JAMES CONNOLLY: 1868-1916

9. 1868 – Born, Cowgate, Edinburgh
1882 – joins British army.
1889 – deserts and returns to Edinburgh, active in socialist politics
1892 – Secretary of the Scottish Socialist Federation
1896 – arrives in Dublin, helps form Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP)
1898 – Workers’ Republic – serializes Labour in Irish History
1903 – emigrates to the US
1911 – returns to Ireland
1913 – co-founder (with Jack White), Irish Citizen Army
1916 – Easter Rising and execution

12. Jim Larkin
James Connolly
Big Bill Haywood, IWW
Mrs. Bamber, Liverpool Trades Council

13. JIM LARKIN: 1876-1947

14. 1876 – Born, Liverpool
1903 – Dock foreman, Liverpool
1905 – Full-time trade union official
1907 – moves to Belfast –
1908 – forms ITGWU
1913 – Lockout
1914 – moves to U.S.A.
1919 – founding member, American Communist Party
1920 – jailed for ‘criminal anarchy’
1923 – pardoned and returns to Ireland, forms Irish Workers’ League
1924 – forms Workers’ Union of Ireland
1947 – dies. Buried in Glasnevin cemetary

27. ITGWU branches
1920

32. Bruree Workers Soviet Mills, April 1919

34. How to organise the unskilled?
How to develop political consciousness?
Do we build an indigenous movement or join
with the British-based Unions?
Republics- plural