Geoffrey Bell looks back at the life of James Larkin, who was born 150 years ago this month.
One hundred and fifty thousand public sector workers went on strike in Northern Ireland on 18th January. They were demanding the same wage increases workers in the rest of the ‘United Kingdom’ have recently secured.
The Tory government said there was money available to meet the workers’ demands, but that they would not pay it until power-sharing in Northern Ireland resumed. This crude attempt to blame the current political impasse in Britain’s remaining Irish colony for denying wage increases has been exposed and denounced by all the political parties in the North of Ireland. It is totally within the government’s sovereignty to cough up the money, whether there is an existing local administration or not.
The general, all-inclusive nature of the strike – the biggest in the history of Northern Ireland – was reminiscent of what was once dubbed “Larkinism”, a form of militant trade unionism associated with James Larkin, whose 150th birthday just happens to fall a week after the strike.
Larkin was and remains an inspirational figure to many throughout Ireland, and indeed elsewhere. He is worth remembering.
Larkin was born in Liverpool on 28th January 1874 of north of Ireland parents. As a teenager he joined the Independent Labour Party, worked in the Liverpool docks and joined the National Union of Dock Labourers. He soon became a workers’ leader and was always a powerful orator. When playing a leading role in a local strike cost him his job, he became an organiser for the NUDL and, in that role went to Belfast in 1907.
There he briefly succeeded in uniting Protest and Catholic workers, calling a general strike in June 1907, which even sections of the police joined. The militancy of the strike alarmed the British-based union leadership, who took over control of the action, and promptly sold it out. Larkin then went to Dublin and there his leadership of strikes of unskilled workers led him to being suspended from his union job by his moderate union bosses.
Larkin then did something which, historically, was very significant, forming an Irish-based union – the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. In a sense, this was the trade union equivalent of the then wider and growing Irish national movement, and its advocacy of Irish self-determination, while breaking the existing dependence on British movements and institutions.
But Larkin also sought to learn from the international workers’ movement. His trade unionism was influenced by European and American syndicalist ideas: that a union should not just aim to win wage rises for its members, but also be a vehicle for societal change. Allied to this was his advocacy of ‘one big union’ of workers in different trades and industries.
This is what he attempted to put into practice. He was ably assisted by James Connolly and under their leadership the ITGWU prospered. By 1913 it had 20,000 members, and its growth and Larkin’s popularity brought a counterassault by Irish bosses, most notably newspaper magnate William Martin Murphy. In September 1913, he “locked out” or suspended all ITGWU members in his employment, in an attempt to smash the union. A Dublin-wide general strike followed and went on for months.
Larkin and Connolly appealed to British trade unionists and socialist for financial help and even solidarity action. There was a huge rally in support of the Dublin workers in November 1913 in London’s Albert Hall at which Sylvia Pankhurst, George Landsbury, George Bernard Shaw and Connolly himself spoke. But, more crucially, in December 1913 a special conference of the British TUC refused to endorse sympathetic action in Britain in solidarity with the Dublin workers. That spelt the end of the workers’ struggle and Larkin admitted defeat in January 1914.
By the end of 1914 Larkin had gone to America, first as a public speaker, and then he secured employment as a union official. He was a German agent in the First World War, and he supported Ireland’s 1916 Rising. He identified with Russian revolution and in 1920 was jailed in America for five years in part of the ‘Red Scare’.
Even according to sympathetic biographers, it seems that Larkin, especially after the defeat in the Lock Out, was a very difficult person to work or live with. He suffered bouts of depression and egomania. He quarrelled with many of his friends and his wife, Elizabth left him. After he returned to Ireland in 1923, he sought to resume the leadership of the ITGWU, but instead ended up dividing the union and was expelled from it, becoming the leader of the rival Workers Union of Ireland, which had been founded by his brother and son. It was indicative of the charisma that Larkin still had that two-thirds of the Dublin membership of the ITGWU joined the WUI. He lost his revolutionary fervour somewhat in later life and died after a fall in the WUI office in 1947.
The Dictionary of Irish Biography assesses Larkin thus: “Larkin revolutionised Irish trade unionism in two respects. In developing the ITGWU he delivered a terminal blow to the crippling policy of dependence on British labour and laid the basis of the modern Irish labour movement. In industrial relations he introduced a method of struggle that made possible the unionisation of unskilled workers. He is remembered especially not for what he did, but in the image and idea; in the image of Dublin workers as a ‘risen people’.”
That last phrase derives from an in inscription in Irish, English, and French on a statue of Larkin which today stands in Dublin’s O’Connell Street. It is part a longer quotation that he and Connolly borrowed from an 18th century French radical newspaper: “The great appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise.”
It was advice well taken in the North of Ireland on 18th January.
Geoffrey Bell is an executive member of Labour for Irish Unity.
Image: James Larkin Monument. https://www.flickr.com/photos/infomatique/49204996723. Creator: William Murphy Copyright: williamm@infomatique.org. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic
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