1913 Lockout Ireland in the year 1913 was a subject nation within the British Empire. Supposedly an integral part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the country was, to all intents and purpose, a colony ruled from Dublin Castle. Ireland had been England’s first overseas colony in the 12th century and successive centuries saw repeated efforts to subdue the population and persistent resistance expressed in armed rebellions and political movements for independence. The last armed rebellion before 1913 was the ill-fated Fenian Rising of 1867 but more significant was the Land War of 1879 to 1882, with similar outbreaks in subsequent years. The Land War and subsequent agrarian reforms saw a major change in land ownership with the large estates of colonial landlords being broken up. The main beneficiaries of this were the larger farmers. Farm labourers and smallholders continued a marginalised existence, especially in the so-called ‘Congested Districts’ of the West and South. In 1841 the population of Ireland had been in excess of 8 million. The Great Genocide 1845-1849 devastated the country, wiping out some two million people in a short space of years through starvation, disease and mass emigration. By 1911, two years before the Lockout, the Irish population had decreased to 4.39 million. The economy was essentially a supplier of food to industrial Britain, while little industrial development took place in Ireland, with the exception of Belfast and surrounding districts. The rural population had no industrialised cities and towns to migrate to within Ireland and so mass emigration continued to ensure the decline of the population. In 1911 the population of Dublin City and County was 477,000 and such manufacturing industries as there were consisted mainly of brewing, distilling and food processing. Skilled trades, commerce and government employment provided jobs for many but the mass of the working class population depended on sporadic work on the docks, in transport and other forms of casual and seasonal labour. It was this workforce that was organised in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union founded in 1909. It is reckoned that over 100,000 people lived in slum housing in Dublin in 1913, out of a City population of 300,000. At the time of the Lockout Irish politics was dominated by the forces of constitutional Nationalism and Unionism. After years of fruitless lobbying within the Westminster Parliament the MPs of the Irish Parliamentary Party, under their leader John Redmond, seemed to have come within sight of the promised land of Home Rule for Ireland. After two General Elections in 1910 the British Liberal Party governed with the support of the Irish Party in Westminster and was pledged to introduce a Home Rule Bill. This was bitterly opposed by the Tories, especially in the House of Lords, a bastion of British wealth and privilege. When the Lords repeatedly used their power of veto to block Liberal government measures, including budgets, the government hit back by appointing a raft of Liberal peers to the House and, in August 1911, passed the Parliament Act. This meant that in future the Lords could only delay a Bill for two years. The Tories responded by stepping up their support for Unionists in Ulster. In September 1911 Edward Carson was welcomed as leader of the Unionists at Craigavon, mansion of Captain James Craig. “We must be prepared, the morning Home Rule passes, ourselves to become responsible for the government of the Protestant province of Ulster,” declared Carson. Two days later in Belfast 400 Unionist and Orange Order delegates adopted a plan to establish a Provisional Government of Ulster and “not to submit to Home Rule”. At a rally in Portrush the next day Carson produced a telegram sent to him by a Commander in the Royal Navy offering to his services and claimed this was far from an isolated case. Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty in the Liberal Government and he was booked to speak at a Home Rule meeting in the Ulster Hall in February 1912. Armed Unionists took possession of the Hall and prevented the meeting from going ahead. It was held instead in Celtic Park in West Belfast. The Unionists ratcheted up the crisis throughout the year. In April at Balmoral in Belfast 150,000 men in military formation marched past Andrew Bonar Law, the new leader of the Tories. That same month the Home Rule Bill was introduced and it passed its second reading in May. The words of Carson and other leading Unionists led to violence. With sectarian tension rising during the Orange marching season, in July 1912 in Belfast over 2,000 workers were driven out of their work in Harland and Wolff’s shipyard, the Workman Clark yard and other employments. Most were Catholics but they included some hundreds of Protestants deemed politically undesirable by the sectarian Unionist instigators. Arms were already being imported to Ulster at this time, six months before the formal establishment of the Ulster Volunteer Force in January 1913. In the meantime the Solemn League and Covenant (September 28th 1912) was signed by an estimated 250,000 men. The support of the British Tory establishment for Unionist sectarianism had a radicalising effect on Irish nationalists. Since 1893 and the founding of Conradh na Gaeilge, Irish nationalism had been deepened and strengthened by the movement to revive the Irish language and Irish culture generally. The GAA had flourished. There were successful efforts to foster Irish art and literature. Though politically the Irish Party still dominated, there were stirrings on the left of Irish nationalism. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, which had been moribund since the turn of the century, was reorganised after 1907 by the Fenian veteran Tom Clarke and the young radical Seán Mac Diarmada. Arthur Griffith had established Sinn Féin in 1905, a loose grouping of nationalists more radical than the Irish Party. Their call for abstention from Westminster, the unilateral establishment of an Irish parliament and the vigorous support of Irish industry and foreign trade, struck a chord with many. It provided a forum for those who had little time for the parliamentary game and little belief in the conspiracies of the IRB. PH Pearse was a leading figure of this young generation and up to 1912 he, like many, was prepared to give the Home Rule movement a last chance. Indeed in that year the setting up of a Home Rule parliament was widely anticipated. This led to the Irish trade unions to set up the Irish Trade Union Congress and Labour Party, with the aim of standing trade union sponsored candidates in the Home Rule election. Pearse took a similar, though short-lived initiative, to prepare an Irish-speaking party for the Home Rule parliament. At a massive Home Rule rally in Dublin in 1912 Pearse said that if nationalists were tricked again and cheated by the British government there would be “red war throughout Ireland”. The years before the Lockout also saw the rise of the Women’s Movement. The Irish Women’s Suffrage League campaigned for votes for women and in the summer of 1912, after stepping up their campaign by breaking windows in Government buildings and challenging British ministers in person, women were attacked on the streets by the police, jailed in Mountjoy, went on hunger strike and were force fed. In his books ‘Labour in Irish History’ (1910) and ‘The Reconquest of Ireland’ (1915), James Connolly presented a socialist interpretation of Irish history and politics. He criticised those who ignored the fundamental social and economic aspects of the conquest of Ireland by British imperialism and who sloganised around political oppression while ignoring, or even perpetuating, oppression of the property-less majority by the privileged majority. Connolly predicted: “The Irish toilers henceforward will base their fight for freedom, not upon the winning or losing the right to talk in an Irish Parliament, but upon their progress towards the mastery of those factories, workshops and farms upon which a people’s bread and liberties depend.” (‘Labour in Irish History.’) As a full-time trade unionist, socialist revolutionary and militant Irish republican, Connolly was determined to make this happen, to fulfil his own prediction: “For the only true prophets are they who carve out the future which they announce.” (‘The Reconquest of Ireland.’) This video will fill you with nothing but pride for the brave Irish men and women who stood up and fought back fundamentally paving the way for workers rights and strikes for years to come.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Oct 2013 11:35:23 +0000
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