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

I thank the Deputies who supported my motion and contributed to the debate. The great Dublin Lock-out of 1913 is an event that today embarrasses the political establishment and discomfits in particular the Labour Party and the leadership of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU.

The ruthlessness of that section of the Home Rulers and capitalist nationalists that was involved with the Dublin employers and its oppression of the working class to defend its profits was shocking, but the people involved were the progenitors of the capitalist parties of today, Fine Gael and Labour. It is uncomfortable to be reminded of the brutality of one's antecedents.

The herculean struggle for justice, dignity and humanity of the Dublin working class in 1913 is humbling and inspiring for succeeding generations. The courage and audacity of the leadership of that movement, including Connolly and Larkin, was unparalleled. They were radical socialists. They did not just denounce the evils of the capitalism of their day, but they worked tirelessly to break that system and to replace it with a socialist commonwealth. By contrast, one or two Labour Party contributors to this debate expressed all of the coruscating cynicism that has reduced Labour to a tool of the establishment of this day and age. They flung insults at left-wing socialists in the Dáil, using the language of the right and the capitalist media of the 1960s that was directed at the Labour Party itself when it had some claim to being a party for working people.

Labour today plays a central role in the rescue of the financial markets' dictatorship - the speculator and the bondholder - from the consequences of their crazed profit-driven system when it crashed. They demanded that the system be rescued on the backs of working people, young people, pensioners and the poor. Deputy Ross stated that class warfare was in the past and that speaking of it was no longer appropriate. Not so. Class war is when the machinery of, for example, the capitalist State, including the political establishment, is deployed to transfer €64 billion from the majority of people in the State - working people, the poor, pensioners and middle and lower income workers, namely, the working class - to a tiny minority of financiers, big bankers and big bondholders, namely, the financial capitalists. So far, it has been unfortunately a one-sided class war, but that will change and should change.

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