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James Larkin

1876–1947

 

Along with JAMES CONNOLLY [16], James Larkin was one of the leading figures in the development of both the trade union movement and democratic socialism in Ireland.  But where Connolly was more of a thinker, Larkin was a man of action, a street rebel.

      One of his biographers, the historian Emmet Larkin, wrote: 'His accomplishment was unique and representative - unique partly because it was representative.  His rich and complex personality allowed him to harmonize the three most dissonant themes of his day.  For he claimed to be at one and the same time a Socialist, a Nationalist, and a Roman Catholic.'  His career was representative because it 'mirrored to a larger extent than did that of his equally colourful comrades [Eugene Debbs, Tom Mann, and James Connolly] those attributes that were the hallmark of this generation of working-class leaders'.

      He was born in the slums of Liverpool, the great English seaport, in 1876 to poor Irish parents.  As a child he witnessed not only the grim poverty of the families around him, but also had to watch the death of his father from tuberculosis.  He had hardly any schooling, but was sent away to spend at least part of his childhood with his grandparents in Ulster.  He returned to Liverpool at the age of nine, and began his own working life at the age of eleven.

      He spent some time at sea - he stowed away in search of adventure; and then became a labourer on the Liverpool docks.  When not yet seventeen he joined the Liverpool branch of the Independent Labour Party.  He rose from docker to foreman.  He lost his job for attempting to organize his men and joined the National Union of Dockers in 1901.  In 1905, after a bitter strike at his firm, he was appointed an organizer for the union.

      In Belfast in 1907, Larkin began the blacking of goods - that is the refusal to handle any goods which had not been made or transported by unionized labour.  However, he fell out with the union and went to Dublin, where in 1909 he set up his own union, the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU).

      Perhaps no other city had such scenes of poverty as Dublin had then.  He strove to improve not only working conditions, but workers' lives by widening their cultural horizons.  His union grew rapidly, and the inevitable clash with employers came to a head in 1913.  Though the workers were forced back to work, their rights had been established.  Larkin had drawn a line in the sand.

      The epic days of the long summer of 1913 have entered into the folklore of Dublin - the hardship caused by the employers' lockout, the riots and deaths on O'Connell Street, the clash with the clerical authorities over the sending of workers' children to England to be fed.  For six months, twenty thousand men and women, on whom another eighty thousand depended for their bread and shelter, were locked out because they would not sign the pledge of the Employers Organization not to join the TGWU.  For trade unionists throughout Britain it became the battlefront of the day.  Larkin won support in England and America, and even Lenin, then lurking in Zurich, had to admire Larkin's revolutionary zeal.

      Larkin then went to America, where he lectured and wrote about the causes close to him.  But socialism was already in decline.  As in Europe, its failure to resist the First World War had shaken its whole edifice.  And there were others problems for Larkin.  He was out of the country during the crucial years of the troubles, when Ireland took new directions he could play no part in.  In 1920 he was sentenced to ten years and jailed in Sing Sing for attempting to overthrow the US government at a time when the United States was passing through its first 'Red scare'.  He explained his point of view as best he could: '[A]t an early age, I took my mind to this question of the age - why are the many poor?  It was true to me.  I don't know whether the light of God or the light of humanity or the light of my own intelligence brought it to me, but it came to me like a flash.  The thing is wrong because the basis of society is wrong.'

      He became the focus of an international campaign to free him from prison.  In 1923 he was pardoned and released and returned to Ireland, but once again he fell out with his union, and left it to set up the Workers Union of Ireland.  Elected to the Dáil (the Irish national assembly) and the Dublin city council, he continued his struggle for workers' rights.

      For Larkin and the labour movement these were often difficult years.  He played an important part in the making of the new Ireland, where the needs of the economy were tempered with the equally important needs of the workers.  When he died on 30th January 1947, his funeral was a huge one even by the standards of political Dublin.

      'It is hard to believe this great man is dead,' the playwright SEAN O'CASEY [55], himself the product of the Dublin slums, wrote on the day of Larkin's death, 'for all thoughts and all activities surged in the soul of this labour leader, for he combined within himself the imagination of the artist, with the fire and determination of a leader of a downtrodden class.'

      Yet for all his admirers said, there was an element of the maverick in Larkin.  His critics could admit that he was a powerful and charismatic figure, but he was also demagogic, abrasive, and all too often divisive.  His support for the International and the Communist movements made him anathema to many, but to others closer to the streets of Dublin he was a giant among men, a prophet of a better life for all.  He remains a complex but powerfully influential figure, a legend among Irish leaders.