irish labour movement 1880-1924: lecture two - the rise of new unionism

HHIS403 - Political & Social Movements in Twentieth-Century Ireland

The Irish Labour Movement, 1889 – 1924Friday @ 10am 

Introduction: Irish Labour movement, 1889-1924 The Rise of New Unionism, 1889-1906James Connolly and the Irish Socialist Republican Party, 1896-1904Jim Larkin and ‘Larkinism’, 1907-1914The 1913 Lockout and the Irish Citizen ArmySyndicalism, 1917-1921Civil War and Retreat, 1921-1924

Required Reading:Emmet O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland 1824-2000 (Dublin: UCD Press, 2011): 51-127. Supplementary Reading:Conor McCabe, ‘Your only God is profit’: Irish class relations and the 1913 Lockout ’ in David Convery (ed) Locked Out: A Century of Irish Working-Class Life (Dublin: Irish Academic Press 2013)Lorcan Collins, James Connolly: 16 Lives (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2012)Fintan Lane, The Origins of Modern Irish Socialism, 1881-1896 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997)David Lynch, Radical Politics in Modern Ireland: The Irish Socialist Republican Party, 1896-1904 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005)Emmet O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland, 1917-1923 (Cork: Cork University Press, 1988)Emmet O’Connor, James Larkin (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002)

Thirty ‘new’ unions formed in Ireland between 1885 and 1891

Notable developments:

NUDL - National Union of Dock Labourers (liverpool)

ASRS – Amalgamated Society Railway Servants (London)

NAUL – National Amalgamated Union of Labour (Tyneside)

‘New’ Politics

April 1894 – Irish Trade Union Congress convened in Dublin

‘New’ Politics

April 1894 – Irish Trade Union Congress convened in Dublin

“Oblivious to the contrasts in employment structure, trade unionism and politics between Ireland and Britain, the ITUC was a miniature version of the BTUC. Herein lay a damnable design fault. The BTUC’s political influence rested on its industrial power.

‘New’ Politics

April 1894 – Irish Trade Union Congress convened in Dublin

“Oblivious to the contrasts in employment structure, trade unionism and politics between Ireland and Britain, the ITUC was a miniature version of the BTUC. Herein lay a damnable design fault. The BTUC’s political influence rested on its industrial power.

Trying to copy the British model meant that the ITUC would be primarily an industrial rather than a political body, pursuing its objectives on the basis of union organisation, where it was weak, rather than through the national movement, where it would have some leverage.

‘New’ Politics

April 1894 – Irish Trade Union Congress convened in Dublin

Congress rejected reality by abjuring the nationalism which most workers believed in for a strictly Labour politics which most of them did not.

The result was not a seedling socialism, but depoliticisation.” (O’Connor, p.63)

John Leslie, The Irish Question (1894)

John Leslie, The Irish Question (1894)

John Leslie, The Irish Question (1894)

“Remember this—that somewhere and somehow, and by somebody, a beginning must be made. Who strikes the first blow for Ireland? Who draws first blood for Ireland? Who wins a wreath that will be green forever?” Irish Felon, 1849