LABOUR BECOMES A POWER IN IRISH LIFE
In the play and interplay of movements and events at this time in
Ireland we cannot leave out of account the Labour Movement--that is,
the official Trade Union organisation as distinct from the Labourers'
Association. Hitherto it had mainly concerned itself with industrial
and social questions and had not made politics or nationalism an
object of direct activity. The workers had their politics, so to
speak, apart from their Trade Unions, and the toilers from Belfast
were able to meet the moilers from Cork for the consideration of their
common programme and common lot without infringing on the vexed issue
of Home Rule, on which they held widely divergent views--often enough
without understanding the reason why. They were a good deal concerned
about municipal government and how many men they were able to return
to the Dublin, Belfast and Cork corporations, but they had not counted
highly and, indeed, scarcely at all in the scheme of national affairs.
The Parliamentarians were too strong for them. Yet it was the workers
who always provided the soundest leaders of nationality and its most
incorruptible and self-sacrificing body-guard. The thinkers expressed
the ideals of Irish nationhood; they lived them and were even prepared
to suffer for them. But the time had come when this parochialism of
labour in Ireland was to end. To the enthusiasm and impetuous force of
James Larkin and the fine brain of James Connolly Irish labour owes
most for its awakening. The rise of Larkin was almost meteoric. He was
one day organising the workers of Cork into a Transport Workers Union;
almost the next he was marshalling a strike in Dublin, which made him
an international democratic figure of extraordinary power. He was a
man of amazing personality, who exercised a compelling influence over
the workers. He shook them out of their deadly stupor, lectured them
in a manner that they were not accustomed to, brow-beat them and,
though he made them suffer in body over the weary months of the
strike, he infused a spirit into them they had not known before. He
made the world ring with the shame of Dublin's slums and he did much
to make men of those who were little better than dumb-driven animals.
He united the Capitalists of Ireland against him in a powerful
organisation, and though they broke his strike they did not break the
spirit that was behind it. Some men will say the Rebellion of Easter
Week had its beginnings in the Dublin Strike of 1913; others that
Carson was the cause of it; whilst many ascribe it to the criminal
folly and short-sightedness of Redmond and his followers, who allowed
British politicians to bully and betray them at every point and made
Parliamentarianism of their type intolerable to the young soul of
Ireland. History in due course will assign each its due meed of
responsibility, but of this we are certain, that the men who came out
in Easter Week and bore arms were largely the men whom Larkin had
organised and whom Connolly's doctrine had influenced. From the point
of view of mental calibre Connolly was by far the abler man. He was
not as well known outside Labour circles in Dublin as he has come to
be since his death, but to anyone who has given any thought or study
to his life and writings he must appear a person of single-minded
purpose, great ability, ordered methods of thought and a fine
Nationalism, which was rooted in the principles of Wolfe Tone and the
United Irishmen. Connolly preached the gospel of social democracy with
a fine and almost inspired fervour. He was an internationalist in the
full Socialist sense, but seeing the harrowing sights that beset him
every day in the abominable slums of Dublin City he was an Irish
Reformer above all else. Mr Robert Lynd writes of him, in his
Introduction to Connolly's _Labour in Ireland_:
"To Connolly Dublin was in one respect a vast charnel-house of the
poor. He quotes figures showing that in 1908 the death-rate in Dublin
City was 23 per 1000 as compared with a mean death-rate of 15.8 in the
seventy-six largest English towns. He then quotes other figures,
showing that while among the professional and independent classes of
Dublin children under five die at a rate of 0.9 per 1000 of the
population of the class the rate among the labouring poor is 27.7. To
acquiesce in conditions such as are revealed in these figures is to be
guilty of something like child murder. We endure such things because
it is the tradition of comfortable people to endure them. But it would
be impossible for any people that had its social conscience awakened
to endure them for a day. Connolly was the pioneer of the social
conscience in Ireland."
In the chapter on "Labour in Dublin" Connolly himself thus refers to
the Dublin Strike and what it meant:
"Out of all this turmoil and fighting the Irish working class movement
has evolved, is evolving, amongst its members a higher conception of
mutual life, a realisation of their duties to each other and to
society at large, and are thus building for the future a way that
ought to gladden the hearts of all lovers of the race. In contrast to
the narrow, restricted outlook of the Capitalist class and even of
certain old-fashioned trade unionists, with their perpetual insistence
upon 'rights,' it insists, almost fiercely, that there are no rights
without duties, and the first duty is to help one another. This is,
indeed, revolutionary and disturbing, but not half as much as would be
a practical following out of the moral precepts of Christianity."
Here we get some measure of the man and of his creed. To the part he
played in the Easter Week Rebellion I must refer in its own proper
place. That the Dublin Strike and its consequences had a profound
effect on later events, this quotation from "Æ" will show. In a famous
"open letter" to the employers he declared:
"The men whose manhood you have broken will loathe you and will be
always brooding and scheming to strike a fresh blow. The children will
be taught to curse you. The infant being moulded in the womb will have
breathed into its starved body the vitality of hate. It is not
they--it is you who are blind Samsons pulling down the pillars of the
social order."
The poet oftentimes has the vision to see in clear outline what the
politician and the Pharisee cannot even glimpse.
At any rate this may be asserted, that from the year of the Dublin
Strike dates the uprise of Labour in Ireland. Connolly became a martyr
for his principles, whilst Larkin has been hunted from one end of the
world to the other because of his doctrines, undoubtedly of an
extremely revolutionary character. But able men have arisen to
continue the work they inaugurated and Labour in Ireland has now
formally insisted on its right to be a political Party as well as a
social organisation. It no longer circumscribes its aspirations to
purely industrial issues and social concerns, but it takes its place
on the stage of larger happenings and events and is like to play a
great part in the moulding of the Ireland that will arise when the old
vicious systems and forms are shattered for evermore.