112 years later, the Dublin Lockout of 1913 remains a fundamental experience in Irish and British Labour history. Jim Larkin and James Connolly led over 20,000 workers and their 80,000 dependants in an eight-month struggle, and while it ended in defeat by the bosses, the state, and union bureaucracy, it is rich in lessons and inspiration for today.
Larkin and the ITGWU
Born to Irish parents in Liverpool in 1876, James Larkin would come to be one of the most influential figures in Labour History in Ireland and Britain. As a young docker in Liverpool, Larkin joined the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL).
Through his involvement in the Liverpool Dock Strike of 1905, Larkin learned the need for workers to get organised, the power of militancy and centrality of class solidarity in industrial disputes. The strike highlighted Larkin’s emergence as an effective leader, credible organiser, and articulate agitator. After the strike had ended, the NUDL hired him as National Organiser, taking him across Scotland and Ireland building the Union.
It was to be in Belfast that Larkin would establish his militant reputation. In 1907, Larkin played an instrumental role in organising tens of thousands of workers, across the sectarian divide, into a fight for better pay and conditions. Although the strike eventually ended in compromise, valuable lessons were learned. His instinct to escalate the fight and draw on more militant tactics, such as the use of sympathy strikes, boycotts of “tainted goods” and recruitment of unskilled workers, was putting him at odds with the conservative bureaucracy of the NUDL.
By 1908, Larkin had established union branches in every major Irish port, but his militancy alienated the NUDL leadership. After refusing orders to go to Scotland, the NUDL leadership suspended him.
Undeterred, Larkin sought to go beyond the sectional craft unions and instead build a general campaign to organise all skilled and unskilled workers in Ireland under “One Big Union”. This culminated in the breakaway and founding of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU) on 28th December 1908. When it formed, the great majority of the NUDL’s membership went with Larkin. In essence, the ITGWU was established as a rank-and-file revolt against the NUDL leadership.
The Lockout
At the turn of the century, Dublin city was a slum. A third of the population lived in city centre tenements, where poverty, disease and overcrowding were rife. Dublin at this time had the highest infant mortality rate in Europe, due to the poor diets and sanitation within the city.
Despite this, Larkin made Dublin one of the best organised trade union cities in Europe. By 1913, the ITGWU had over 30,000 members, with headquarters at Liberty Hall and a recreational centre in Croyden Park.
With the rising tide of the Great Unrest, the capitalist class in Ireland knew that a struggle was brewing, and with that, Larkin was becoming a serious threat to their interests. As more workers joined the ITGWU, and more strikes began to spread, the reality was becoming clear.
The employers were to find their counter-offensive personified in William Martin Murphy, a Cork-born capitalist. Murphy, formerly an MP for the Home Rule Party, was owner of the Herald and Irish Independent newspaper groups, Clery’s department store and controlled the Dublin United Tramway Company.
In 1911, at the height of the rail strike in Dublin, the Dublin Chamber of Commerce set up an Employers’ Federation to crush the growing workers militancy, with Murphy at its head. Murphy knew then, in 1911, that the capitalist class were not yet prepared enough to take on the workers and began to set plans in place to deal with Larkin and the ITGWU.
In early 1913, the ITGWU led over 30 strikes in Dublin. Larkin targeted Guinness and the Dublin United Tram Company, owned by Murphy. While progress with Guinness workers was slow, the Tram workers responded differently.
On 15 August 1913, Murphy gave Irish Independent dispatch workers and tramway workers an ultimatum: choose between the Union and their jobs. The employers began a war against Larkin and the union, demanding employees of 404 companies sign a document. It read:
Forty employees refused to resign, and they were immediately sacked. The next day newspaper distributors refused to handle any of the Independent goods and they were locked out of their workplace. On 17 August, two days later, Murphy dismissed a further 200 tram workers who refused to leave the ITGWU. Days after, hundreds of workers were locked out of their workplaces by the employers. By September 1913, 25,000 workers had been locked out in Dublin. What ensued was a harsh, eight-month onslaught by the employers backed by the full power of the state.
Bloody Sunday
With little choice, the ITGWU called a tram drivers’ strike on 26 August. Two days later, Larkin was arrested for libel, conspiracy, and unlawful assembly but was released on bail. He then called a demonstration on O’Connell Street for 31 August, which was banned.
Since the strike began, Murphy brought in scabs from Britain, leading to clashes as workers defended their pickets. The Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) made no mistakes in siding with the employers.
The DMP’s support, backed by the Royal Irish Constabulary, was crucial for Murphy in gaining employer agreement to smash the union. On 31 August, despite the ban, hundreds of workers gathered on O’Connell Street to hear Larkin.
The DMP had lined the street and planned to ensure it didn’t proceed. The police began a baton charge and waged a brutal attack on demonstrators with over 500 people injured and 3 people murdered. The police continued their rampage through the inner city, ransacking the tenements and violently assaulting women, children and the elderly. Sunday 31st August 1913 would enter the history books as the first Bloody Sunday in a century where many more would sadly follow.
This Bloody Sunday would become the catalyst for the formation of Europe’s first workers’ defence militia, the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). The ICA was a direct product of the class conflict and the strategic response of James Connolly to the need for a disciplined and trained force to defend workers against the scabs and the state. Connolly and the ICA would play a central role in the Easter Rising of 1916.
Betrayal and Defeat
As word of events spread across the isles, The British Trade Union Congress was already underway in Manchester. The day after ‘Bloody Sunday’ Larkin went to England to address the conference and speak on the situation in Dublin. Horrified by the gravity of the Lockout and nature of the police violence, the TUC immediately voted to send £5,000 to the strikers and organised weekly collections to support their comrades in Dublin. They also sent food and adopted a scheme to temporarily home the strikers’ children.
Larkin and Connolly believed solidarity action in Britain, not charity, could break the employer’s offensive. Larkin launched his ‘Fiery Cross’ campaign, addressing rallies across England. Thousands of British workers supported Dublin, but the bureaucracy opposed spreading the dispute, fearing it would inspire militancy.
Reacting to the mounting pressure from below across Britain, a special conference of the TUC was convened on the 9th of December. Hoping this congress would back calls to boycott any goods coming to and from Ireland, Larkin believed that such a policy would drive a wedge through the Employers’ Federation.
Using the pretence of the situation in Dublin, the Bureaucracy mounted its own attack on the line put forward by Larkin and others. The conference was stacked with handpicked union officials. The conference opposed all calls for concrete solidarity with Dublin and passed a motion condemning Larkin.
The whole affair was a knife in the back for Larkin, Connolly and the workers of Ireland. Without the support of British workers defeat was inevitable. By the middle of January 1914, TUC funds had ceased and some sections of those locked out had begun to return to work on whatever terms were offered. As Kieran Allen has written:
Assessment
At this time across the international Labour movement, syndicalism was becoming a dominant trend. Originating in France, syndicalism emphasised greater militancy, strikes and direct action to build solidarity and win power. It was suspicious and hostile towards revolutionary parties, arguing that parties created political elites. As a tendency, it often downplayed or outright rejected revolutionary theory instead championing the spontaneity of workers actions, believing that to be enough to overcome capitalism alone.
Syndicalism was to find a highpoint in the International Workers of the World, founded in America in 1905. The IWW greatly influenced Connolly and Larkin’s revolutionary trade unionism. On these ideas and what was to be termed ‘Larkinism’, John Newsinger writes:
The Dublin lockout ended in a crushing defeat for the city’s working class. Membership of the ITGWU fell from 30,000 before the strike to 5,000 by the end. With thousands of workers having lost their jobs, out of desperation many enrolled in the slaughter of the first World War a few months later. The defeat also exposed the weaknesses of syndicalism.
The Great Unrest 1910 -1914 conjured up mass movements in both Britain and Ireland, but the failure of syndicalism meant it was unable to take root and fuse together the industrial battle with the myriad other struggles, such as the fight against imperialism, the fight for women’s suffrage, and the fight for National Liberation. The opportunity to merge these struggles into a serious force capable of mounting a revolutionary challenge to the established order was missed, with stark consequences for the left, and Irish history more generally.
Equally, the betrayal of the TUC bureaucracy is another reminder that, ultimately, its interests aren’t tied to that of the workers, but only in maintaining its own position as the manager and pacifier of working-class discontent. We must fight to build rank-and-file militant unions with the fighting tradition of Connolly and Larkin at their core.
Socialists look to the Dublin Lockout for its heroism and for the determination of the working masses of Dublin in their resolve in the battle against the city’s capitalist class and all it had to throw at them. The influence of the likes of Larkin and Connolly gives us a glimpse of the role socialists can play today in winning workers to the power of their own self-activity. The lockout is full of lessons for all of us committed to building a socialist Ireland, free from the twin vicegrips of capitalism and imperialism.
