Bloody Sunday of 1913

Sir, – May I address some assertions made by Kevin McCarthy in Tuesday’s edition (September 12th) in response to Jonathan Kelly’s letter on September 7th on Ireland’s first Bloody Sunday of the 20th century, August 31st, 1913. As both point out, Bloody Sunday had nothing to do with more traditional divisions within Irish society based on ethnographic violence.

It marked a major escalation in the class war that erupted between Dublin’s mainly Protestant and unionist employers, led by William Martin Murphy, a devoutly Catholic nationalist businessman and the city’s workers, who were overwhelmingly Catholic and nationalist in sentiment, led by Jim Larkin, a Liverpool-Irish syndicalist.

For the record, over 300 members of the DMP and 70 members of the RIC were involved in the baton charge in O’Connell Street on Bloody Sunday. Somewhere between 300 and 600 civilians were casualties.

There were also significant police casualties during the Lockout riots, but there is no breakdown for Bloody Sunday itself.

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Most civilians injured were a mixture of day trippers and church goers.

The vast majority of trade unionists in the city had gone to Croydon Park in Marino to attend a rally called by the Trades Council in an effort to de-escalate the violence that had erupted.

There was no Irish Transport and General Workers Union official called Michael Byrne who died after being tortured in a police cell in Dun Laoghaire.

There was a local branch secretary called John Byrne, who was arrested and subsequently transferred to hospital where he died of pneumonia.

At Byrne’s funeral, James Connolly said that Byrne had gone on hunger and thirst strike in protest at his arrest and subsequently collapsed.

Alicia Brady was not shot dead by a strike breaker but was hit in the hand by a ricochet from a bullet.

She died of tetanus because she could not afford to have her wound treated.

None of these things should have happened or be forgotten. Nor should we let mythology distract us from the fact that workers are still denied a statutory right to collective bargaining in the democratic Irish State they helped create.

Anyone interested should attend the International Labour History Conference in Dublin from September 14th to 17th. – Yours, etc,

PADRAIG YEATES,

Portmarnock,

Dublin 13.