Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I commend Deputy Higgins for bringing this motion into the Dáil. It is hugely important, 100 years after the great 1913 Lock-out, that we remember that event and consider how far have we achieved the demands that Connolly and Larkin and the working class of Dublin set out to achieve in 1913. We should consider some of the issues they were facing because the Government, particularly the Labour Party, seems keen to say how different it was then, the implication being that the politics and perspectives of Connolly and Larkin are not particularly relevant to today.

Connolly fought against poverty in the first instance. Today, there are 200,000 children living in poverty and a Government that in the past few weeks has been imposing cuts on children with special needs. That is something Connolly and Larkin would oppose and resist with all their might.

They fought for workers' rights and against the casualisation of labour. That battle is still being fought as governments encourage the casualisation of labour, the outsourcing of work and the proliferation of agencies which deny secure conditions of employment and rights for workers in this country.

Most recently this has been evident in a public private partnership in my constituency between Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council and Sisk, along with a number of Spanish multinationals. They sacked a shop steward as soon as he joined a union and got others to do so as well. Those people only won their rights because they went out on strike, just as was the case in 1913. This Government has still failed to vindicate the basic right to trade union recognition and actively encourages the casualisation and outsourcing of labour.

Connolly fought against empire and particularly emphasised the need for this State to control its natural resources. He stated "A free nation is one which possesses absolute control over its internal resources and powers" so how would Connolly stand with the outrageous and disgraceful plans to sell natural resources and State enterprises in order to pay off the gambling debts of bankers and bondholders? He believed in people power and struggle as the means to achieve goals and in the rights of trade unionists to take industrial action, including sympathetic industrial action. I note a Member opposite who denounced sympathetic strikes, and it is worth remembering what Connolly stated in that regard:

We hold that the sympathetic strike is the affirmation of the Christrian principle that we are all members of one another, while those who oppose the sympathetic strike and uphold sectionalism in trade union struggles are repeating the question of Cain, who when questioned about his brother - the brother he had murdered - asked "Am I my brother's keeper?" We say "Yes", we are all the keepers of our brothers and sisters and responsible for them.

That basic principle of solidarity and the right of working people to stick up for one another and take industrial action in order to defend each other's rights is a right denied under the current labour legislation.

Crucially, Connolly believed in real democracy, and that is very pertinent to what is happening with this Government in this country. He stated:

If Parliament, elected to carry out the wishes of the electors on one question, chooses to act in a manner contrary to the wishes of the electors in a dozen other questions, the electors have no redress except to wait for another general election to give them the opportunity to return other gentlemen under similar conditions and with similar opportunities of evil doing. The democracy of Parliament is, in short, the democracy of capitalism.

That had the implication that it is not real democracy at all, so how true is that of this Government? There were promises about burning bondholders and protecting the vulnerable, as well as getting the country working. There has been a betrayal of all those promises, with a sacrifice of jobs, conditions, rights, incomes and livelihoods of ordinary people who elected the Government Members, and people have no recourse to do anything. In that context, the message of Connolly that struggle on the streets and industrial struggle is the way to gain redress is as relevant as ever.

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