In Dublin, 61 years ago, March 1947, an immense crowd of people, 200,000 of them, many of the men bare-headed in freakishly Arctic weather, marched behind the coffin of Jim Larkin. Larkin was the founder of the modern Irish labour movement. He is the greatest figure in Irish labour history. James Connolly, Larkin's partner between 1910 and 1914, was far more clever and far better educated, but it was Larkin who touched the workers of the slums with the holy fire of righteous indignation, and ignited them in revolt.
Larkin was a union organiser in Liverpool, Belfast, Dublin and in the USA — where he was jailed in the aftermath of World War One. He was a founder of the US Communist Party and a — none too competent — leader of an Irish communist party in the '20s. A man of contradictions, he was both a practising Catholic and a member of the Executive of the Communist International! He never abandoned revolutionary socialism. Dublin's workers elected him to the Dail in 1944.
The magnificent quality of Larkin and of Larkin's work is best seen in the heroism which the workers he inspired and organised displayed in such abundance during Dublin's Labour War of 1913-14. Let us look at Larkin — and Connolly, and the workers they led — in action. We will see in them what working-class solidarity is and what it can achieve. Larkin's great message of labour solidarity has as much meaning — and urgency — for British workers today as it had in Dublin before the First World War.
In the beginning of 1916, when the British army began to grow desperate for recruits for the imperialist slaughter-house in France, it plastered Dublin with posters conveying the following encouragement: "The trenches in France are healthier than the slums of Dublin"!
The posters were right. Dublin had the highest general death rate of any city in Europe, including Russia. Moscow: 26.3 per 1,000, Calcutta: 27 per 1,000, Dublin: 27.6 per 1,000. The death rate for working class children was 27.7 per 1,000.
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