Big Jim Larkin was born on 28 January 1874 at 41 Combermere Street, in an Irish Catholic working-class enclave near the south-end docks in Liverpool. Both his parents came of tenant farmer stock from around Newry, and Jim would claim that his father and uncles had been Fenians. The second of six children, he grew … Read more
Speaking at the golden jubilee meeting of the Workers’ Union of Ireland (WUI) in September 1974, historian F.X. Martin supported the union’s attempt to have a monument erected on Dublin’s O’Connell Street in memory of James Larkin, the WUI’s inaugural general secretary from 1924 to 1947: ‘This burly, brass-throated orator with the magnificent frame which … Read more
In the short term, the Lockout was a pyrrhic victory for the employers. They did not abandon their central demand, the ban on Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) members, but only its inspirer, Murphy, and a few others enforced it. The union was weaker but it survived. Its example inspired workers to organise … Read more
Tourists are often invited, like Doubting Thomas, to thrust their fingers into the bullet holes that mark the sides of the General Post Office. Few visitors to the National Archives pause to run their hands along the words etched into the granite of the wall that runs along Bishop Street. Yet the history of Jacob’s … Read more
Born in 1883, the daughter of a Dublin grocer, Helena Molony experienced an unhappy, if comfortable, childhood; orphaned in early life, she did not get on with her stepmother. As in many republican autobiographical narratives, she could identify a moment of political awakening: ‘I was a young girl dreaming about Ireland when I saw and … Read more