On the last Sunday in August 1913 James Nolan and John Byrne were batoned to death in the streets of Dublin by members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. A further four hundred working people were injured as the police broke up a meeting addressed by Jim Larkin. Later Michael Byrne, an IT & GWU secretary, was tortured to death in a police cell; young Alice Brady while walking home with her strike allowance of food was shot down in cold blood by a scab; drunken police broke into homes in the slums of Corporation Street bludgeoning the women and children ol strikers. such brutalities were commonly inflicted then, as today, on the Irish working class in struggle.
The Bogside and Belfast people have recently experienced the ravages of drunken mobs of police •and trigger happy Specials, while in Dublin workers nave been clubbed into the ground. But British socialists should remember the strike breaking role of our own TUC and Labour leadership in Ireland in 1913. It will then be not so difficult to understand the acatening silence among the ranks of the labour umonists to jol with irsh workers in Britain toG workers in the British Isles face the prospect of an even bloodier repression than did the Dublin men and women in 1913 The Irish general strike of 1913 was a decisive landmark in Irish history. The employers were out to break the Irish Transport and General Workers Union that had practised a unionism which went radically beyond the conservative form of new unionism in Britain. From 1911 the IT & GWU under Larkin's leadership had used the sympathetic strike in every early August when Murphy locked out the IT & GWU tram workers. By September 400 firms had fallen behind Murphy and demanded the signing of the notorious document which forbade membership of the IT & GWU, as a condition of employment. Rather than sign it, 30,000 workers marched out from their factories in solidarity with the IT & GWU comrades.
This brave resistance of the Irish workers was met by the full force of the police and military on ine streets. Baton-charges, killings, savage prison shareholders in Murphy's Tramway company; and sentences dealt out by magistates who were repression of meetings and free speech. But all over document. Connolly wrote in October of 'Glorious Dublin they chose to fight rather than sign the Dublin', "Baton charges, prison cells, untimely death and acute starvation all were faced without a murmur, and in face of them all, the brave Dublin workers never lost faith in their ultimate triumph never doubted but that their organisation would aristocrats today when the most exploited section or fact that many of our critics amongst the British abour leaders seem to lose sight of. The Dublin fight is more than a trade union. fight; it is a great class struggle, and recognised as such by all sides. We in Ireland feel that to doubt our victory would be to lose faith in the destiny of our class"
The murder of Byrne and Nolan on 31st August made Dublin the centre of international labour struggle. The response of British workers in support of their Irish fellow unionists was immediate. The TUC, which was in session, sent a delegation to reassert the right of free speech and public assembly. Special relief ships were organised and carried food and provisions to the strikers paid for by British trade unionists.
For the first few weeks the strike was well supported, British trade unionists held meetings for Larkin and raised funds for the strike. But the TUC leaders were already beginning to vacillate. While they had so strongly condemned the August massacres they had been careful not to express support for the aims of the strike itself. Soon the Dublin workers were to face the barefaced treachery of the British labour leaders.
British TU support for the strike was doomed. Unless British workers were prepared to strike with their Irish fellow unionists, not only would the strike be defeated, but they would turn their own unions into direct strike breaking organisations.
Early in the strike the British TU bosses had attempted to go over the heads of the IT & GWU to find a compromise with the employers. By November they had opened up a major attack on Larkin. Thomas Ashton, secretary of the Miners Federation, complained that Larkin was using his Fiery Cross' tour of England to cause strife between the trade unionists and their leaders. Larkin, released from prison in mid-November, was attacked by J. H. Thomas of the NUR and Havelock Wilson, president of the Seamen's and Foremen's Union, for appealing to British workers for strike action. Snowden and Smillie of the NUM also joined in the opposition to sympathetic action.
The final confrontation came at a special congress of trade unions on December 9th. Here, Arthur Henderson, Sexton of the Dock Labourers Union and Gosling, President of the Transport Workers Federation, joined with Wilson and Thomas in defeating the proposal for a blockade. It was left to the gasworkers union delegate, supported by the compositors, to raise the flag of proletarian internationalism. He declared that the Dublin employers should be told that while labour was prepared to exhaust the possibilities of a peaceful settlement, it was equally prepared to exhaust the possibilities of war. When Larkin replied to his critics, he declared bitterly that he thought he'd come to a conference elected by the rank and file, and pointed to at least one delegate who had scabbed on the Dublin workers. When it came to a decision the capitulators tried to cloak their deeds by saying that they had no mandate from the union rank and file, despite the fact that the conference had been three weeks delayed by the same gentlemen claiming the time to do precisely that.
This sell-out of the Irish workers was carried out in the face of strong sympathy among British workers for the Irish struggle. collected, and Irish boats blacked. But in both Dublin Huge amounts of money were and Belfast, men who refused to scab were told by the only way to end the Dublin dispute, and the Northwall Dublin NUR branch demanded a similar meeting to stop blacklegs being brought over. Both requests were refused Following the London conference the NUR ordered its men in Dublin back to work. The NUDL and the Seamen's and Firemen's Union rapidly followed, ordering its men to unload and man ships loaded by scabs. Immediately the news was out, the employers knew they had won and had nothing to fear from the British trade union movement. The strike continued till February when the men gradually went back under conditions which denied them the right to use the sympathetic strike. By isolating Dublin the British labour leaders had helped the employers beat the strike, and all but destroy the IT & GWU, inflict ing a blow on the Irish labour movement from which it has not to this day recovered. Nor was this the first act of strike breaking by British trade union leaders. Sexton had broken the fragile unity of Catholic and Protestant workers built by Larkin in the 1907 Belfast strike, had expelled Larkin from the Union, and doomed the labour movement in Belfast to sectarian religious division. Taken together these two acts were decisive in dividing the working class and tipping the balance of Irish politics in favour of reaction in the North and conservative nationalism in the South More than fifty years later the attitude of the trade union and labour bureaucracy has changed little. We still have the hollow gesture of solidarity that was made by their predecessors in 1913. The odd murmur was heard at the Portsmouth TUC in solidarity with the workers defending their lives behind barricades but not a stifled mutter was heard against the imperialist policy Wilson is following in Ireland.
Yet the situation in the north grows more critical each day. Troops dismantle the protective barricades in Belfast. The Ulster Volunteers (i.e. 'disarmed' B Specials) are given time to prepare a further massacre More urgently than ever is the need for British trade support the cause of Irish self-defence and self-determination. Nowhere in the labour movement