If we want a decent life, we’ll have to live up to the legacy of Larkin
That was the start of what became known as the 1913 lockout, a titanic struggle between Jim Larkin's ITGWU and the employers of Dublin on the other.
The employers were led by William Martin Murphy, the proprietor of the Irish Independent and the Irish Catholic.
For five months after that initial action, the nearest thing we have ever had in Ireland to class warfare raged. It led to death, riots, baton-charging, and hardship in Dublin's tenements. The struggle has been documented many times, not least in the late Jim Plunkett's novel Strumpet City and in Padraig Yeates phenomenal study, Lockout: Dublin 1913.
Larkin and Murphy led from the front throughout, attacking each other in the strongest personal terms, with Larkin emerging as an icon and an inspiration for generations to come. A powerful and difficult man, Jim Larkin had a talent for binding people close to him, and for making enemies that would last a lifetime.
He later split the union he founded, and formed a rival union, the Workers Union of Ireland. (It was one of the great privileges of my life that 60 years after the lockout I became an assistant branch secretary and later branch secretary of that union, working under Jim Larkin's son Denis, but that's another story I'll tell you some time.)
Larkin was always more than a trade union official. He believed passionately and impatiently that the power of working people should be harnessed for political ends. As Sean O'Casey said of him, he fought not just to put bread on the tables of working families, but to put a rose in a vase on the table too.
He failed in 1913 the locked-out workers all had to struggle back to work in whatever way they could, many of them forced to sign papers renouncing their union membership.
But the union, and movement for the rights of working people, didn't die. Neither did the struggle to reconcile the interests of workers with those of their employers. It lasted for many years, and in some cases it has lasted to this day.
There were many other aspects to that struggle that resonate to the present day. Workers were denounced from the pulpit, especially when they sought to organise to send their hungry children to supportive families in "pagan" England. The church played an active role in the dispute, always and inevitably on the side of the employers.
The side-issues that were highlighted in the dispute, such as child poverty and neglect, remained unresolved for many years, and are still a feature of many of our debates. (The current debate about inequality in education, for instance, reminds us that your address is every bit as important to personal development as the number of points you get in your Leaving Certificate.)
In the end, or at least in the immediate aftermath, the political consensus that developed in Ireland was that the issues of class, poverty, workers' rights and other social concerns were less important than "the national question".
"Labour must wait," said De Valera, and he meant that the only thing that mattered was freedom.
But it was Connolly who said that there can be no freedom without the freedom of working people, and that tension has also existed until now.
People like me were raised on tales of Jim Larkin the biography of him by Emmet Larkin, I remember, was a seminal influence. From the moment I read it, at the age of 16, I never wanted to be on any side but the side of working people. His "burning desire to close the gap between what ought to be and what is" is an ambition that can be focussed on many of the social and economic issues of today.
But was Larkin a failure or a success? Put it another way, did the 1913 lockout really make a difference?
Throughout most of our history since then, the central issue in Irish politics has been the national question. The political parties that fought a civil war over that question nearly 10 years later have largely dominated political discourse ever since.
That discourse has, at least until relatively recently, had almost nothing to do with the core issues that affect things such as disadvantage, alienation, and the development of a fair and just society.
IN recent years, indeed, the management of our economy has almost been conducted as if, to quote Margaret Thatcher, there was no such thing as society. How else does one account for the McCreevy era and especially the first five McCreevy budgets, which gave the richest 20% of people in Ireland six times more than they gave the poorest 20%?
At the same time, it is inarguable that the role and influence of the trade union movement has changed immeasurably since Larkin's time. While he would probably have been gratified to see union leaders exerting considerable influence in government buildings, and would probably have mellowed sufficiently to see social partnership as a good thing (the younger Larkin would have seen it as a sell-out), he would undoubtedly be concerned at the declining influence of his movement in the workplace.
Larkin, I like to think, would be as passionate today as he always was about the gap between what ought to be and what is. He would admire the peace process, but be frustrated about the apparent lack of a peace dividend, the failure to release a dynamic that is certainly there in an island that is politically at peace, and is economically more united than at any time in our history.
He would be angry at the fact that young people in Ireland have no more hope (perhaps even less) of starting a home of their own than they did in the early part of the century. He would be a passionate advocate of breaking down barriers, especially the barriers that prevent people fulfilling their potential in education. He would still argue for the rose on the table.
In trying to assess whether Larkin failed or succeeded, it's tempting to rely too much on the negative aspects. It has to be said that the country in which he was the first to organise working people is now one of the richest in the world, with higher standards of living than many others, and with a range of different approaches to how labour is treated in the workplace. The legacy he left behind has made more than its contribution to that.
In some senses, therefore, the question is not whether the legacy of 1913 was a positive one. The real issue is whether that spirit, a spirit ultimately founded on the principles of greater equality and economic as well as political freedom, can still contribute to our development.
My own view is that we need the spirit of Larkin more than ever now if we are to develop as a community. If our prosperity continues, but fails to address the issues of fairness and decency, the real question will not be whether Larkin failed. The real question will be whether we failed Larkin.
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