On the last Sunday in August 1913 James Nolan and John Byrne were batoned to death in the streete of Dublin by members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. A further four hundred working people were injured as the police broke up a meeting addressed by Jim Larkin. Later Michael Byrne, an IT & GWU secretary, was tortured to death in a police cell; young Alice Brady while walking home with her strike allowance of food was shot dowrt in cold blood by a scab: drunken police broke into homes in the slums of Corporation Strect bludgeoning the women and children of strilers. hritalities were commonly inflicted then, as today, on the Irish working class in struggle.
The Bogside and Belfast people have recently experienced the ravages of drunken mobs of police •and trigger happy Specials, while in Dublin workers been clubbed into the ground. Antich socialists should remember the strike breaking role of our own TUC and Labour leadership in Ireland in 1913. It will then be not so difficult to understand the deafening silence among the ranks of the labour aristocrats today when the most exploited section of workers in the British Isles face the prospect of an even bloodier repression than did the Dublin men and women in 1913:
"he srich general strike of 1913 was a decisive landmark in Irish history. The employers were out to break the Irish Transport and General Workers Union that had practised a unionism which went radically beyond the conservative form of new unionism in Britain. From 1911 the IT & GWU under Larkin's leadership had used the sympathetic strike in every industrial dispute in which their fellow unionists were involved and had won a whole series of victories for other unions and immeasurably strengthened the fighting strength of the working class movement. The employers, led by William Murphy the owner of the Dublin Tramways and of three powerful newspapers, amanised to fight the Irish TGWU. They heean in.
workers. By September 400 firms had behind Murphy and demanded the signing of the notorious document which forbade membership of the IT & GWU, as a condition of employment. Rather than sign it, 30,000 workers marched out from their lactories in soldarity with the I & GWU comrades.
This brave resistance of the Irish workers was met by the lull force ol the police and military on the streets Baton-charges, Killings. savage orison sentences denit ont by magistrates who were shareholders in Murphy's Tramway company; and repression of meetings and free speech. But all over Document. Cholly tote in teter of Glorious Dublin they chose to fight rather than Dublin', "Baton charges, prison cells, untimely death and acute starvation - all were faced without a murmur, and in face of them all, the brave Dublin workers never lost faith in their ultimate triumph, never doubted but that their organisation would emerge victorious from the struggle. This is the great fact that many of our critics amongst the British labour leaders seem to lose sight of. The Dablin fight is more than a trade union. fight; it is a great class struggle, and recognised as such by all sides. We in Ireland feel that to doubt our victory would be to lose faith in the destiny of our class".
The murder of Byrne and Nolan on 31st August made Dublin the centre of international labour struggle. The response of British workers in support of