What our history really has to teach us about Big Jim Larkin – Jack O’Connor Irish Independent, Thursday February 21st, 2013
Kevin Myers makes a very selective cull of Jim Larkin’s long and stormy career to character assassinate him and present a picture that is as unjustified as the ‘union cult of Larkin’ he seeks more legitimately to question. As an equally selective quote from my speech at the commemoration to mark Larkin’s death on January 30th, 1947, is recruited to Mr Myers’ task I would like to respond to his virulent caricature of Larkin and the 1913 Lockout, which is one of the first major commemorative events of the current Decade of Centenaries.
Firstly, the full sentence from my speech which Mr Myers’ quotes reads, ‘If we are to be honestly true to the legacy of Jim Larkin it behoves us to abandon our sectarian comfort zones and to devise the best strategy we can to protect and advance the cause of working people’. It is the latter point that I was seeking to emphasise and that is what Larkin sought to achieve throughout his life, not always wisely but certainly selflessly. In the process he brought the ‘new unionism’ to Ireland, enabling unskilled and semi-skilled workers to seek representation and collective bargaining in the workplace. This was something denied to them by Dublin employers, although conceded across much of the United Kingdom.
The most serious of several inaccurate claims by Mr Myers’ is that ‘Larkin was certainly not a peaceful pioneer of collective bargaining… but a syndicalist who ruthlessly used the strike as a weapon to wreck private enterprise.’
Larkin certainly was a syndicalist, a variation on mainstream socialism by which trade unionists sought to extend the collective power of workers to not alone secure better pay and conditions but the long term social, economic and political interests of workers generally. Larkin certainly advocated replacing capitalism with a workers commonwealth and he did use violent language on occasion. However the rhetoric of violence was commonplace in the political discourse not alone of socialists but constitutional nationalists and Ulster unionists. It was after all a lawyer, Edward Carson, who reintroduced the gun into Irish politics.
But Larkin never resorted to violence in pursuit of his aims. He knew that to do so would be to play into the hands of the anti-union companies that dominated the political landscape in Dublin in 1913. Larkin knew he could not build a mass trade union by wrecking the companies where his members worked. Indeed one of his less well remembered slogans today is, ‘A Fair Day’s Work for a Fair Day’s Pay’. It was the employers who took the offensive against the workers that year. Far from advocating recklessly wrecking private enterprises Larkin, along with the majority of the Dublin Trades Council agreed to the establishment of a conciliation scheme for the city. It was due to be established in September of that year when William Martin Murphy and his allies in the Dublin Chamber of Commerce unleashed starvation as a weapon to break the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, securing the services of the DMP RIC and British Army to assist them.
Given that 100,000 people were adversely affected by the starvation tactics of the employers a remarkable aspect of the dispute was the relative absence of violence. Where breakdowns occurred in discipline they were mainly by the police, not alone on Bloody Sunday but on picket lines and raids on workers’ homes. It was also the employers, as Justices of the Peace, who routinely issued firearms licences and revolvers to the strike breakers they employed. Every person shot in the Lockout was shot by a strike breaker.
Repeatedly during the dispute Larkin and the other trade union leaders sought to end the dispute through negotiation and accepted the recommendations of the Government’s own inquiry aimed at settling it. It was the employers who rejected those recommendations. It is true that the Irish Worker, the best radical newspaper produced on these islands since the days of the United Irishmen, did publish the names strike breakers, but then the Irish Independent not only published the names but the addresses of men and women who attempted to send their children out of the city to be cared for in foster homes in Belfast and Britain.
It is not surprising, given the power of the forces arrayed against them and the pressures they were under, that Larkin and other trade union leaders frequently clashed over how best to save the nascent Irish trade union movement. One of the lessons of the Lockout is the importance of solidarity and unity between workers organisations when confronting an employers’ offensive as ferocious as that of 1913. The vast majority of the media was also arrayed against them and much of the coverage jaundiced and inaccurate. Some things do not change.