Irish Labour Movement 1880-1924: Lecture One - Introduction

HHIS403 - Political & Social Movements in Twentieth-Century Ireland

The Irish Labour Movement, 1889 – 1924Friday @ 10am 

Introduction: Irish Labour movement, 1889-1924 The Rise of New Unionism, 1889-1906James Connolly and the Irish Socialist Republican Party, 1896-1904Jim Larkin and ‘Larkinism’, 1907-1914The 1913 Lockout and the Irish Citizen ArmySyndicalism, 1917-1921Civil War and Retreat, 1921-1924

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)

The New Departure

A compact made between Parnell, Davitt, and the Fenian leader John Devoy in June 1879

Fenians, parliamentarians and ‘advanced’ nationalists agreed to work together

The New Departure provided the basis for the effective prosecution of the Land War

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)

‘New’ Politics

April 1894 – Irish Trade Union Congress convened in Dublin

‘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.

‘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.

‘New’ Politics

April 1894 – Irish Trade Union Congress convened in Dublin

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)

JAMES CONNOLLY: 1868-1916

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

JIM LARKIN: 1876-1947

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

ITGWU branches1920

Bruree Workers Soviet Mills, April 1919