Labor Movement

Trade unions emerged in Ireland in the early nineteenth century, combining features of the obsolescent guilds and agrarian secret societies. Their legal status was not fully regularized until the 1860s. The sheer numbers and poverty of Irish unskilled workers made them difficult to organize, and not until the end of the nineteenth century were sustained efforts made to do so.

Before 1900 organized labor was dominated by skilled craft workers who emphasized their differential status (by restricting skills and controlling admissions). Craft unions acted as friendly societies, providing medical and other benefits for members. They operated within cross-class nationalist movements (the Dublin trades were a mainstay of nationalist processions); their emphasis on self-reliance drew many urban artisans into radical nationalist movements such as Fenianism and Parnellism. They believed that workers' interests lay in cooperation with employers to develop Irish industries, though such cooperation often proved one-sided.

Craft unions established trade councils in urban centers (Cork in 1880, Belfast in 1881, Dublin in 1886). Attempts to create U.K.-wide labor federations in the nineteenth century foundered because of organizational and communications difficulties and nationalist sentiments; an Irish Trade Union Congress (ITUC) was founded in 1894. The 1890s also saw many local Irish societies merge with larger British unions; the role of British unions in Ireland intermittently divided the Irish labor movement until the 1950s.

Small socialist groups appeared in Irish urban centers beginning in the 1870s; these were usually short-lived because of clerical and political opposition. The Dublin-centered Irish Republican Socialist Party (1894–1903) deserves particular attention as the first political venture of James Connolly (1868–1916), the Scottish-born Marxist theorist and future leader of the 1916 Rising. The first independent Labour parliamentary candidates stood for election in Belfast in 1885 and 1886. The Home Rule Party sometimes spoke of itself as a "labor party"; some members were labor activists in Britain, and the party sought British support by comparing land agitation to trade unionism. From 1892 several Home Rule MPs identified themselves as "labor nationalists" (similar to contemporary "Lib-Lab" MPs within the British Liberal Party). The "Lib-Nat" MPs voiced labor concerns but were primarily loyal to the Home Rule Party, whose relations with the British labor movement were complicated by its alliance with the Liberals and its own increasingly bourgeois character. The extension of the local-government franchise in 1899 created independent labor groups on several urban councils, but these proved divisive and ineffective.

The ITUC was hampered by divisions between pro-union northern workers and (predominantly nationalist) southern unions. The industrialization of northeast Ulster gave it disproportionate strength within the movement, but northern unions mirrored the sectarian divide. Skilled workers' unions maintained sectarian as well as craft divisions, and unskilled workers followed populist Orange or Green (Protestant or Catholic) leaders who incorporated "laborist" elements in their messages. Cross-sectarian cooperation occurred from time to time, but it was always vulnerable to constitutional and religious tensions.

The Belfast trade unionist William Walker (1871–1918) established an Independent Labour Party presence in Belfast in 1893. Walker's "gas and water socialism" included support for the union on economic grounds. His endorsement of sectarian Protestant legislation alienated Catholic support, which contributed to the defeat of his parliamentary candidacies in 1905 to 1907; he is best remembered for debating the relationship between socialism and nationalism with Connolly in 1911.

Beginning in 1873 attempts were made to organize agricultural laborers through groups such as the Irish Agricultural Labourers' Union (1873–1879), the Knights of the Plough (1890s), and the Irish Land and Labour Association (1894–1918). These faced formidable organizational difficulties; their association with the Irish Parliamentary Party encouraged factionalization and complicated relations with urban unions. They were absorbed by the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union during the First World War.

British "new unionism," which tried to organize unskilled workers in mass-membership unions, led briefly to labor unrest in Ireland when it emerged in the late 1880s. Its principal impact on Ireland began in 1907 when James Larkin (1876–1947) arrived in Belfast as an organizer for the Liverpool-based National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL, founded in Liverpool by Irish immigrants). Belfast was already experiencing an upsurge of trade-union militancy. Larkin, an inspiring orator, organized large numbers of unskilled workers, to some extent uniting Catholic and Protestant. Employers reacted with lockouts; between April and November 1907 Belfast saw disputes involving dockers, carters, and tobacco workers. Organized strike-breaking and street unrest led to police mutiny and military intervention in which two laborers were killed and many were wounded by troops.

The NUDL leadership disliked Larkin's confrontational style and expansive recruitment. Faced with heavy demands for strike pay, it sidelined Larkin and settled on disadvantageous terms. Larkin moved to Dublin and Cork, becoming embroiled in further strikes. After his suspension by the NUDL in December 1908, Larkin founded the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU). The new union faced determined opposition from employers and the NUDL. In the summer of 1909, ITGWU strikers in Cork were crushed by a concerted lockout; Larkin was briefly jailed in 1910 because of a dispute over NUDL funds.

Instead of the conciliatory tactics of the older unions, the ITGWU operated in a confrontational style, enlisting the impoverished masses of unskilled urban labor and trying with some success to bring a general rise in wages through sympathetic strikes, the "closed shop," and aggressive tactics against strike-breaking. Larkin held the syndicalist belief in the general strike as a weapon of social transformation. He expressed the anger and hopes of the poor, linking their struggle to Fenianism and Parnellism, which had also faced middleclass and clerical opposition. His reckless leadership was balanced by skilled (and occasionally exasperated) organizers such as William O'Brien and James Fearon.

The ITGWU joined the ITUC in 1909, moving it toward explicit socialism. Older craft unions acquiesced or were sidelined. Pro-Larkin labor councillors became the principal opposition to Dublin Corporation; Connolly returned from the United States as a political organizer and produced some of his best-known attempts to adapt Marxism to Irish conditions. In 1912 the ITUC established the present-day Irish Labour Party.

The year 1911 saw further labor conflict, with prolonged strikes in Wexford and Dundalk and a Dublin rail and timber strike in September. The weekly Irish Worker, written mostly by Larkin, first appeared on 27 May 1911; it denounced the employers and their allies in uncompromising terms. Meanwhile, the Dublin employers, led by William Martin Murphy, prepared concerted counteraction. The Irish Parliamentary Party, frightened by Larkin's radicalism and divided between laborist and probusiness elements, proved ineffective and was bitterly denounced by Larkin. (In some provincial centers, notably Sligo, which experienced a major dispute in 1912, local Home Rule leaders did come to terms with Larkinism.)

The great Dublin lockout of 1913 to 1914 was the climax of two years of preparations by employers and Larkinites. The dismissal of Independent employees who joined the ITGWU led to sympathy action by ITGWU members in other firms and to a walkout by ITGWU tramwaymen on 19 August 1913. The employers retaliated with a mass lockout aimed at destroying the union by starving out its members. The strikers received financial assistance from British unions (which, however, turned down Larkin's calls for sympathy strikes in Britain). The end of the dispute in January 1914 marked a short-term defeat for the ITGWU, but it survived. The terrible poverty of Edwardian Dublin, the determined endurance of the strikers, and the vindictive words and behavior of the employers provided the founding images for the modern Irish labor movement. The formation of the Irish Citizen Army in self-defense against widespread police brutality symbolizes the strike's radicalizing effect.

Shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, Larkin left for the United States on a fundraising tour. He returned in 1923 to a labor movement strengthened by wartime upheavals but less receptive to his form of radicalism.

Labor Movement

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