Dublin lock-out

The Dublin lock-out was a major industrial dispute between approximately 20,000 workers and 300 employers that took place in Dublin, Ireland. The dispute, lasting from 26 August 1913 to 18 January 1914, is often viewed as the most severe and significant industrial dispute in Irish history. Central to the dispute was the workers' right to unionise. Tenement#Dublin and History of Dublin#Early 20th century Many of Dublin's workers lived in terrible conditions in tenements. For example, over 830 people lived in just 15 houses in Henrietta Street's Georgian tenements. At 10 Henrietta Street, the Irish Sisters of Charity ran a Magdalene laundry that was inhabited by more than 50 single women. An estimated four million pledges were taken in pawnbrokers every year. The infant mortality rate among the poor was 142 per 1,000 births, extraordinarily high for a European city. The situation was made considerably worse by the high rate of disease in the slums, which was worsened by the lack of health care and cramped living conditions. The most prevalent disease in the Dublin slums at the time was tuberculosis (TB), which spread through tenements very quickly and caused many deaths in the poor. A report, published in 1912, found that TB-related deaths in Ireland were 50% higher than in England or Scotland. The vast majority of TB-related deaths in Ireland occurred among the poorer classes. The report updated a 1903 study by Dr John Lumsden. Poverty was perpetuated in Dublin by the lack of work for unskilled workers, who did not have any form of representation before trade unions were founded. The unskilled workers often had to compete with one another for work every day, with the job generally going to whoever agreed to work for the lowest wages. James Larkin, the main protagonist on the side of the workers in the dispute, was a docker in Liverpool and a union organiser. In 1907, he was sent to Belfast as a local organiser of the British-based National Union of Dock Labourers (NUDL). In Belfast, Larkin organised a strike of dock and transport workers.

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Related concepts (11)

Irish revolutionary period

The revolutionary period in Irish history was the period in the 1910s and early 1920s when Irish nationalist opinion shifted from the Home Rule-supporting Irish Parliamentary Party to the republican Sinn Féin movement. There were several waves of civil unrest linked to Ulster loyalism, trade unionism, and physical force republicanism, leading to the Irish War of Independence, the creation of the Irish Free State, the Partition of Ireland, and the Irish Civil War.

Dublin lock-out

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