Any balanced history of the 1913 lockout?

Brendan Burgess

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I went to a talk by Kevin Myers on Jim Larkin on Thursday and he is anti-Larkin in the same way that the rest of the country idolizes him.

I don't know enough history to challenge him or support him.

Is there any good balanced history of the period - not left wing propaganda but not right wing nonsense either?

Myers' main point was that Larkin had no interest whatsoever in collective bargaining, his only objective was to bring down the capitalist system through strikes. Larkin had no interest in the appalling living conditions in Dublin at the time. Larkin was hated by the other trade unionists, including James Connolly.

Union leaders took defamation cases against him and won.

He was convicted of fraud. Not sure if I picked this up correctly. (Wikipedia is more balanced on this issue. "After trial and conviction for embezzlement in 1910, he was sentenced to prison for a year.[3] This was widely regarded as unjust, and the then Lord-Lieutenant, Lord Aberdeen, pardoned him after he had served three months in prison.")

When Larkin stood for election to the Dáil in 1927 he got around 8% of the vote in a North Dublin inner city constituency, so he wasn't very popular with the people either. - Just checked this on Wikipedia and he was elected to the Dáil with 12,000 votes for the Irish Workers League.
 
Lockout Dublin 1913 by Padraig Yeates is pretty much the definitive account - positively reviewed by the Irish media.
 
Pity I didn't know that on Thursday. He was speaking after Myers but I hadn't planned to hang around for it.

Brendan
 
Thanks Deise, but I would hardly think he is going to do a balanced account with this background from the publishers of his book on 1913

Pádraig Yeates is a journalist, publicist and trade union activist.


He is a distinguished social and labour historian and the author of Lockout, the standard work on the great 1913 labour dispute.
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Bit of a leap there Brendan , simply because Mr. Yeates is a trade unionist does not necessarily mean that he cannot write a balanced account of the lockout .

Perhaps the best way to judge is to read his book ?
 
Hi Deise

He is coming from a particular viewpoint where Jim Larkin is seen as a hero by the trade union movement.

So I would need to check him out in the same way as I wouldn't take what Kevin Myers said.

I would like to see something written by an historian.

Brendan
 

Brendan , I'm very surprised at you !

Sure , the author is a Trade Unionist but you have simply dismissed him as being biased on that basis alone .

Perhaps for a more balanced view you should read the book or perhaps you do not care to do so based on preconceptions ?
 
Boss, Strumpet City is a good read. I know its fiction but one does get a sense of the situation. For example on that embezzlement charge he was collecting in Cork for Dublin strikers and passed the money straight through to them. The boss of the TUC in England didn't like him at all and got him on the technicality that he should have routed the collections through head office. He got one year's hard Labour quashed after a month when it was realised how unjust it was.

He was undoubtedly interested in overturning the whole social order and his methods such as sympathy strikes have, I think, long since been banned. But I don't see much point in hunting down his personal motivation. Was Mother Therese solely interested in the poor, or was she booking a seat upstairs?
 
Deiseblue said:
Perhaps for a more balanced view you should read the book or perhaps you do not care to do so based on preconceptions ?
Click to expand...

Hi Deise

I would prefer to read a book by someone who has not got a particular angle on the story. A historian rather than a Trade Unionist or a book written by an IBEC employee for that matter.

Brendan
 
Until the August 2013 book on the Lockout by John Newsinger Mr. Yeates ( a quick google suggests that it is roundly accepted that Mr. Yeates is a respected historian ) book on the lockout was the only detailed account.

I have read Mr. Yeates book & I found it extremely instructive & frank in it's descriptions of Unions & their leaders - flaws & all , but then again if people are not prepared to read the book then really it's not something that can be debated !

I have not read Mr. Newsinger's book as yet but hope to do so in the coming weeks - I should warn those of a nervous disposition that Mr. Newsinger is a Marxist !
 

No one is saying people shouldn't read the book. Simply pointing out that saying that one book is the definitive account on a subject is a bit much. So anyone that writes another book on the subject is wrong or at least not as factually correct.
 

I think the fact that you are recommending the book and saying it is balanced tells us that it is sympathetic to the socialist agenda.
If I’d recommended the book it would be safe to say that it would be of the opposite bent.

My mother’s family was heavily involved in the lock-out and her uncle was a founding member of the trade union movement in this country. His memoires were published a few years back, the launch was in Liberty Hall. My mother edited the whole thing together from his diaries. Needless to say I haven’t read it
 
Like Brendan & Sunny , all I can say to you all is read it & get back to me !

Until then debate/analysis on the book & why I recommended same is impossible .

This rush to imply that the book in question is biased without reading same is very strange - really it's not that expensive & only runs to a few hundred pages.

I think this particular topic has run it's course & as such I'm now signing off.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
I would prefer to read a book by someone who has not got a particular angle on the story. A historian rather than a Trade Unionist or a book written by an IBEC employee for that matter.
Click to expand...

Just make sure you avoid any book written by a money-grabbing accountants. All those accountants are the same, money-grabbing, tight-fisted, penny-pinching etc etc etc....
 
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