Address at the Annual Conference of the Labour History Society
9th October 2015
Bhí Éire leath bealaigh trí deich mbliana d'athraithe suntasach sa bhliain 1915 (naoi déag is a cúig déag); ar mhór-roinn na hEorpa bhí athraithe ar bun, de bharr imbhualadh sotal impiriúil, a raibh an Chéad Chogadh Domhanda mar thoradh orthu. Anseo in Éirinn bhí an tír ar tí athraithe a fheiceáil a chuirfeadh tús leis an tréimhse réabhlóide, mar a thugtar uirthí anois.
[The Ireland of 1915 was an Ireland midway through a decade of extraordinary change; on the European continent, change that would see the loss of a generation to war in the collision of imperialist hubris. Here in Ireland changes took place that placed us on the cusp of what is now known as our revolutionary period.]
This was a decade of turmoil that unfolded in the shadow of the Home Rule Acts, the founding of the Ulster Volunteers and the Irish Volunteers, the establishment of Citizen Army, the outbreak of the 1914 World War, and the Rising of 1916. It was also just a decade on from the last of a series of Land Acts, legislation that would enable in rural Ireland a property based political culture to emerge, one that could accommodate itself within nationalism.
The content of nationalism might be charerterised by a demand for indpendence of decision in economics and social terms. For some this could even be within the structures of empire. However, some forms of nationalism, as exemplified by Padraic Pearse, were moving towards Connolly’s socialist defence of the working class. Padraic Pearse would intone the spirit of the Fenian dead that Autumn in his oration at O’Donovan Rossa’s grave. The volley fired over the grave was from volunteers in the Citizen Army as were the notes played by William Oman for the last post.
We can see in this decade, too, the widening of a divide between city and country, and within the class system of both the urban and rural societies.. At labour level, in Dublin it was a decade which had witnessed the most significant event in Irish Trade Union history - indeed in Irish social history of the early 20th Century - the Great Lockout in Dublin which had taken place in 1913. The project that was the Lockout left its significant and enduring mark on, not just the industrial, but the entire social landscape of Ireland. In rural areas land consolidation was under way with graziers, albeit nationalists emerging to constitute a new native predator class. The early decades of the 20th century in Ireland saw a rural landscape emptied of political agitation by the effect of famine and emigration of labourers and smallholders.
In the city of Dublin there can be little doubt that the Lockout redefined the nature of commerce and class relations in the city. Historian C. Desmond Greaves has stated that one of its key effects:
“on the workers of all industries was to strengthen their consciousness of themselves as a class.”
The effects of the Gorta Mór and emigration had radically reduced the numbers of agricultural labourers in rural areas where the grazier class enjoyed the support of senior church leaders. If in the land war local curates had sided with congests while some bishops condemned land agitation, now rival conservatism was in the ascendant assisted by landholding and church.
Today, the class divides which existed in the years leading up to the Lockout seem quite extraordinary. If I might draw on the work of contemporary historians such as Catriona Crowe and Diarmuid Ferriter, as to what the Census of 1911 shows. It depicts a Dublin of the most extreme contrasts; at the exclusive Kildare Street Club, there were 6 visitors on census night, including a landowner, a land agent, a retired Colonel, the official starter at Irish race meetings and Lord Fermoy. Thirty-two staff attended to their comfort. The German waiters from the Shelbourne hotel lived nearby on Kildare Street, while W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory were staying around the corner in Nolan’s hotel on South Frederick Street.
The Lockout contributes massively to 1915, a year when the ferment of writing would moved to militancy. This new militancy took place in the shadow of a very different version of Dublin; one marked by poverty and hunger, a city where tens of thousands lived in tenement slums, starved into ill-health, scraping a living on the margins of society; and a city about which Sir Charles Cameron, the Medical Inspector for Dublin, reported, “it is certain that infants perish from want of sufficient food.” Indeed, through the exhaustive work of Caitríona Crowe and other historians of the period, we have gained in recent years a far greater knowledge and understanding of the scale and nature of poverty in Dublin at the time. One third of families lived in one-bedroom accommodation – these were often very large families; and the death rate generally, and for infants in particular, were among the highest in the world.
Economic and social conditions were the context in which first labour unrest and later nationalist unrest were to come forth. While the lockout marked the beginning of a new era where Irish workers would come together in solidarity, and the trade union and labour movement would carve out a significant part of the new Irish State, there can be no doubt that the 1913 Lockout did not signify any immediate victory for the Irish working class.
Reflecting on the circumstances in which workers inevitably found themselves James Connolly stated at the time that:
“From the effects of this drawn battle both sides are still bearing heavy scars. How deep those scars are, none will ever reveal. But the working class has lost none of its aggressiveness, none of its confidence, none of the hope in the ultimate triumph”,
Nevertheless, many of those driven to return to work had to do so in a spirit of defeat, having been forced into ‘pledging’ to distance themselves from ‘Larkinism’ in the future. Many more were blacklisted and left unable to find employment.
The routes out of unemployment that were taken by those now debarred from working in this country varied. Most tragic were the large proportion who felt they had no choice but to join the British army in order to secure the separation allowance for their dependents, and who became victims of the cruel and murderous conflict that was World War l or, if they survived, would face significant hostility on their return home.
Earlier this year I participated in the commemoration ceremony at Gallipoli, a moving and deeply sad occasion which recalled the 4,000 Irish men who lost their lives in that failed invasion of Turkey during the First World War. There were, of course, varied reasons why so many Irish men decided to sign up during World War l. However we must ask ourselves, of those 4,000 Irish citizens who died at Gallipoli, and not only there but at all the sites of battle in World War ll, how many were motivated to fight in that War by political idealism and how many enlisted out of a desire for escape and adventure, and yet how many more were in Gallipoli on that tragic and fateful day because they quite simply had no other means of supporting their wives and children? Those driven to dependence on the separation allowance, who returned home with chronic injuries had often to seek to make themselves invisible in communities that had reacted furiously to the executions of the leaders of the 1916 Rising.
The impact on Irish society of these losses of human life was profound. In the words of Katherine Tynan:
“Dublin was full of mourning, and in the faces one met there was a hard brightness of pain as though the people’s hearts burnt in the fire and were not consumed”.
1915, the mid-point of the decade was perhaps a turning point in an Ireland which became increasingly opposed to involvement in the First World War, leading to another great mobilisation of Irish workers when, in April 1918, a one day strike would take place in opposition to threatened conscription, a one day strike which brought the national economy to its knees. By now the intellectual movements that had made a case for cultural respect were making way for a more militant pursuance of independence.
The traumatic effect of those deaths at Gallipoli also had a profound impact on social and political attitudes. The legitimacy of the system of government in the country could not be maintained in the face of a stark social inequality, combined with the needless deaths of so many young men; and indeed the authority of an economic order characterised by exploitation also became more difficult to sustain.
In such a volatile political environment, the just cause of labour could not be suppressed as completely as some had hoped. Indeed, while William Martin Murphy had won a victory in the short term, he was not successful in his greater aim of destroying the ITGWU or bringing an end to organised general trade unionism. Neither could he repeat the Lockout of 1913. In 1915 a further attempt at lockout failed as employers, having learnt a salutary lesson in 1913 as to the costs in economic but also social terms, refused to join Murphy in his action.
Today, when we take a long view of the year that was 1915 we see it as a time of grief for the lives that had been lost so senselessly in a futile war; a time of social inequality and a determined searching for democratic rights, a time when society was permeated with a deep sense of unrest; and, consequently, a time when a rising tide of militant nationalism resulted in the mobilisation and expansion of the Volunteer movement. Ireland was setting out again, as it were, on its journey towards independence, and while Home Rule was being spoken of as being just a few short years away, the egalitarian flames within the competing forms of nationalism were sadly faint.
The idealism of an independence with structural change and emancipator promise would perhaps finds its strongest expression in the Citizen Army, and it was that strain of the independence movement who would bear the brunt of the insurrection and often also suffer the approbrium of a beaten down, or in so many respects dependent public, trapped with the structure of empire.
Discussing 1915 and the significance of that year with a historian friend, he stressed to me how, following a number of measures of repression, amongst them The Defence of the Realm Act of March 1915 and the censorship of publications which came late in 1914 meant that in response to a plethora of increasingly militant speeches and publications all such manifestations were regarded as acts of sedition. It was a year that saw a regrouping of forces, but also a change in their character, a dramatic shift towards militancy. As the drum-beat of militancy became more pronounced it affected everything. Douglas de hÍde resigned, in July of that year, from an increasingly politicised Gaelic League, while in October the production of Padraig Pearse’s “The Siege” signalled a move from culturally based critique towards militancy.
As to intellectual expression of that militancy, the publication in May of James Connolly’s “The Workers’ Republic” was deeply significant in terms of theory and propaganda. With Jim Larkin now gone to the United States, Connolly was in charge and could give a new impetus to the struggle for Workers’ Rights in an independent Ireland. In 1915 Arthur Griffiths’ Nationality, part of a series, also appears; thus you had an intellectual invocation of independence with strikingly different content
Quite simply, may I suggest, that one has to take full account of the ferment of publishing and other activity that characterised 1915 in order to understand 1916. There was a widespread sense of crisis, of old systems coming under immense strain, and of new ideas being brought forward. And always in the vanguard are strong women. I am really pleased that women’s role in this turbulent decade will be given recognition at your conference..
As to what me might learn from it all? Today, a hundred years on, Ireland within the European Union has been experiencing a contemporary serious crisis of legitimacy; reflected, for example in a great sense of disappointment in trusted institutions which are perceived to have failed the citizenry.
We are, I hope, emerging from a baleful chapter in our history, a chapter which saw the collapse of a version of Irish economy that had been made vulnerable by its being built on property speculation, individualism as a philosophy, and a model of economics that was described as regulation with a light touch’, and which had the effect of severing the economy from social reality. The fallacies, the unexamined assumptions underpinning the heart of the dominant modes of thinking of this period, and which now have been exposed, must surely provoke scholars and public alike.
This chapter of our recent past has been one in which the poor suffered more than others, a chapter which saw an ever growing and deepening crisis of social cohesion resulting in increases in experiences such as homelessness, drug addiction, alcohol abuse and family breakdown.
That chapter in the history of Ireland and Europe has deepened a social divide and, in the words of Jürgen Habermas who recognises the divide as also a European phenomenon when he writes of those who find themselves on the wrong side of that chasm:
“[do] not pay in money values but in the hard currency of their daily existence”.
Having also witnessed the large scale neglect, and even abandonment, of the values of social responsibility by institutions invested with authority, and by professions which had jealously guarded their self-regulation, there is now again a groundswell of popular demand for a fundamental re-examination of the assumptions and values that underpin the dominant economic and political discourse of our times.
Yet, as in 1915, an effective and meaningful response to this crisis requires coherent and rigorous scholarly analysis and communication of that analysis. Otherwise it evaporates in a populist anger. There can be no doubt that Ireland now stands again at a critical turning point in its social history and, in this regard, the process of reflection and commemoration is directly relevant to the task of addressing our future. The desire to examine the root causes of what has happened, and to reconnect what has been sundered, in our society and in our public discourse is helped by bringing an ethical respect for complexity to our historical reflections.
By deconstructing the turbulent events of one hundred years ago in all their facets, we can perhaps gain an understanding of the dangers that can stem from social and political crises, particularly when not analysed; but we can also perceive more clearly the potential for radical renewal when fresh ideas and an emancipatory vision are put before the people as inspiration. With a fresh eye, the necessary radical re-thinking of accepted orthodoxies and their replacement with alternatives can enable us to move to discussing or possibilities in a shared sense of solidarity.
The circumstances of recent ties, the challenge of future change issues an invitation to discourse and debate. For example, among the challenges we face at this moment is the debate on the definition of work. With the mantra of ‘labour market flexibility’ being abused by some powerful interests at home and abroad to justify some current conceptions of labour as being a mere commodity, and the worker as being simply a unit within that commodity, it becomes necessary to pose the alternative of decent work. The demand for the recognition of the worker as a human being entitled to dignity, security, for recognition of their role as citizens in a deliberative democracy that enables participation.
Any consideration of the ethical and social dimensions of work and the workplace must challenge any reductive view of the worker as simply a commodity; we must insist, in the discourse, that all workers are seen as rounded citizens requiring family and community relations, and with the right to participate in society, and entitled to a balanced life, in which their employment plays its rightful role, but does not supercede the many other elements necessary to a full and productive life. Such an understanding of work suggests a view of society within a Republic where economic arrangements are made accountable to and, above all, instrumental to social policies that receive the assent of citizens who have participated in the drafting of such policies.
The 1913 Lockout took place in a Dublin which lacked a proper industrial base, where many starved in tenement slums and where our fight for independence was still to be won. Many pages of our history have now intervened and we are, in all our failures, achievements and new fragilities, a very different country from that which emerged from the Lockout a hundred years ago.
However, we must recall and learn from the fact that the Lockout also took place against a background of casual work with little security, and wages which were difficult to live on with pride or dignity. Sadly, the concept of the vulnerable and insecure worker has not been obliterated from our society.
Today, many of our citizens are trapped in chronic job insecurity. Indeed, job security is often dismissed as an outdated notion, a thing of the past, a concept that does not fit with a dynamic, globally connected labour market. Temporary or short term contracts, internships, and the discretion of employers to vary employees’ working hours with minimal notice, have led to an increasing percentage of our population working in precarious, low paid and poor quality jobs, with little possibility of career progression.
In the European Union, and Ireland as part of it, concerned social economists write now of the emergence of a new ‘precariat’.
Many workers are not only denied the benefit of organised labour, a battle which lay at the heart of the 1913 Lockout they are also refused the right to ‘decent work’, employment that would provide a source of personal dignity and freedom, would be capable of providing security for a family, or serve as the basis for security in the community, and for democratic flourishing and participation. The rationalising paradigm of empire was confronted 100 years ago. We must have the courage to confront the dominating economic paradign of our times.
I firmly believe that now, more than ever, we need to empower all our citizens with an appreciation of history in all its complexity; of rights and how they were won; of how we got to where we are; and an understanding of the conflicts that occurred along the way, as well as the consensus that emerged.
It is history which has shaped our society and which will be the basis for the future we might craft together. It is vital that today’s generation have a deep and textured understanding not only of the 1913 Lockout, its causes and effects but also how it and events in 1915 led to 1916, and how those events challenge us to have an appreciation of our duty and responsibility to build on all that was achieved by those who fought and made profound sacrifices in the past to ensure a fairer and more just society today and tomorrow.
We must seek to recover too, as your conference will I am sure, that atmosphere where, some were allowed to return to work at the cost of their rights, others were forced to fight abroad so that those at home might eat, and how some were coming to the conclusion that independence was a necessary precursor to the achievement of workers’ rights.
That was 1915 and all of this vortex would feed into the cauldron that will source the actions of 1916.
Sa lá atá inniu ann, i gcodarsnacht leis an bhliain 1915, téann muid i ngleic le dúshláin ár linne i gcomhthéacs tír a bhfuil neamhspleach agus sochaí a bhfuil rathúil, fiú má tá sí éagothrom. Tá sé de chomhacht agus an chumas againn ár gcinniúint féin a smachtú agus tabhairt faoi mórcheisteanna an aimsir seo agus na linne seo.
Today, in contrast with 1915, we address the challenges of our time in the context of an independent and free nation and as a prosperous if unequal society, where we have the power and the ability to control our own destiny and to grasp the great issues of our time and of this generation. Great issues that are also global such as global hunger, inequality, climate change, gender exclusion and violence.
Over the coming year, we will all reflect on the idealism of the words and vision, and the legacy and meaning, of 1916 and of the Proclamation. What better time to seek again the opportunity to build and define our society and to do so by the creation of an ethical foundation on which our Republic can grow and thrive, and in which our citizens can fulfil their potential in peace and security, in health and in happiness.