The seeds are sown. Larkinism prevails. A bloody weekend

THE SEEDS ARE SOWN

The idea of a strikers defence force had been mooted many times before the Irish Citizen Army was actually formed. Police brutality during previous strikes in Dublin, Cork and Wexford, had convinced some people of the absolute necessity of a defence force. Larkin himself had said during the 1908 Dublin Carters strike, that he would organise a " workers army", to defend the strikers if the employers sent in the army, as they had done in Belfast in 1907. P. T. Daly proposed the formation of a 'Workers Police', after a worker died as a result of a police baton charge during the 1911 Wexford strike for I. T. G. W. U. recognition. However this never materialised as the dispute was settled shortly afterwards. The offer from a military man like Jack White to organise and discipline a workers defence force, coupled with the sheer brutality of the police during the first weekend of the strike in August 1913, in what became known as Bloody Sunday, were the factors which actually resulted in the formation of the Irish Citizen Army.

LARKINISM PREVAILS

By 1911 Larkin had been so successful in organising the unskilled workers in Dublin that the employers led by William Martin Murphy formed the Dublin Employers Federation to combat the I. T. G. W. U. By August 1913 the employers decided that Larkinism must be smashed. Murphy, whose business interests included The Tramways Company and The Irish Independent Group of Newspapers, knew that Larkin's tactic of the sympathetic strike posed a real threat to the employers power. On Friday August 15th, Murphy took the initiative in provoking a confrontation with the I. T. G. W. U. by informing his employees in the despatch department of The Irish Independent that they had to choose between the union or their jobs. After forty employees were laid off, the following Monday the union blacked The Independent Group of Newspapers. By Tuesday the union members in Easons had been locked out for refusing to handle Murphy's papers. The following Thursday Murphy upped the ante by giving the tram workers the same ultimatum, sacking over two hundred men who refused to resign from the union. Larkin bided his time as he knew that the Dublin Horse Show was on the following week and there would be thousands of visitors to Dublin.

On Tuesday August 26th the I. T. G. W. U. struck back with over seven hundred tramway men walking off the job and leaving their trams where they stood. The following day began the clashes between the striking tramsmen and the scabs brought in by Murphy to replace them. The scabs service had to be discontinued after dark due to attacks from the strikers. In the meantime Murphy had been in contact with the Dublin Castle authorities who promised him that the Dublin Metropolitan Police (D. M. P. ) would be reinforced by the Royal Irish Constabulary (R. I. C. ). A camp of R. I. C. men from Cork was set up in Dun Laoghaire for this purpose. Special constables were also sworn in.

A BLOODY WEEKEND

At one of the huge nightly rallies in Beresford Place, Larkin announced a public meeting to be held the following Sunday in O'Connell Street in support of the strikers. In doing so he promised that

" that if one of our class fall then two of the other should fall for that one. "

The following day the I. T. G. W. U. leadership, Larkin, William O'Brien, P. T. Daly, William Partridge and Thomas Lawlor, were arrested and charged with seditious libel and conspiracy. All five men were released after giving an undertaking to be of 'good behaviour'. The demonstration called for August 31st in O'Connell Street in support of the strikers had been proclaimed by the authorities. At another mass rally in Beresford Place on the Friday before the proposed demonstration in O'Connell Street, Larkin burnt The Proclamation banning the rally and declared that he would hold the meeting " dead or alive". The police broke up the Friday rally but Larkin managed to escape and hide out in Constance Markievicz's home.

The next day Connolly and Partridge were arrested. With Larkin in hiding and Connolly arrested, William O'Brien decided to transfer Sunday's meeting from O'Connell Street to Croydon Park on which the I. T. G. W. U. had a long term lease. Later on that Sunday evening squads of drunken police roamed the streets of Dublin beating up anybody who got in their way. There were reports of baton charges by police against strikers in Ringsend and pitched battles between the people from Corporation Buildings and the police. During police attacks on people in the vicinity of Liberty Hall. Two workers, James Nolan and James Byrne, were beaten to death.

An eye witness to the killing of James Nolan, Captain Monteith of the Irish Volunteers, reports that a mixed patrol of about thirty five D. M. P. and R. I. C. attacked Nolan and clubbed him to the ground, leaving him in a pool of blood. Monteith himself was beaten up by these police for remonstrating with them but " had sense enough to lie (still) until the patrol passed on". Later on that weekend Monteith's fourteen year old daughter was beaten up by a drunken policeman.

Larkin was determined to go ahead with the meeting in O'Connell Street despite O'Brien's decision to rally in Croydon Park. To avoid detection he disguised himself as an elderly clergyman until he got on to the balcony of the Imperial Hotel, owned by William Murphy, where he proceeded to speak to the crowd who had recognised him. Within minutes he had been arrested. The police once again went wild batoning and clubbing everybody in the area despite the fact that most people in O'Connell Street that day were coming or going to church and most of Larkin's supporters were in Croydon Park. Constance Markievicz was one of those arrested by the police. She had turned to wish Larkin good luck when

" the inspector on Larkin's right hit me on the nose and mouth with his clenched fist. I reeled against another policeman, who pulled me about, tearing all the buttons off my blouse, and tearing it out all round my waist. He then threw me back into the middle of the street, where all the police had begun to run, several of them kicking and hitting at me as they passed....... I could not get out of the crowd of police and at last one hit me a back-hand blow across the left side of my face with his baton. I fell back against the corner of a shop, when another policeman started to seize me by the throat, but I was pulled out of the crowd by some men, who took me down to Sackville Place and into a house to stop the blood flowing from my nose and mouth and to try to tidy my blouse".

( Terrible Beauty by Diana Norman, pg. 89)

The viciousness of the police on that day left over five hundred people injured and made the front pages of both the Irish and British newspapers. Later that night Corporation Buildings were again attacked by the police in revenge for the battles of the previous day, but they were repulsed by a combination of residents and strikers. The police returned with reinforcements around 2am that night and proceeded to attack men, women and children and wreck their homes.

On the same day in Inchicore, an arrested picketer had been rescued by a crowd of strikers resulting in the police storming the local Union Hall, Emmet Hall. Again pitched battles broke out between strikers armed with sticks and stones and the police. The fighting continued into the night leaving hundreds of people injured. Thousands of police had been mobilised but eventually a detachment of the West Kent Regiment were required to restore order. Such was the outcry against the savagery of the police that the authorities were forced to set up a 'Commission into the Dublin Disturbances'. Naturally this was a whitewash and absolved the police of any blame.

The employers again upped the ante on September 3rd when the Employers Federation issued their ultimatum to their I. T. G. W. U. employees - resign from the union or loose your job. Four hundred and four employers locked out their unionised workers. Upwards of 25, 000 people were locked out, which, including their dependants, affected over 100, 000 people, a third of the population of Dublin. The working class of Dublin, who, even in times of employment had to suffer squalor and poverty, now found themselves destitute and facing starvation.