Note 599 — Chapter IX

It is doubtful whether, in any country in the world, even in Australia or Denmark, there is in 1920 so large a proportion of the adult male manual workers enrolled in Trade Unions as in the United Kingdom; and—Ireland being still relatively unorganised industrially—certainly not so large a proportion as in Great Britain alone.

The Trade Union Movement in Ireland has, apart from the Irish branches of British Unions, largely concentrated in the Belfast area, little connection with that in Great Britain, but its progress during the past thirty years has been scarcely less remarkable. The Irish railwaymen have abandoned their attempts at organisation in an Irish Union, and have lately swarmed into the National Union of Railwaymen to the number of over 20,000. The engineers in Ireland, whether at Belfast or elsewhere, are, to the number of 9000, in the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and other British Unions. The other great Unions have nearly all their Irish branches. But the great transformation has been in the foundation and remarkable development of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, built up by James Connolly and James Larkin, which has survived both its tremendous Dublin strike of 1913 and the loss of both its leaders, and claims in 1920 over 100,000 members in 400 branches, being half the Trade Unionists in all Ireland. The only other Irish Trade Unions exceeding 5000 members are the Flax Roughers’ Union, included with other Unions in an Irish Textile Workers’ Federation, and the Clerical Workers’ Union, together with the Irish Teachers’ Society, which (unlike the National Union of Teachers in England and the Educational Institute of Scotland) is frankly affiliated with the (Irish) Labour Party. Scores of other Irish Trade Unions exist, practically all small, local, and sectional in character, and almost confined to the ten towns of Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Limerick, Waterford, Dundalk, Derry, Clonmel, Sligo, and Kilkenny. The total Trade Union membership in Ireland, which thirty years ago was only put at 40,000, may now exceed 200,000, about one-fifth of which is in and about Belfast. The Irish Trades Union Congress, established in 1894, and the Irish Labour Party meet annually.

The Irish Trade Union Movement, emerging from handicraftsmen’s local clubs, some of them dating from the middle of the eighteenth century, and monopolist and sectional in policy, has, during the present century, become fired with nationalist spirit and almost revolutionary fervour. Its heroes are Michael Davitt, James Connolly, and James Larkin. The story of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, with its extraordinary extension to all grades of wage-earners all over Ireland, and its sensational strikes in Dublin in 1913-14, is an epic in itself. Some idea of this development may be gathered from The Irish Labour Movement, by W. P. Ryan, 1919; Labour in Irish History, by James Connolly; Socialism Made Easy, by the same (about 1905); the Annual Reports of the Irish Trades Union Congress since 1895; and those of the Irish Labour Party.