Dr Emmet O’Connor outlines the history of the trade union and labour movement over the past century, a period marked by ruptures and repetitions, and where in Faulkner’s words, “the past is never dead, It’s not even past.”
In 1912, the president of the Irish Trades Union Congress Michael O’Lehane told its delegate conference that: “When such altered circumstances obtain, trades unionism in Ireland will, for the first time, take its natural place in the community, and I, for one, am convinced that that will be no mean place.” ‘Such altered circumstances’ meant Home Rule. O’Lehane was deliberately oblique because Congress upheld a ‘no politics’ convention.
Formally, Congress never discussed Home Rule. It was the big issue of the day and could have a huge impact on the economy and industrial relations, but it wasn’t to be mentioned. Labour in Belfast wasn’t so optimistic about Home Rule. But it was hoped that somehow the issue would be finally resolved and then we could back to normality. Partition and sectarian conflict were feared, but no one foresaw the world war, and the major constitutional changes of 1920-22.
Belfast was then at the height of its industrial prowess, and unusual in that it could offer work for men in its shipyards and engineering shops, and for women in its linen mills. We tend to take this for granted, but many shipbuilding centres in Britain had little work for women, and vice versa for textile towns. As the last of the great industrial cities to be constructed in the UK, Belfast had plenty of purpose-built housing in its signature red-brick Coronation Streets and only 1% of its population lived in slums. On the other hand, public health was poor because the city was built on sloblands, underemployment was chronic, wage rates for unskilled workers were below average, the streets were grim and functional, and there were few amenities. The splendid City Hall was described as a wedding cake at a pauper’s funeral.
Belfast was far and away the most industrialized city in Ireland but the city had a notorious reputation for sectarian violence and there had been workplace expulsions in 1857, 1864, and 1901, and during the three Home Rule crises. Belfast Trades Council (BTC) lived in constant fear of constitutional crises. The first Home Rule crisis, in 1886, forced the resignation of its secretary, Alexander Bowman, because of his support for William Gladstone, and it led BTC to distance itself from the Liberal-Labourite politics of the British Labour movement. Instead, in 1896, the BTC formed its own Labour Party when it nominated 6 candidates for the Corporation. William Walker would change that in 1903 when he persuaded the trades council to affiliate to the recently founded Labour Representation Committee, ending friendly relations with the Unionist Party. It was Walker, not James Connolly, who set Belfast Labour on a collision course with the Unionists.
The sectarian divide was not the primary political problem for Labour in Belfast. Catholics accounted for less than 25% of the city’s population in the 1901 census, and were under-represented in the skilled trades that dominated trade unionism. The predicament was the contradiction between labour with a ‘small L’ (ie employees) and Labour with a ‘big L’ (the activists who ran the unions and BTC). Whereas the former was mostly Unionist, and by extension Conservative, the latter looked to British Labour, who associated with the Liberal Party, (later the Labour Party). And the Liberals, of course, were identified with Home Rule. Arguably, there were two trade union movements in Belfast.
The British-based unions were at best indifferent and often hostile to the idea of an Irish Labour movement at this time. Most were opposed to the Irish TUC, which they regarded as a disloyal breakaway from the British TUC. One of the reasons for the formation of the ITUC in 1894 was that Irish officials felt they were getting no promotion within the British unions. William Walker told Belfast trades council, ‘It seems to be a canon of the amalgamated that ‘no Irishmen need apply’.
Walker wanted to be an MP. He really, really wanted to be an MP, and targeted Belfast North, then the least sectarian part of the city. He was himself strongly pro-Union and hoped he could distance Labour from Home Rule (HR), but the Unionists wouldn’t let him off the hook. A vote for Labour, they insisted, was a vote for Home Rule. And once the Liberals were returned to power in 1906, HR was back in the realm of possibility and affiliations to BTC began to decline. Things worsened when the House of Lords rejected the Liberal government’s ‘People’s Budget’ in 1909, as HR and social reform became entangled. The general elections of 1910 returned a minority Liberal government dependent on the support of 85 Irish and 40 Labour MPs. In return, the Irish demanded a HR bill and the end of the House of Lords’ veto on legislation. For Belfast Labour, this was a perfect storm.
In practice, British Labour was a HR party. As most saw it, if you were a Labourite you were a democrat, and if you were a democrat, you had to support HR. Two factors discouraged Labour from sympathising with the Unionists. 1) they were allied to the Tories, and 2) their primary argument was that HR would be Rome rule, and a key aim of the left was to get religion out of politics, so it was not acceptable to support the division of Ireland along religious line. Far from being uniquely prophetic, Connolly was typical of the left of the time. What he was saying was the same as Ramsay MacDonald in Westminster: pass the HR bill as quickly as possible and get on with it. Partition would institutionalise sectarianism, so almost any alternative was preferable.
What Connolly wrote on Ulster was also conditioned by the fact that he was an activist, in the thick of a political battle over partition: the outcome of which would shape the future of the labour movement in Ireland for decades. Thus, in his famous controversy with William Walker in 1911, the one thing that he and Walker agreed on was that sectarian violence was a thing of the past in Belfast. Connolly wanted to believe that Unionists wouldn’t fight against HR. Walker wanted to
believe that his good work for Labour politics had made it impossible.
By 1912, BTC had three discernible factions. On one side was a group of Connollyites, who were looking forward to playing their part in the new HR Ireland. On the other were conservatives who were willing to break with the ITUC over the HR issue. In the middle, was a fraying band of Walkerites, against HR and against partition, hoping to put off a decision on the constitutional question until the last minute. The Walkerites were still the key tendency and they tried to avoid friction with Ulster Unionism. The shipyard expulsions of 1912, for example, were not mentioned in the trades council’s annual report, for fear of causing offence.
Labour politics died in Belfast during the Third HR crisis, but was re-born in 1918, thanks to the impact of the world war. That period from the summer of 1918 to the summer of 1920 were Belfast’s two red years, marked by the massive engineering strike of January and February 1919 and the election of 13 Labour councillors to the Corporation in Jan 1920. Belfast was of course reflecting the wider shift to the left in Europe and in Britain, until this post-war radicalism came to a shuddering halt with the shipyard expulsions of 1920. Relations between Labour and Unionism were at their lowest ebb, but all changed with partition.
Before 1920, partition had seemed radical and outrageous. After 1921, getting rid of it seemed equally radical and unlikely. Harry Midgely is a good example of the evolution in thinking in the NILP. In 1921 he contested the first elections for the NI parliament as a Connollyite. In the 1920s and 30s, his thinking gradually shifted in favour of accepting NI. In the 1940s he joined the Unionist Party and he ended up joining the Orange Order. By the 1940s, the NILP had established formal links with the British LP and in 1949 it came out officially in favour of the Union.
The ITUC had scarcely any meaningful role in NI up to 1944. The was partly because the Unionist government wanted to deal with Labour only through the Ulster Unionist Labour Association, which was chaired by J.M. Andrews, who was also the Minister of Labour from 1921 to 1937. But it also reflected the lack of engagement of trade unionists in NI with Congress. Only when the ITGWU pushed for an Irish-based movement in the 1930s did the amalgamateds push back by affiliating their Northern members in large numbers. The big increase in union membership during WW2 led to criticism of Congress’s silence on Northern affairs from Labour maverick Jack Beattie. The outcome was the NI Committee, which was presented to Congress jointly by the ITGWU and the ATGWU. Both unions were at daggers drawn during these years, but one thing they agreed on was that they didn’t want a debate on the NIC.
Then Stormont refused to recognise the NIC on the ground that its headquarters was in a foreign country. It was pointed out that the Church of Ireland also had its HQ in a foreign country, but Stormont didn’t think that was very funny. The dispute was further complicated by the split in Congress in 1945 when Irish unions formed the breakaway CIU. Stormont wanted the NIC to form a so-called Ulster TUC, but the great bulk of trade unionists united behind the NIC and rejected the Ulster against Stormont. The ITUC and the CIU re-united as the ICTU in 1959. At last, in 1963, anticipating the return of a Labour government in London and pressure to deal with the NIC, Stormont granted recognition.
And they all lived happily ever after…
NOTE: As part of ICTU’s contribution to the Decade of Centenaries, it is co-hosting with Ulster University, Belfast Trades Council and the Messines Fellowship a conference on Labour and the Foundation and Development of Northern Ireland. The conference is on Saturday 5 October at the MAC Belfast.
The conference will feature leading historians Emmet O’Connor, Henry Patterson, Theresa Moriarty, Christopher Loughlin and Eliza McKee, with reflections of the present state of the trade union movement from ICTU’s Owen Reidy and the TUC’s Frances O’Grady. The event has been organised by the distinguished labour historian Padraig Yeates.
Details are HERE and admission is free.
This is a guest slot to give a platform for new writers either as a one off, or a prelude to becoming part of the regular Slugger team.
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