The Irish Labour History Society: An Outline History (original) (raw)

2010, Labour History Review

By European standards, Ireland was slow to produce a labour history society.1 This was certainly not due to a want of a rich antiquity, popular interest, class consciousness, or vigour in Irish trade unionism. The first Irish labour history was stitched into trade union banners and paraded in magnificent displays of popular mobilization from the 1830s onwards. Some unions appropriated antiquity, portraying themselves as descendants of a medieval trade guild, complete with ancient mottoes and heraldic coats of arms, the better to assert a claim to legal and public acceptance. Other unions, not so fortunate in their lineage, addressed the wider politics of the working class. By the 1830s, the prosperity of the late eighteenth century was acquiring an ever more rosy hue, and the blame for subsequent economic decline was pinned firmly on the Act of Union with Britain in 1800. Through depictions of the glories and prosperity of Erin before 1800, union banners carried an obvious history lesson.2 The first wave of written labour history, pioneered largely by socialists or 'social improvers', was reflected in Ireland in a radical pamphleteering tradition, of which the great example is James Connolly's work, especially his Labour in Irish History (1910).3 The age of Connolly and 'Big Jim' Larkin saw the publication of two contemporary histories, on the 1913 lockout and the Citizen Army, as well as the first attempt at a general survey of the movement's past.4 There was even, mirabile dictu, an academic study of labour.5 Another book on labour from an Irish academic would not appear until 1977!