Dublin in the rare old times

THE organisers of the Dublin: One City, One Book Festival, which is the focal point for a month of literary events in April, have chosen well with this year’s selection, James Plunkett’s Strumpet City.

The centenary of Dublin’s 1913 Lock-out falls this year and much of the action of Strumpet City, which opens with King Edward VII’s royal visit in 1907 and closes with one of the novel’s characters sailing off to fight in the Great War, hangs on it.

There are vivid re-creations of the strikes which led up to the lock-out in August that year, of the hunger and deprivation it unleashed, of police baton charges, of strikers’ rallies and the banners they marched under: “Arise, Ye Slaves.”