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Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism, and Nationalism in Ireland

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Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism, and Nationalism in Ireland SYNDICALISM, INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM, AND NATIONALISM IN IRELAND Emmet O’Connor University of Ulster The young working class of Ireland, formed as it was in an atmosphere saturated with heroic memories of national rebellion, and coming into conflict with the egotistically narrow and imperially arrogant trade union- ism of Britain, has wavered accordingly between nationalism and syn- dicalism, and is always ready to link these conceptions together in its revolutionary consciousness. Leon Trotsky, 1916.1 On Sunday 20 January 1907 Big Jim Larkin disembarked from a cross- channel ferry at Belfast to attend the British Labour Party annual conference and, he hoped, re-organise the Irish ports for the Liverpool- based National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL).2 He made his way with a slouching, gangly gait, without which Irish history might have been quite different. The cumbersomeness had denied him a place in the senior team at Liverpool Football Club, and he was not a man to stay in the reserves.3 For the watching detectives, he was easy to read. A black broad- brimmed hat provided the bohemian touch affected by British social- ists of the fin de siècle, while his muscular frame, shovel-like hands, worn old great-coat, and thick, droopy moustache, betrayed his fifteen years as a Merseyside docker. Less obviously, Belfast was a kind of homecoming for Larkin. Though he is not known to have set foot in Ireland since his birth in Liverpool in 1874, his parents had emigrated from Ulster, and he would insist, from 1909 at latest, that he too was 1 Nashe Slovo, 4 July 1916, quoted in D.R. O’Connor Lysaght, (ed.), The Commu- nists and the Irish Revolution, Dublin: LiterÉire, 1993, 59–60. 2 There have been relatively few studies of Larkin. See Emmet Larkin, James Larkin: Irish Labour Leader, 1874–1947, Routledge: London, 1965; Donal Nevin (ed.), James Larkin: Lion of the Fold, Gill and Macmillan: Dublin, 1998; and Emmet O’Connor, James Larkin, Cork University Press, 2002. 3 “The autobiography of Seán McKeown”, 23. I am obliged to Neal Garnham for a copy of this unpublished memoir. Larkin appointed McKeown’s father, Michael, as secretary of the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL) in Belfast in 1907. 194 emmet o’connor an Ulsterman, born and bred in the maternal family homestead in south Down.4 Coincidentally, in that year, he left the NUDL to launch the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU), and begin the “conflict with the egotistically narrow and imperially arrogant trade unionism of Britain”. Two others who would be instrumental in the pursuit of syndicalism and industrial unionism in Ireland were James Connolly and William O’Brien. Connolly was the polar opposite of Larkin in temperament and style, but they had much in common in their background and politics. Connolly also claimed an Ulster nativity, although he was born in Edinburgh in 1868: at least his parents were of that opinion.5 Following activism in the Scottish wing of the Social Democratic Fed- eration, Connolly settled in Dublin in 1896, and founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party on the theses with which he is most iden- tified: the Irish national struggle was also a social struggle, only the working class could complete the struggle, and only socialism could guarantee real economic independence. In 1903 he moved on to the United States (US). He had already been attracted to the ideas of Daniel De Leon and the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), and would be impressed by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The essence of his revolutionary industrial unionism was summed up in his pamphlet Socialism Made Easy in 1908. Returning to Dublin in 1910, Connolly became an official of the ITGWU in 1911, and succeeded Larkin as head of the union in 1914. In public history, both were equally towering leaders at this time, and complimentary book-ends: Connolly being the political revolutionist and nationalist, and Larkin being the union agitator and international- ist.6 In reality, Larkin was by far the more important of the two during the first phase of syndicalist unrest, from 1907 to 1914: indeed mili- tancy in these years was usually called “Larkinism”. Brilliant as a polemicist, Connolly was never very effective as an agitator: according to the wags, the Irish Socialist Republican Party 4 The family tradition is discussed in Jim Larkin, In The Footsteps of Big Jim: A Family Biography, Dublin: Blackwater Press, 1995, 3–11. 5 See Fintan Lane, “James Connolly’s 1901 census return”, Saothar, 25, 2000, 103– 106. Connollyology grows apace. There were some 200 publications on Connolly in 1980, and 350 in 2007. The most recent and comprehensive biography is Donal Nevin, James Connolly: ‘A Full Life’, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 2005. 6 See Emmet O’Connor, “Red Jim was a green man”, Irish Democrat, March–April, 2002..
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