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Irish Labour Movement 1880-1924: Lecture One - Introduction
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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