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The Dublin lock-out | |||
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![]() Dublin Metropolitan Police break up a union rally | |||
Date | 26 August 1913 – 18 January 1914 | ||
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Caused by |
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Methods | Strikes, rallies, walkouts | ||
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Casualties and losses | |||
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2 dead, several hundred injured |
The Dublin lock-out was a major industrial dispute between approximately 20,000 workers and 300 employers that took place in Dublin, Ireland. The dispute, lasting from 26 August 1913 to 18 January 1914, is often viewed as the most severe and significant industrial dispute in Irish history. Central to the dispute was the workers' right to unionise.
Many of Dublin's workers lived in terrible conditions in tenements. For example, over 830 people lived in just 15 houses in Henrietta Street's Georgian tenements. At 10 Henrietta Street, the Irish Sisters of Charity ran a Magdalene laundry that was inhabited by more than 50 single women. [1] An estimated four million pledges were taken in pawnbrokers every year. The infant mortality rate among the poor was 142 per 1,000 births, extraordinarily high for a European city. The situation was made considerably worse by the high rate of disease in the slums, which was worsened by the lack of health care and cramped living conditions. The most prevalent disease in the Dublin slums at the time was tuberculosis (TB), which spread through tenements very quickly and caused many deaths among the poor. A report, published in 1912, found that TB-related deaths in Ireland were 50% higher than in England or Scotland. The vast majority of TB-related deaths in Ireland occurred among the poorer classes. The report updated a 1903 study by Dr John Lumsden.
Poverty was perpetuated in Dublin by the lack of work for unskilled workers, who did not have any form of representation before trade unions were founded. The unskilled workers often had to compete with one another for work every day, with the job generally going to whoever agreed to work for the lowest wages.
James Larkin, the main protagonist on the side of the workers in the dispute, was a docker in Liverpool and a union organiser. In 1907, he was sent to Belfast as a local organiser of the British-based National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL). In Belfast, Larkin organised a strike of dock and transport workers. It was also in Belfast that Larkin began to use the tactic of the sympathetic strike in which workers who were not directly involved in an industrial dispute with employers would go on strike in support of other workers, who were striking. The Belfast strike was moderately successful and boosted Larkin's standing among Irish workers. However, his tactics were highly controversial and so Larkin was transferred to Dublin.
Unskilled workers in Dublin were very much at the mercy of their employers. Employers who suspected workers of trying to organise themselves could blacklist them to destroy them any chance of future employment. Larkin set about organising the unskilled workers of Dublin, which was a cause of concern for the NUDL, which was reluctant to engage in a full-scale industrial dispute with the powerful Dublin employers. It suspended Larkin from the NUDL in 1908. Larkin then left the NUDL and set up an Irish union, the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU).
The ITGWU was the first Irish trade union to cater for both skilled and unskilled workers. In its first few months, it quickly gained popularity and soon spread to other Irish cities. The ITGWU was used as a vehicle for Larkin's syndicalist views. He believed in bringing about a socialist revolution by the establishment of trade unions and calling general strikes.
The ITGWU initially lost several strikes between 1908 and 1910 but after 1913 won strikes involving carters and railway workers like the 1913 Sligo dock strike. Between 1911 and 1913, membership of the ITGWU rose from 4,000 to 10,000, to the alarm of employers.
Larkin had learned from the methods of the 1910 Tonypandy riots and the 1911 Liverpool general transport strike.
Another important figure in the rise of an organised workers' movement in Ireland at the time was James Connolly, an Edinburgh-born Marxist of Irish parentage. Connolly was a talented orator and a fine writer. He became known for his speeches on the streets of Dublin in support of socialism and Irish nationalism. In 1896, Connolly established the Irish Socialist Republican Party and the newspaper The Workers' Republic. In 1911, Connolly was appointed the ITGWU's Belfast organiser. In 1912, Connolly and Larkin formed the Irish Labour Party to represent workers in the imminent Home Rule Bill debate in the British Parliament. Home rule, although passed in the House of Commons, was postponed, by the start of World War I. The plan was then suspended for one year, then indefinitely, after the rise of militant nationalism after the 1916 Rising.
Among the employers in Ireland opposed to trade unions such as Larkin's ITGWU was William Martin Murphy, Ireland's most prominent capitalist, born in Castletownbere, County Cork. In 1913, Murphy was chairman of the Dublin United Tramway Company and owned Clery's department store and the Imperial Hotel. He controlled the Irish Independent , Evening Herald and Irish Catholic newspapers and was a major shareholder in the B&I Line. Murphy was also a prominent Irish nationalist and a former Home Rule MP in Parliament.
Even today, his defenders insist that he was a charitable man and a good employer and that his workers received fair wages. However, conditions in his many enterprises were often poor or worse, with employees given only one day off in 10 and being forced to labour up to 17 hours a day. Dublin tramway workers were paid substantially less than their counterparts in Belfast and Liverpool and were subjected to a regime of punitive fines, probationary periods extending for as long as six years and a culture of company surveillance involving the widespread use of informers. [2]
Murphy was not opposed in principle to trade unions, particularly craft unions, but he was vehemently opposed to the ITGWU and saw its leader, Larkin, as a dangerous revolutionary. [3] In July 1913, Murphy presided over a meeting of 300 employers during which a collective response to the rise of trade unionism was agreed. Murphy and the employers were determined not to allow the ITGWU to unionise the Dublin workforce. On 15 August, Murphy dismissed 40 workers whom he suspected of ITGWU membership, followed by another 300 over the next week.
The resulting industrial dispute was the most severe in the history of Ireland. Employers in Dublin locked out their workers and employed blackleg labour from Britain and elsewhere in Ireland. Dublin's workers, despite being some of the poorest in the United Kingdom at the time, applied for help and were sent £150,000 by the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) and other sources in Ireland, doled out dutifully by the ITGWU. [4] [5]
The "Kiddies' Scheme" for the starving children of Irish strikers to be temporarily looked after by British trade unionists was blocked by the Roman Catholic Church and especially the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which claimed that Catholic children would be subject to Protestant or atheist influences when in Britain. The Church supported the employers during the dispute and condemned Larkin as a socialist revolutionary. [6]
Notably, Guinness, the largest employer and biggest exporter in Dublin, refused to lock out its workforce. It refused to join Murphy's group but sent £500 to the employers' fund. It had a policy against sympathetic strikes and expected its workers, whose conditions were far better than the norm in Ireland, not to strike in sympathy; six who had done so were dismissed. It had 400 of its staff who were already ITGWU members and so it had a working relationship with the union. Larkin appealed to have the six reinstated but without success. [7]
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) leader, Bill Haywood, was in Paris when he heard of the lockout. He collected 1000 francs to aid the strikers and travelled to Dublin where he addressed a crowd in front of City Hall. [8] [9]
Strikers used mass pickets and intimidation against strike-breakers, who were also violent towards strikers. The Dublin Metropolitan Police carried out a baton charge at worker's rallies. On 31 August 1913, the DMP attacked a meeting on Sackville Street (now known as O'Connell Street) that had been publicly banned. It caused the deaths of two workers: James Nolan and John Byrne. Over 300 more were injured.
The baton charge was a response to the appearance of James Larkin, who had been banned from holding a meeting, to speak for the workers. He had been smuggled into William Martin Murphy's Imperial Hotel by Nellie Gifford, the sister-in-law of Thomas MacDonagh, and spoke from a balcony. The event is remembered as Bloody Sunday, a term used for two subsequent days in 20th-century Ireland and for the murderous charge of police in the Liverpool general strike. Another worker, Alice Brady, was later shot dead by a strike-breaker as she brought home a food parcel from the union office. Michael Byrne, an ITGWU official from Kingstown, died after he had been tortured in a police cell. [10]
Connolly, Larkin and ex-British Army Captain Jack White formed a worker's militia, the Irish Citizen Army, to protect workers' demonstrations.
For seven months, the lock-out affected tens of thousands of Dublin families. Murphy's three main newspapers, the Irish Independent , the Sunday Independent and the Evening Herald , portrayed Larkin as the villain. Influential figures such as Patrick Pearse, Countess Markievicz and William Butler Yeats supported the workers in the media.
The lock-out eventually concluded in early 1914, when the TUC in Britain rejected Larkin and Connolly's request for a sympathetic strike. Most workers, many of whom were on the brink of starvation, went back to work and signed pledges not to join the ITGWU. It was badly damaged by its defeat in the Lockout and was further hit by the departure of Larkin to the United States in 1914 and the execution of Connolly, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916.
The union was rebuilt by William O'Brien and Thomas Johnson. By 1919, its membership had surpassed that of 1913.
Many of the blacklisted workers joined the British Army since they had no other source of pay to support their families, and they found themselves in the trenches of World War I within the year.
Although the actions of the ITGWU and the smaller UBLU had been unsuccessful in achieving substantially better pay and conditions for 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 as Murphy had attempted to with the ITGWU. The lock-out had damaged commercial businesses in Dublin, with many forced to declare bankruptcy.
September 1913, one of the most famous of W. B. Yeats' poems, was published in The Irish Times during the lock-out. Although the occasion of the poem was the decision of Dublin Corporation not to build a gallery to house the Hugh Lane collection of paintings (William Martin Murphy was one of the most vocal opponents of the plan), it has sometimes been viewed by scholars as a commentary on the lock-out. [11] In the poem, Yeats wrote mockingly of commerciants who "fumble in a greasy till, and add the halfpence to the pence" and asked:
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
James Connolly was a Scottish born Irish republican, socialist, and trade union leader, executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland. He remains an important figure both for the Irish labour movement and for Irish republicanism.
A lockout is a work stoppage or denial of employment initiated by the management of a company during a labor dispute. In contrast to a strike, in which employees refuse to work, a lockout is initiated by employers or industry owners.
The Irish Citizen Army, or ICA, was a small paramilitary group of trained trade union volunteers from the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU) established in Dublin for the defence of workers' demonstrations from the Dublin Metropolitan Police. It was formed by James Larkin, James Connolly and Jack White on 23 November 1913. Other prominent members included Seán O'Casey, Constance Markievicz, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, P. T. Daly and Kit Poole. In 1916, it took part in the Easter Rising, an armed insurrection aimed at ending British rule in Ireland.
James Larkin, sometimes known as Jim Larkin or Big Jim, was an Irish republican, socialist and trade union leader. He was one of the founders of the Irish Labour Party along with James Connolly and William O'Brien, and later the founder of the Irish Worker League, as well as the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU) and the Workers' Union of Ireland. Along with Connolly and Jack White, he was also a founder of the Irish Citizen Army. Larkin was a leading figure in the Syndicalist movement.
Events from the year 1913 in Ireland.
The Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU) was a trade union representing workers, initially mainly labourers, in Ireland.
William O'Brien was a politician and trade unionist in Ireland. While rarely dominating the political spotlight, O'Brien was incredibly powerful and influential behind the scenes, maintaining a firm grip over Ireland's trade unions for many decades. Besides his leadership in the trade unions, O'Brien was a founder, alongside James Larkin and James Connolly, of the Labour Party of Ireland. In later years a rift formed between Larkin and O'Brien that would last the rest of their lives and often divide the labour movement in Ireland.
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Maria Winifred "Winnie" Carney, was an Irish republican, a participant in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, and in Belfast—as a trade union secretary, women's suffragist, and socialist party member—a lifelong social and political activist. In March 2024, a statue to her was unveiled on the grounds of Belfast City Hall.
Industrial violence refers to acts of violence which occur within the context of industrial relations. These disputes can involve employers and employees, unions, employer organisations and the state. There is not a singular theory which can explain the conditions under which industrial conflicts become violent. However, there are a variety of partial explanations provided by theoretical frameworks on collective violence, social conflict and labor protest and militancy.
The Belfast Dock strike or Belfast lockout took place in Belfast, Ireland from 26 April to 28 August 1907. The strike was called by Liverpool-born trade union leader James Larkin who had successfully organised the dock workers to join the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL). The dockers, both Protestant and Catholic, had gone on strike after their demand for union recognition was refused. They were soon joined by carters, shipyard workers, sailors, firemen, boilermakers, coal heavers, transport workers, and women from the city's largest tobacco factory. Most of the dock labourers were employed by powerful tobacco magnate Thomas Gallaher, chairman of the Belfast Steamship Company and owner of Gallaher's Tobacco Factory.
Delia Larkin was a trade union organiser, journalist and actress, born to Irish parents in Liverpool, England. She was influenced by the activities of her brother, James Larkin, to move to Ireland, and was prominent during the 1913 Dublin Lockout. She was active in Irish trade union activities and was a founding secretary of the Irish Women Workers' Union.
Thomas Kennedy was an Irish Labour Party politician and trade union official.
Rosanna "Rosie" Hackett was an Irish revolutionary and trade union leader. She was a founder-member of the Irish Women Workers' Union, and supported strikers during the 1913 Dublin Lockout. She later became a member of the Irish Citizen Army and was involved in the 1916 Easter Rising. In the 1970s, the labour movement awarded Hackett a gold medal for decades of service, and in 2014 a Dublin city bridge was named in her memory.
Patrick Thomas Daly, known as P. T. Daly was an Irish trade unionist and politician.
Alice Brady (1898–1914) was a labour activist that was shot and killed during the 1913 Dublin Lock-out. She was shot accidentally in the hand by a worker and died two weeks later of tetanus. The worker was charged but acquitted of her murder. Members from the Irish Women Workers' Union used her funeral as a show of strength. A service was held on Saturday, 4 January 2014 to mark the centenary of Brady's funeral, and RTÉ One broadcast a documentary on the lockout involving descendants of participants and members of Brady's family.
Edward W. Stewart was an Irish trade unionist and politician.
The 1913 Sligo Dock strike in the port of Sligo in northwest Ireland was a labour dispute lasting 56 days from 8 March to 6 May 1913. During the strike, there were numerous clashes on the docks and riots in the town, resulting in one fatality. Occurring six months earlier than the Dublin Lockout, it was regarded as a precursor to that action and a successful application of the Irish Transport & General Workers Union’s strategy for workers rights by James Larkin and James Connolly. It resulted in victory for the workers. James Larkin considered the 1913 victory in Sligo to be a major achievement of the ITGWU.
Walter Carpenter was a prominent socialist and trade union organiser active in Ireland in the early 20th century.
Frank Robbins was an Irish trade unionist. Robbins came to prominence as a member of James Connolly's Irish Citizen Army, taking part in the Dublin Lockout in 1913 and the Easter Rising in 1916. Although Robbins did not involve himself in the ensuing Irish War of Independence or Irish Civil War, he continued to influence events in Ireland through his leadership in the trade union movement and as part of the Labour Party. During the Irish revolutionary period, Robbins was frustrated by the notion that Labour was considered outside of Irish Republicanism, rather than a strand within it. He was also frustrated by the lack of willingness by the labour movement to involve itself directly in the War of Independence.