The man who became the Irish labour movement incarnate

JAMES LARKIN was a remarkable man. On the day he died, Sean O'Casey wrote: "It is hard to believe that this great man is dead, for all thoughts and all activities surged in the soul of this labour leader. He was far and away above the orthodox labour leader, for he combined within himself the imagination of the artist, with the fire and determination of a leader of a downtrodden class."

Larkin was born in the slums of Liverpool in 1874. He was raised in poverty, received only a few years of formal schooling, was thrown on a brutal labour market, and struggled to keep his family from sinking into a more abject poverty. He stowed away to escape unemployment and find adventure, and then returned to Liverpool at the age of 20 to take his place among that vast army of casuals who prowled the docks in search of a day's work.

He finally found regular work as a docker, and was soon promoted to a dock foreman. When his men went out on strike in the summer of 1905 he went with them and became their leader. The strike was lost, but he was asked to become a full time organiser for the men's union, the National Union of Dock Labourers. He quickly organised the Scottish ports, and was then assigned the more difficult task of reorganising the Irish ports.

Soon after his arrival in Ireland in January 1907, Larkin was involved in a series of strikes in Belfast, Cork, and Dublin, which the executive of the national union was reluctant to support. He then broke with the national union and founded the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union at the end of 1908. The Transport Union, after a shaky start, rapidly gained in numbers and strength. By 1913 it was the largest and most militant union in Ireland.

In the great Dublin strike and lock out of 1913, Larkin challenged the employing classes in the persons of William Martin Murphy and his Employers Federation. The epic struggle, which lasted some six months and involved 20,000 workers and their 80,000 dependants, resulted in a crushing defeat for the workers, in spite of massive support from the British Labour movement. The Transport Union was decimated in numbers and wrecked financially.

IN early 1914 Larkin decided to undertake a speaking tour in the US to raise the necessary funds build his union. By the time he was able to sail for America in late October 1914, however, the first World War had broken out, and it would be nearly nine years before Larkin was to return to Ireland. While in the US, Larkin was by turns a lecturer, a union organiser, an Irish propagandist, a socialist, an agitator, a founder of the American Communist Party, and finally a martyred" political prisoner who served nearly three years in prison.

Two overriding themes, however, gave his US career some coherence. The first was his implacable opposition to the first World War, and the second was his enthusiastic acceptance of the Russian revolution in November 1917. Both these stands, needless to say, were very unpopular, and when the celebrated "red scare" of 1919 followed hard on the heels of the end of the war, Larkin was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a very stiff term in prison. He was eventually pardoned in early 1923 in the interests of free speech and shortly after deported to Ireland.

Within a month of his arrival a fierce struggle for power broke out in the Transport Union, which was soon extended to the whole Irish labour movement, and Larkin was at the centre of it. Larkin was suspended as general secretary of the Transport Union, and finally expelled. He then approved the founding of the Workers' Union of Ireland, but was only able to carry a remnant of the Transport Union, mainly based in Dublin, with him.

With the advent of the Great Depression in 1929, Larkin's power and influence on both the trade union and political sides of the labour movement were further impaired, and the man who had long been seen as the Irish labour movement incarnate now was only a part fit.

When Larkin first arrived in Dublin in 1907 he was shocked at the degradation of human life in the capital city of Ireland. Some 26,000 families, or nearly a third of the people of Dublin, lived in 5,000 decayed tenements. Death, disease, immorality, insanity, crime, drunkenness, unemployment, low wages, and high rents formed an integral part of Dublin slum life. By founding the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, Larkin was able to do something about raising the workers' wages, shortening their hours, and improving their working conditions.

But Larkin attempted to make his Transport Union something more than an instrument for the material advancement of the workers. He made it a vehicle for their social and cultural improvement as well. When the Transport Union acquired Liberty Hall as its headquarters in early 1912, the old hotel was transformed into a centre for the social and cultural activities of the union.

The crowning achievement, however, of Larkin's imaginative social and cultural efforts was his rental of a house and three acres in Clontarf as a recreation centre for the union members and their families.

THESE were the reasons why Larkin was the idol or the Dublin working classes. He gave them more of his time, his energy, and himself than anyone had ever given them before. He gave them a social life besides the public house and the tenement stoop or window. And he brought a measure of hope and happiness into their narrow lives by providing them with new outlets for their neglected humanity. The achievement was modest because the resources were slender, but a great deal was done with very little where nothing had been done before.

In the last analysis, however, Larkin's ascendancy over the Dublin workers was rooted in his remarkable ability to identify with them. He was at one and the same time only one of them and yet something more than each.

In May 1911, Larkin increased both his presence and his influence in Dublin with the launching of Irish Worker and People's Advocate. This novel production was and remains unique in the history of working class journalism. Week after week, Larkin attacked with a monumental perseverance and determination the sweating, exploiting employers and the corrupt, cynical politicians, who were, in his view, responsible for the reprehensible social condition of Dublin.

He gave no quarter and expected none as he vilified any and all, high and low, who had the misfortune to come under the notice of his pen.

Still, even while exposing sordid tales of mischief, misery, jobbery and injustice, Larkin also never failed to call for something more for the workers. "We are going to rouse the working classes out of their slough of despond... out of the mire of poverty and misery - and lift them to a place higher. If it is good for the employers to have clean clothing and good food and books and music, and pictures, so it is good that the people should have these things also - and that is the claim we are making today."

It was in that claim for social equality, in fact, that the true greatness of James Larkin is really rooted. It was this demand for social justice for the working classes that not only gave real meaning to his life as an agitator and his work as a trade union leader, but which was also his inestimable gift to the class from which he had sprung.

As an agitator he raised the social and political consciousness of the Irish working classes by preaching the gospel of divine discontent and prophesying for them a brave new world. As a trade union leader he mobilised the power inherent in their aggregate numbers by organising them for the winning of that brave new world.

Without his socialist faith, however, Larkin could never have convinced the Irish working classes of their real worth as human beings, and without that raised consciousness, they could never have been persuaded to make their world a less terrible place for their posterity.

Dr Emmet Larkin, Professor of British and Irish History at the University of Chicago, is the author of an acclaimed biography of James Larkin, to whom he is not related.