There have been a number of hellish and widespread riots in the history of Dublin, but few can compare with those of the year 1913 and the intermittent troubles in the years just before. The man who has taken the blame is Jim Larkin, and a voluminous book published just the year after by Arnold Wright has the flavour of a toady writing to please his master, such is its condemnation of Larkin, a great man who stands in the tradition of the Chartists, the orators Hunt, Tillett and other courageous left-wing dissidents who wanted to stop the exploitation of the downtrodden workers.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Dublin certainly had its fair share of what sociologists used to call the ‘underclass’. The poverty was extreme and there were serious and widespread problems of public health. Dublin witnessed a pattern of employer-union conflict which had been seen decades before in the northern cotton towns and in the London docks just twenty years earlier. The workers were from slum areas and the statistics of deprivation are staggering: in 1910 a third of the city’s population lived in what we would call slums today; the infant mortality rate was 142 per thousand births – as bad as the cholera epidemic of the 1830s in Liverpool. TB was a regular deathly visitant to family homes, and the tenement living conditions meant that there were too many people in very cramped conditions. In one category of housing, there were 1516 tenements occupied by 8295 families. A contemporary writer has a story to tell about this social context:
A Roman Catholic clergyman, the Rev. P. J. Monahan, C.C., who gave evidence, mentioned an instance in which 107 human beings occupied one tenement house, stating that there were only two water-closets in the entire building for both sexes. His figures were challenged later by the corporation officials, who represented that the inmates numbered not 107 but 95, and that there were three water-closets… But the position of the inmates is dreadful to contemplate.
In terms of the work done by people from these homes, trade unionism was entering a place where it had not existed before and where, from the point of view of the major employers, it was a concept they hated and despised. The Irish had experienced this before in a remarkable historical parallel – that of 1830s Manchester, where Irish immigrant families there for work in the factories lived in overcrowded cellars, mostly ill and diseased, while the rich mill owners lived across town in their villas.
Trade union activity shines a torch into these dark places created by class difference, greed and the relentless machine of commerce grinding on, pushing for profits, while it spits out its human fodder. Into this climate came Jim Larkin, a man dogged by controversy, too militant even for his own dockers’ union in Liverpool and later in Belfast, and he came with a credo that was meant to upset the apple-cart of the bosses: ‘The principle I state and mean to stand on is that the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre, is vested of right in the people of Ireland.’