Troubled Dublin

My plea last week was for a recognition of the necessity for a national labour policy, designed to meet our special needs, as no doubt the methods of dealing with labour troubles in Denmark, Norway or Servia to which you refer meet their individual circumstances. A series of articles in ‘Sinn Féin’ dealing with the labour question in such countries as offer some parallel to Ireland in size, population, avocations or temperament would leave us all under an additional debt of gratitude to you, and perhaps help us at least to see a way out of the wretched entanglements in which we are at present involved to the detriment of all and the misery of many. Foreign rule in this as in all our troubles is the primary cause, and I with the minority in Ireland who are Nationalists would say ‘Then remove the primary cause,’ but we must face the fact that the enemy is firmly entrenched and has the tacit support of a majority of the Irish people, and the work of dislodging him will certainly be one of years and may be of generations. A national government would no doubt be able to hold the beam straight between capital and labour, but no national government is in being. We are in close proximity to England, we are mostly English speakers, the English popular press is at our doors, English problems are discussed as if they were our own, English industrial methods are in force in all our big businesses. Our working people are ill-paid, ill-fed, scandalously housed and in many cases overworked. The national physique from these causes is rapidly deteriorating and every year that we permit them to exist is laying up a legacy of ill for the future of the nation. It is obvious from the general conditions under which the workers live that the sense of justice of the employers is not to be relied on, nor is the public conscience an effective buffer between them and wrong. What, then, is left but organisation and combination for the enforcement of their claim to a living wage and fair conditions of existence? At least, what else is so obvious and so feasible? Statecraft and knowledge of how things are managed in other countries might suggest alternatives, but so far as the man in the street is concerned Trades Unionism of a kind to be decided on by the workers themselves is the only choice. This seems to be the point at issue in the present struggle. One employer, who with callous inhumanity boasts that he possesses the power to starve the men into submission, took the initiative and locked out a number of employees variously stated at sixty and two hundred, for exercising the right which is recognised as legal and must, I think, be regarded as moral, to join a Trades Union of their own choosing. There is a principle at stake there which must be fought for by the working classes if they are not to become serfs. The logic of which we have had so many specimens in the Dublin daily press for the past couple of weeks, that justifies an Employers’ Federation and execrates a Union of employees whose necessities are so much greater and more personal is certainly lopsided.

Boycotting is a weapon whose efficacy was tested in the Land War. No doubt it was regarded in some quarters as a very immoral and wicked one, but the conscience of the nation as a whole accepted it, and it seems inconsistent for the people who in retrospect approve of it to be squeamish over its present-day application. I have always held the personal view that the energy used up in the land agitation should have been applied to purely national ends, i.e., to the dislodging of the ancient enemy bag and baggage, rather than to the buying out of a section of his garrison, but one is faced by the problem. Would the same amount of energy have been generated in a struggle for what to many would seem an abstract principle, appealing to the highest and most altruistic sentiments of the few rather than to the self-interest of the many? It is generally contended that land settlement was a necessary preliminary to higher things. Parnell’s hesitation to join forces with the land agitators and his declaration that he would never have set out on the land campaign except as a means to an end illustrate the difficulty of coming to a decision to such a question. He, the man par excellence of his generation found it well to clear the decks by getting a social question out of the way. The problem of to-day is somewhat akin. Can the labour unrest be turned into national channels, and, on the other hand, can the condition of the labourer be improved by the Irish people themselves. This will not be achieved by oddly standing aloof, and letting him fight a handicapped battle against Irish capitalists backed by all the resources of the English Government in the shape of armed men. People struggling for bare existence, whose educational equipment is a blend of the teaching of the ‘National’ school and of the slum, menaced by starvation, cowed by a sense of inferiority, and gloated over by those who boast of their own three meals a day, cannot be blamed for listening to anyone who gives them fair words. If they join English unions, amalgamated with English parties, and become further Anglicised, the loss is Ireland’s. What are we to do, not only in the interests of this hapless section of our people, but in the paramount interests of the nation, which is greater than any of its sections?