| James Larkin |
|
| Born |
21 January, 1874
Liverpool, England |
| Died |
30 January, 1947
|
| Nationality |
Irish |
| Occupation |
trade union leader |
James (Big Jim) Larkin (Irish: Séamas Ó Lorcáin;
21 January, 1876–30
January, 1947), an Irish trade union leader and
socialist activist, was born to Irish parents in
Liverpool, England in 1874, although he and his family later moved to live in a small cottage
in Burren, southern County Down. Growing up in poverty, he had little formal education and
began working in a variety of jobs while still a child before becoming a full-time trade union organiser in 1905. He moved to
Ireland in 1907, where he founded the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, the Irish Labour Party, and later the Workers' Union of
Ireland. Perhaps best known for his role in the 1913 Dublin Lockout, "Big Jim"
continues to occupy a significant place in the collective memory of Dublin.
Beginnings
Larkin's family lived in the slums in Liverpool during the early years of his life, and from the age of seven he attended
school in the mornings and worked in the afternoons to supplement the family income - a common arrangement in working-class
families at the time. At the age of fourteen, after the death of his father, he was apprenticed to the firm his father had worked
for, but was dismissed after two years. He was unemployed for a while and then worked as a seaman and docker. By 1903 he was a
dock foreman, and on 8 September that year he married Elizabeth Brown.
From 1893 Larkin had developed an interest in socialism, and he became a member of the
Independent Labour Party. In 1905 he was one of the few foremen to take part in
a strike on the Liverpool docks. He was elected to the strike committee, and although he lost his foreman's job as a result, his
performance had so impressed the National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL) that it appointed him a temporary organiser. He later
gained a permanent position with the union, and in 1906 it sent him to Scotland, where he
successfully organised workers in Preston and Glasgow.
Organising the Irish labour movement, 1907–1914
In January 1907 Larkin undertook his first task on behalf of the trade union movement in Ireland, when he arrived in
Belfast to organise the city's dock workers for the NUDL. He succeeded in unionising the
workforce and, as employers refused to meet their wage demands, he called the dockers out on strike in June. Carters and coal men
soon joined in, the latter settling their dispute after a month. Larkin succeeded in uniting Protestant and Catholic workers, and even persuading the police to
strike at one point, but the strike ended without significant success by November. Tensions over the leadership of the strike
arose between Larkin and NUDL general secretary James Sexton. The role of the latter in
taking over negotiations and agreeing a disastrous settlement for the last strikers ensured a lasting rift between him and
Larkin.
In 1908 Larkin moved south and organised workers in Dublin, Cork and Waterford with considerable success. His involvement, against
union instructions, in a dispute in Dublin resulted in his expulsion from the NDLU. The union later prosecuted him for diverting
union funds to give strike pay to Cork workers engaged in an unofficial dispute. After trial and conviction in 1910 he would
serve three months in prison for this, a sentence widely regarded as unjust.
After his expulsion from the NDLU, Larkin founded the Irish
Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU) at the end of December 1908. The organisation still exists today as the
Services Industrial Professional & Technical
Union (SIPTU). It quickly gained the affiliation of the NDLU branches in Dublin, Cork, Dundalk and Waterford, while the
Derry and Drogheda branches stayed with the British union and Belfast split along sectarian lines. Early in the new year, Larkin
moved to Dublin, which became the main base of the ITGWU and the focus of all his future union activity in Ireland.
In June 1911 Larkin established a newspaper, The Irish Worker, to provide a pro-labour alternative to the
capitalist-owned press. This organ was characterised by a campaigning approach and the harsh denunciation of unfair employers and
of Larkin's political enemies. Its columns also included pieces by intellectuals. The paper was produced until its suppression by
the authorities in 1915.
In partnership with James Connolly, Larkin helped form the Irish Labour Party in 1912. Later that year he was elected to the Dublin Corporation. However, he did not hold his seat long, as a month later he was removed on
account of his fraud conviction.
The Dublin Lockout, 1913
Statue of James Larkin on O'Connell Street, Dublin (
Oisín Kelly 1977)
In early 1913 Larkin achieved some notable successes in industrial disputes in Dublin, making frequent recourse to
sympathetic strikes and blacking (boycotting) of goods.
Two major employers remained non-union firms and a target of Larkin's organising ambitions: Guinness and the Dublin United Tramway Company.
Guinness staff were well-paid and enjoyed generous benefits from a paternalistic management, and as a result they showed
little interest in trade unions. This was far from the case on the tramways. The chairman of the Dublin United Tramway Company,
industrialist and newspaper proprietor William Martin Murphy, was determined not
to allow the ITGWU to unionise his workforce. On 15 August he dismissed forty workers he suspected of ITGWU membership, followed
by another 300 over the next week. On 26 August the tramway workers officially went on strike. Led by Murphy, over four hundred
of the city's employers retaliated by requiring their workers to sign a pledge not to be a member of the ITGWU and not to engage
in sympathetic strikes.
The resulting industrial dispute was the most severe in Ireland's history. Employers in Dublin engaged in a lockout of their workers when the latter refused to sign the pledge, employing blackleg labour from Great Britain and elsewhere in Ireland.
Dublin's workers, amongst the poorest in the then United
Kingdom, were forced to survive on generous but inadequate donations from the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) and other sources in Ireland, distributed by the ITGWU.
For seven months the lockout affected tens of thousands of Dublin's workers and employers, with Larkin portrayed as the
villain by Murphy's three main newspapers, the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent and the Evening Herald. Other leaders in
the ITGWU at the time were James Connolly and William X. O'Brien, while influential figures such as Pádraig
Pearse, Countess Markievicz and William Butler Yeats supported the workers in the generally anti-Larkin media.
The lockout eventually concluded in early 1914 when the calls for a sympathetic strike in Britain from Larkin and Connolly
were rejected by the British TUC. Although the actions of the ITGWU and the smaller UBLU were unsuccessful in achieving
substantially better pay and conditions for the workers, they marked a watershed in Irish labour history. The principle of union
action and workers' solidarity had been firmly established. Perhaps even more importantly, Larkin's rhetoric, condemning poverty
and injustice and calling for the oppressed to stand up for themselves, made a lasting impression.
Larkin in America, 1914–1923
Some months after the lockout ended, Larkin left for the United States. He intended to
recuperate from the strain of the lockout and raise funds for the union. His decision to leave dismayed many union activists.
Once there he became a member of the Socialist Party of America, and was
involved in the syndicalist Industrial
Workers of the World union. He became an enthusiastic supporter of the Soviet Union
and was expelled from the Socialist Party of America in 1919 along with numerous other sympathisers of the Bolsheviks.
Larkin's speeches in support of the Soviet Union, his association with founding members of the American Communist Party, and his radical publications made him a target of the "Red Scare" that was sweeping the nation; he was jailed in 1920 for 'criminal anarchy' and was sentenced
to five to ten years in Sing Sing prison. In 1923, he was pardoned and later deported by
Alfred E. Smith, Governor of New York.
Return to Ireland and communist activism
Upon his arrival in Ireland in April 1923, Larkin received a hero's welcome, and immediately set about touring the country
meeting trade union members and appealing for an end to the Civil War. However, he soon
found himself at variance with William O'Brien, who in his absence had become the leading figure in the ITGWU and the Irish
Labour Party and Trade Union Congress. Larkin was still officially general secretary of the ITGWU, and a bitter struggle between
the two men ensued which would last over twenty years.
In September 1923 Larkin formed the Irish Worker League (IWL), which was soon
afterwards recognised by the Comintern as the Irish section of the world communist movement. In 1924 Larkin attended the Comintern congress and was elected to its executive committee.
However, the League was not organised as a political party, never held a general congress and never succeeded in being
politically effective. Its most prominent activity in its first year was to raise funds for republican civil war prisoners.
During Larkin's absence at the 1924 Comintern congress (and apparently against his instructions), his brother Peter took his
supporters out of the ITGWU, forming the Workers' Union of Ireland (WUI). The
new union quickly grew, gaining the allegiance of about two thirds of the Dublin membership of the ITGWU and of a smaller number
of rural members. It affiliated to the pro-Soviet Red International of Labour Unions.
However, like the IWL, the WUI would be hampered in its growth by Larkin's chaotic and dictatorial approach.
In January 1925, the Comintern sent British communist activist Bob
Stewart to Ireland to establish a communist party in cooperation with Larkin. A formal founding conference of the Irish Worker
League, which was to take up this role, was set for May 1925. A fiasco ensued when the organisers discovered at the last minute
that Larkin did not intend to attend. Feeling that the proposed party could not succeed without him, they called the conference
off as it was due to start in a packed room in the Mansion House in Dublin.
In the September 1927 general election, Larkin ran in
North Dublin and was elected. This was to be the only time that
a self-proclaimed communist was elected to Dáil Éireann until the election
of Joe Higgins in 1997. However, as a result of a libel award against him won by William
O'Brien, which he had refused to pay, he was an undischarged bankrupt and could not take up his seat.
Larkin was unsuccessful in his attempts in the following years to gain a position as a commercial agent in Ireland for the
Soviet Union, and this may have contributed to his disenchantment with the communist cause. The Soviets, for their part, were
increasingly impatient with his ineffective leadership. From the early 1930s Larkin drew away from the Soviet Union. While in the
1932 general election he stood without success as a communist, in 1933 and subsequently he ran as "Independent Labour". During
this period he also engaged in a rapprochement with the Catholic Church. In 1936 he regained his seat on Dublin Corporation. He then regained his Dáil seat in the 1937 general election but lost it again the
following year. In this period the Workers' Union of Ireland also entered the mainstream of the trade union movement, being
admitted to the Dublin Trades Council in 1936, although the ICTU would not accept its membership
application until 1945.
Return to the Labour Party
James Larkin The Labour Leader
In 1941 a new trade union bill was published by the Government. Inspired by an internal trade union restructuring proposal by
William O'Brien, it was viewed as a threat by the smaller general unions and the Irish branches of British unions (known as the
'amalgamated unions'). Larkin and the WUI played a leading role in the unsuccessful campaign against the bill. After its passage
into law he and his supporters successully applied for admission to the Labour Party, where they were now regarded with more
sympathy by many members. O'Brien in response disaffiliated the ITGWU from the party, forming the rival National Labour Party and denouncing what he claimed was communist influence in Labour.
Larkin later served as a Labour Party deputy in Dáil Éireann (1943–44).
James Larkin died in his sleep on 30 January, 1947. His
funeral mass was celebrated by the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles
McQuaid, and thousands lined the streets of the city as the hearse passed to Glasnevin Cemetery.
Commemoration
Literature
Larkin has been the subject of poems by Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, Frank O'Connor and Lola Ridge; his character has been central in plays by Daniel
Corkery, George Russell (Æ), and Sean
O'Casey; and he is a heroic figure in the background of James Plunkett's novel
Strumpet City.
Trivia
James Larkin was memorialized by the New York Irish rock band Black 47, in their song "The
Day They Set Jim Larkin Free."
Monument
Today a statue of "Big Jim" stands on O'Connell Street in Dublin. The inscription on
the front of the monument is an extract in French, Irish and English from one of his
famous speeches:
Les grands ne sont grands que parce que nous sommes à genoux: Levons-nous.
Ní uasal aon uasal ach sinne bheith íseal: Éirímis.
The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise.
The slogan appeared on the masthead of the Workers' Republic, the organ of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, published in Dublin between 1896 and 1903. The
original slogan is usually attributed to Camille Desmoulins (1760-1794), the French
revolutionary.
On the west side of the base of the Larkin monument is a quotation from the poem Jim Larkin by Patrick Kavanagh:
And Tyranny trampled them in Dublin's gutter
Until Jim Larkin came along and cried
The call of Freedom and the call of Pride
And Slavery crept to its hands and knees
And Nineteen Thirteen cheered from out the utter
Degradation of their miseries.
On the east side of the monument there is a quotation from Drums under the Windows by Sean O'Casey:
...He talked to the workers, spoke as only Jim Larkin could speak, not for an assignation with peace, dark obedience, or
placid resignation, but trumpet-tongued of resistance to wrong, discontent with leering poverty, and defiance of any power
strutting out to stand in the way of their march onward.
A road in Clontarf, North Dublin, is named after him.
Sources
- James Larkin, Emmet O'Connor, Cork University Press, Cork, 2002 ISBN
1-85918-339-5
- Lockout: Dublin 1913, Pádraig Yeates, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 2000 ISBN 0-7171-2899-7
- Communism in Modern Ireland: The Pursuit of the Workers' Republic since 1916, Mike Milotte, Dublin, 1984
- Thomas Johnson, 1872 - 1963, John Anthony Gaughan, Kingdom Books, Dublin, 1980, ISBN 0-9506015-3-5
- The Rise of the Irish Trade Unions, Andrew Boyd, Anvil Books, Dublin, 1985 ISBN 0-900068-21-3
- History of Monuments O'Connell Street Area, Dublin City Council, 2003, [1]
- Guinness 1886-1939, SR Dennison & Oliver McDonagh; Cork Univ. Press 1998. ISBN 1-85918-175-9 See: Chapter 8, "The
employees; work and welfare 1886-1914" and chapter 9, "Industrial Relations 1886-1914".
Further reading
- James Larkin, Irish labour leader 1876 - 1947, E. Larkin, London, 1977
- James Larkin: Lion of the Fold, ed. Dónal Nevin, Dublin, 1998
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