his
is the literal truth.

CHAPTER XXII

LABOUR BECOMES A POWER IN IRISH LIFE

In the play and interplay of movements and events at this time in
Ireland we cannot leave out of account the Labour Movement--that is,
the official Trade Union organisation as distinct from the Labourers'
Association. Hitherto it had mainly concerned itself with industrial
and social questions and had not made politics or nationalism an
object of direct activity. The workers had their politics, so to
speak, apart from their Trade Unions, and the toilers from Belfast
were able to meet the moilers from Cork for the consideration of their
common programme and common lot without infringing on the vexed issue
of Home Rule, on which they held widely divergent views--often enough
without understanding the reason why. They were a good deal concerned
about municipal government and how many men they were able to return
to the Dublin, Belfast and Cork corporations, but they had not counted
highly and, indeed, scarcely at all in the scheme of national affairs.
The Parliamentarians were too strong for them. Yet it was the workers
who always provided the soundest leaders of nationality and its most
incorruptible and self-sacrificing body-guard. The thinkers expressed
the ideals of Irish nationhood; they lived them and were even prepared
to suffer for them. But the time had come when this parochialism of
labour in Ireland was to end. To the enthusiasm and impetuous force of
James Larkin and the fine brain of James Connolly Irish labour owes
most for its awakening. The rise of Larkin was almost meteoric. He was
one day organising the workers of Cork into a Transport Workers Union;
almost the next he was marshalling a strike in Dublin, which made him
an international democratic figure of extraordinary power. He was a
man of amazing personality, who exercised a compelling influence over
the workers. He shook them out of their deadly stupor, lectured them
in a manner that they were not accustomed to, brow-beat them and,
though he made them suffer in body over the weary months of the
strike, he infused a spirit into them they had not known before. He
made the world ring with the shame of Dublin's slums and he did much
to make men of those who were little better than dumb-driven animals.
He united the Capitalists of Ireland against him in a powerful
organisation, and though they broke his strike they did