Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

On this, the 100th anniversary of the great Dublin Lock-out of 1913, we salute the titanic struggles of the working class men and women of Dublin city and county against the barbarism inflicted on them, their families and communities through the agency of the ruthless capitalist forces of the day. An Irish capitalist class existed which saw no contradiction between on the one side Irish nationalism, support for Home Rule government and allegiance to Christianity in the form of the Catholic and Protestant religions and on the other side being responsible for keeping hundreds of thousands among the working class on the island of Ireland in abject poverty with slave wages and appalling living conditions.

This Irish capitalist class, when workers stood up to demand justice, fair wages, better living conditions and a decent life, did not hesitate to use all its powerful armoury of political, judicial and police repression to ruthlessly and literally attempt to starve the workers into submission in order to maintain its profits and the power and privilege these profits guaranteed. To understand how criminal the capitalist exploitation was in 1913 we need only look at contemporary reports. A September 1913 parliamentary inquiry into housing conditions found 25,800 families were living in inner city tenements, and 20,100 families were each crammed into one room. With family size ranging from three or four to seven, eight or nine, we can only imagine the deprivation and cruelty involved. The same inquiry concluded that 60,200 people were living in dwellings "unfit for human habitation and incapable of being rendered fit for human habitation".

These appalling conditions contributed to a very high death rate, with Dublin up there with some of the most economically depressed cities on Earth. This led the great socialist and key leader in the Lock-out struggle, James Connolly, to declare the high death rate in Dublin was in exact proportion to the class which the victims belong, falling with the wealth of the people and rising with their poverty.

Sometimes death came to Dublin's poor with shocking abruptness when the rotting tenements in which they lived came crashing down, as happened on Tuesday, September 2, less than one week into the Lock-out. No. 66 Church Street collapsed, killing three adults and four children, showing how workers were oppressed from all sides. One of the victims was 17 year old Eugene Salmon who died trying to rescue his eight year old sister. That very day he had been sacked from Jacob's biscuit factory for refusing to resign his membership of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union.

The rack-renting landlords responsible for atrocities such as this were an integral part of the Dublin business elite. They were represented prominently among the Judiciary and included Dublin's leading capitalists, among them William Martin Murphy who owned the Irish Independent and Evening Herald newspapers. Murphy of course controlled Dublin United Tramways Company which ran the key tramway system in Dublin and was a notorious exploiter of labour. The tramway workers' working day ranged from nine to 17 hours, with one day off in ten. These were oppressive working conditions with massive fines for minor infringements of the company rules and pay was lower than for the workers' counterparts in Britain. It was no wonder Big Jim Larkin, a great leader of the struggle in the Lock-out, described Murphy as "a creature who is living on the sweated victims who are compelled to slave for this modern capitalistic vampire".

On Saturday 19 July, 1913 William Martin Murphy called a meeting of the tramworkers. He warned them against taking strike action, verbally parading his power, and asked "what chance would the men without funds have in a contest with the Company who could and would spend £100,000 or more". This was an enormous sum in those days. With great callousness he went on to declare, "the shareholders ... will have three meals a day ... I don't know if the men who go out can count on this". This warning of depriving workers of their food was made brutally real during the Lock-out which Murphy orchestrated a month later when an attempt was made to starve the Dublin working class into submission.

When Big Jim Larkin arrived in Belfast in 1907 this was the kind of worker exploitation he set out to redress, as did James Connolly when he returned from the United States in 1910 to join him. These men became heroic champions of the downtrodden working class. They had great energy, unending courage and masterly tactical abilities. Critically, they also had a socialist analysis of the economic and social system and set their tireless day to day work of trade union organisation in the context of an overall struggle for socialism which was, as they defined it, the expropriation of the exploiter's wealth and the re-organisation of society as a democratically-run socialist commonwealth where the needs of the majority superseded the greed of a very few.

The new trade unionism extended by Larkin and Connolly, along with many great men and women whose names we do not know today, was correctly seen by Ireland's nationalistic capitalist bosses as a major threat. They looked forward to home rule to assume political control to match the economic power they already wielded. They quaked at the emergence of a new force onto the stage of history, the organised working class determined to secure their rights which threatened the profits of the employers, and the capitalist class saw a mortal threat to their plans to continue to dominate society in a home rule government. It was little wonder then that they set out to exterminate the threat.

In the months that followed, with great cruelty they attempted to starve the working class of Dublin, not only the workers but their children also, in their determination to smash effective trade unionism.

The effective trade unionism that particularly drove them to despair was the sympathetic strike action that had been developed with great effectiveness, leading to great results for workers in the preceding years, when workers in many different enterprises stood together in solidarity on the basis that an injury to one was the concern of all.

During the Lock-out, all of the institutions of the capitalist establishment backed up the brutal onslaught on the workers of Dublin. As alluded to in the Socialist Party's motion, members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, DMP, became the hired thugs for the employers. The judges, among whom were many capitalists, shareholders and rack-renting landlords, sent hundreds of workers to jail. The Catholic hierarchy and clergy denounced the struggles, its leaders and their socialist ideas. The Irish Independentand the Evening Herald, owned by Murphy, poured out a daily dose of bile and viciousness, attacking the working class struggle for justice and slandering and smearing Larkin in particular. The Irish Independent appeared as usual on Tuesday, 2 September 1913, three days after James Nolan and John Byrne were killed by a brutal baton charge on Eden Quay by the police and two days after hundreds of workers were brutally beaten on the streets of Dublin on Bloody Sunday and another worker, John McDonogh, was murdered in his home by the police. On Tuesday, 2 September, a tenement building collapsed on Church Street, yet we find in the Irish Independentnot a denunciation of rack-renting landlords and exploitation or a diatribe against the police violence, but a diatribe against the struggling workers. Denouncing the sympathetic strike, the article reads:

Was ever grosser tyranny attempted to be set up in the name of freedom of combination? Yet this is what Larkinism means and stands for... It is this attempt at despotism that the Tramway Company, Independent Newspapers, Messrs. Shackleton of Lucan, Messrs. Jacob and others are now out to overturn and destroy... It is infinitely better for Dublin and the prosperity of trade and its too few industries that whatever suffering and loss may be involved should be endured for a few weeks at most than that the city should be left helpless in the toils of Larkinism for an indefinite term of years.

The Lock-out ended in 1914 in difficult circumstances for the working class of Dublin. It could have been won had the magnificent solidarity of the British working class been embraced by the leaders of the British Trade Union Congress and action taken on their behalf. It stands as a lasting monument to the people who fought and the gains that came as a result in terms of workers' rights and trade union rights.

The anniversary of 1913 will be commemorated by leaders of ICTU and the Labour Party, but the latter dishonours and shames the heroes of 1913. Only a few weeks ago, the Labour Party pushed through the Dáil a Bill threatening to slash public workers' wages and conditions unless they accepted in a ballot slightly less onerous but equally repugnant cuts. How reminiscent this was of the methods of William Martin Murphy in demanding the signatures of workers to disavow the ITGWU or be sacked. The Labour Party in government drives the austerity agenda with Fine Gael. Attacks on workers' living standards and conditions and public services are at the diktat of the dictatorship of the financial markets, the same vulture capitalists, bondholders and big financiers denounced by Connolly and Larkin as the origin of the suffering of workers in their day. Their profiteering caused the financial crash, yet it is now on the backs of the working class, with the connivance of the Labour Party in a Fine Gael-dominated Government. Pathetic excuses cut no ice.

There is an alternative: to mobilise the power of working people in opposition to this dreadful austerity. Build a monument to the heroes of 1913 by campaigning for a socialist alternative. Taking major wealth, finance and major industry into public ownership and putting them under democratic control is what socialism means and is what is needed. Unfortunately, ICTU's leaders - with one or two honourable exceptions - also capitulated utterly to the austerity agenda, equally shaming the men and women of 1913.

A fitting tribute to that massive struggle, those who pursued it and those who suffered for justice would be to pass a trade union recognition Bill this year, releasing the chains that deliberately make it difficult to organise effective strike action. Resources should be provided to industrial relations machinery, such as the Employment Appeals Tribunal, so that disputes might be heard immediately. As a particular monument, we should also assist communities and bona fide groups in marking and bringing alive the events of 1913 in Dublin with educational and commemorative events. We should have a memorial to the five workers killed - James Nolan, John Byrne, John McDonogh, James Byrne and 16-year-old Alice Brady, a Jacob's worker who was shot by a scab. We need a fitting monument to the heroism and importance of this seminal event in the history of the Irish working class. Above all, we need a fighting response to the disastrous strategy of austerity and a mobilisation of the significant power of working class people to overturn it and to achieve a democratic and socialist strategy instead.

See this speech in context