Dublin Labour War 1913-14

Connolly, the strike, and the children of Dublin

Part of a series of articles on Connolly: workersliberty.org/connolly James Connolly, in support of Jim Larkin, led the workers of Dublin in the great Labour War of 1913-14. The attempt to get strike-bound children to families in Britain and Northern Ireland that would take care of them during the strike was a major event in the Labour War. It led to a sectarian Catholic hue and cry. The then very strong “Catholic Orange Order”, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (Board of Erin), rioted and attacked strikers. Eventually it was direct physical force that stopped the transfer of strikers’ children...

The children, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, and the Archbishop

Our good friend the Daily Citizen describes the scenes attendant upon the intended departure of some Dublin children to Great Britain, under the auspices of a committee organised there for the purpose of taking care of children of the locked out workers; as “the most extraordinary scene in this most extraordinary industrial conflict in this country.” We do not wonder at our British friends being surprised, nor at them being horrified, nor at them being scandalised and shocked at the treatment to which they have been subjected, and the vile aspersions cast upon their motives. For ourselves we...

Connolly and Partition: summary

Part of a series of articles on Connolly: workersliberty.org/connolly “Insofar as national peace is in any way possible in a capitalist society based on exploitation, profit making and strife it is attainable only under a consistently and thoroughly democratic republican system of government the constitution of which contains a fundamental law that prohibits any privileges whatsoever to any one nation and any encroachment whatsoever upon the rights of a national minority. This particularly calls for wide regional autonomy and fully democratic local government, with the boundaries of the self...

How Connolly linked class struggle to socialism

Liam McNulty, author of a forthcoming book on James Connolly, and co-author of the introduction to the new Workers’ Liberty book of James Connolly’s writings on “Effective Trade Unionism”, spoke to Solidarity . In 1918 John Reed, just returned to the USA from revolutionary Russia, reported that Lenin thought Daniel De Leon to be “the greatest of modern Socialists — the only one who had added anything to Socialist thought since Marx”. The addition was the idea that a workers’ government would be based on organisations developed from workplace struggle against capital, such as industrial unions...

Connolly and a history relevant now

A review of our new pamphlet, a collection of writings by James Connolly on effective trade unionism. Click here to order now James Connolly, who was executed after the 1916 Easter Rising, is, along with James Larkin, Ireland’s most famous socialist and union leader. This pamphlet, Effective Trade Unionism , contains his writings on industrial unionism, in both Ireland and the USA, and his account of the 1913 Lockout in Dublin. Connolly is a clear and concise writer and you don’t need to know any of the historical background to be able to understand the pamphlet. But read up on the historical...

The Dublin Labour War, 1913-14 (part three)

Part of a series of articles on Connolly: workersliberty.org/connolly On 9 December 1913 a special congress of the TUC voted down a motion that trade unionists should refuse to handle goods from firms which had been locking out Dublin workers since August. The vote weakened the workers’ side in the “Labour War”, and by 19 January the union was advising workers to return to work on the best terms they could get. The isolation of Dublin , by James Connolly A lesson from Dublin , by James Connolly

A lesson from Dublin

Some time ago I reprinted in Forward an extract from an article I had contributed to the Irish Review defending and expounding the idea of the sympathetic strike. That was at the beginning of the Dublin struggle. Now, the members of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union who have returned to work in Dublin have done so after signing an agreement to handle all classes of goods, that is to say, to renounce for the time the idea and practice of the sympathetic strike. This, by the way, is the only agreement yet signed by members of that union. In those firms which still insist upon the...

A titanic struggle: the Dublin Labour War, 1913-14 (part 2)

This is part two of the section on the 1913-4 Dublin Labour War in our series on 'Connolly: politically unexpurgated' What is the truth about the Dublin dispute? What was the origin of the Dublin dispute? These are at present the most discussed questions in the labour world of these islands, and I have been invited by the editor of the Daily Herald to try and shed a little light upon them for the benefit of its readers. I will try and be brief and to the point, whilst striving to be also clear. In the year 1911 the National Seamen’s and Firemen’s Union, as a last desperate expedient to avoid...

Glorious Dublin!

Dublin workers wait for food aid ships sent by British unions To the readers of Forward possibly some sort of apology is due for the non-appearance of my notes for the past few weeks, but I am sure that they quite well understand that I was, so to speak, otherwise engaged. On the day I generally write my little screed, I was engaged on the 31st of August in learning how to walk around in a ring with about 40 other unfortunates kept six paces apart, and yet slip in a word or two to the poor devil in front of or behind me without being noticed by the watchful prison warders. The first question I...

Kino Eye - Ireland on film: Strumpet City

The recent articles in Solidarity on James Connolly and other aspects of Irish labour history bring to mind what some have called the “great Irish novel”: James Plunkett’s Strumpet City , adapted for TV by Hugh Leonard and broadcast in Ireland in 1980 and then the UK. Strumpet City covers the period from 1907 to 1914, taking as its central event the Dublin Lockout of 1913. Connolly doesn’t make an appearance (he was in the USA for some of this time) but we are offered a surprisingly bravado performance from Peter O’Toole as the famous labour leader Jim Larkin. For me, however, the TV...

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