what if the 1916 leaders had not been executed?

Jolly Red Giant

CDfm wrote: »

There may be complex issues but essentially it is a choice , IMHO, if you look at philosophically based management theories like McGregors people are dupes for every charlatan and demagogue.

http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/history/xy.html

Ordinary working class people have no real 'choice' in a capitalist society - the entire force of the state, the capitalist media, the education system, the history etc. all come to bare on every political situation that develops in the North and in every society. People are forced into a corner by circumstances and take the only route that they deem practical. In one situation that can be engaging in sectarianism - in other circumstances in exactly the same situation they can take a different course because that is the one that is the most practical at the time. Trying to fit 'management theories' into the political strife that is Northern Ireland is a waste of time.

CDfm wrote: »

Take it a notch further when the Labour Party was in power in the UK in the 60's they did damn all to support the NI Prime Minister Terrence O'Neill tackle the issues.

O'Neill was all talk and little action - he wasn't trying to tackle issues he was maneuvering to maintain Unionist hegemony.

CDfm wrote: »

Where was the Labour Movement ? It was being sectarian and tribal.

Evidence for this assertion please

CDfm wrote: »

There are a lot of unexplained events in Irish History of the War of Independence and there were marxist factions and freedom fighters active in Ireland. Now, I am not going the Eoghan Harris route but how do we know what they did ?

How do we know what they did? - because the evidence exists - it has been buried for 80 years but it is there and fortunately there are now historians unwilling to accept the normal revisionist / anti-revisionist dictat of Irish history and are actually carrying out historical research that is unearthing a completely different story than the one that has been peddled since the foundation of the state - and I am not just talking about the 1916-1922 period but right back to the late eighteenth century. There are not the normally accepted two versions of Irish history - a history that is not really two versions but two sides of one coin - there is a third historiography that needs to be conducted - the history of the oppressed classes on this island.

CDfm

I used McGregor as a crossover sociological/philosophy based theory that people might be familiar with.

We both agree that sectarianism is wrong, though we disagree on whether there is a choice.

are not the normally accepted two versions of Irish history - a history that is not really two versions but two sides of one coin - there is a third historiography that needs to be conducted - the history of the oppressed classes on this island.

I agree that the organisations are overlooked and the level of emigration alone tells us that opportunities were extremely limited for people along the lines that antropologists call the power of the limited good(commodity) and it wasn't a great place to be.

There were Marxists involved in the WOI to with aspirations and we do not know what they did or were looking for.

I am interested in this.

Jolly Red Giant

CDfm wrote: »

There were Marxists involved in the WOI to with aspirations and we do not know what they did or were looking for.

I am interested in this.

Actually we do - for example a crowd of 15,000 attended a Mayday demonstration in Limerick in 1918. The crowd unanimously passed a motion containing a 10 point plan for the emancipation of the working class and pledging solidarity with the workers revolution in Russia. The motion was drafted by John (Sean) Dowling, a Marxist industrial organiser for the ITGWU.

CDfm

Jolly Red Giant wrote: »

Actually we do -............

Politically and as part of the labour movement they were popular with some.

Now, as part of the "military" effort in the WOI ,who have we got and what was there strenght and location's.

It may not be a bad thing to reiterate the support at the ballot box too, of course, it does not follow that ITGWU support transferred to the Ballot box.

I am fascinated that we don't have any idea of the "gene pool" of militants that comprised the Irish left .

Jolly Red Giant

CDfm wrote: »

Politically and as part of the labour movement they were popular with some.

Marxist played a prominet role in the Irish labour movement during this period - particularly in the ITGWU. They had widespread support among working class people and drew the scorn of the more conservative layers mainly organised in the craft unions.

CDfm wrote: »

Now, as part of the "military" effort in the WOI ,who have we got and what was there strenght and location's.

With the exception of Peadar O'Donnell there was practically zero cross-over between Marxists and the IRA. The Marxists focussed on building the trade union movement and using the methods of class struggle rather than the methods of nationalism.

CDfm wrote: »

It may not be a bad thing to reiterate the support at the ballot box too, of course, it does not follow that ITGWU support transferred to the Ballot box.

In January 1920 Labour won just under 400 seats compared to Sinn Fein's 550. In the middle of the War of Independence Labour was threatening to displace Sinn Fein in electoral terms. In many areas SF done deals with Labour in order not to risk losing out in a vote. In other areas, like Limerick, the ILPTUC leaders sabotaged the establishment of local LP branches out of fear that the Marxists would gain control of these branches. However, the main focus of the Marxists during this period was the building of the trade unions. The main driving philosophy of Marxism in Ireland at the time was syndicalism that focussed almost exclusively on trade union building while pretty much ignoring electoral politics. If this had not been the case the LP vote in 1920 would have been higher than it was.

CDfm wrote: »

I am fascinated that we don't have any idea of the "gene pool" of militants that comprised the Irish left .

Just like now - these was no 'gene pool' of militants - practically every member of a trade union (and particularly the ITGWU) was a militant. I can list off a couple of dozen prominent trade union activists - all Marxists from Limerick alone without going to my research notes. Politically Marxists were organised in the Revolutionary Socialist Party which split from the SPI a week after the sell-out of the Limerick Soviet in May 1919. But again the main focus of Marxists was not in building the RSP - but in building the trade unions. If they had adopted a different approach (i.e. the approach of Lenin to party building) then the outcoem of this period could ahve been different.

CDfm

The ITGWU has a military wing the Irish Citizen Army and was involved in 1916.

On 19 November, 1913 Larkin and James Connolly established the Irish Citizen Army as a force to protect
workers from the excesses of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. It had a membership of about 350, the majority
being members of unions. The force had a distinctive uniform and trained openly; some arms were secretly
acquired and held at the ITGWU headquarters at Liberty Hall, near the Custom House. Following the
capitulation of the workers and Larkin’s departure for the United States early in 1914, the ICA remained in
existence. Connolly acted as commandant; at a later stage Michael Mallin, who led the force in the 1916 Rising,
became chief of staff.

http://www.nli.ie/1916/pdf/3.3.2.pdf

Jolly Red Giant

CDfm wrote: »

The ITGWU has a military wing the Irish Citizen Army and was involved in 1916.

The Citizens Army was a workers defence force - and you really will have to explain the point you are trying to make.

CDfm

Jolly Red Giant wrote: »

The Citizens Army was a workers defence force - and you really will have to explain the point you are trying to make.

Well JC used them as a revolutionary army in 1916 and planned to go ahead with the rising with or without the Irish Volunteers.

And, "first blood" in Easter 1916 goes too Sean Connolly of the Irish Citizen Army.

Jolly Red Giant

CDfm wrote: »

Well JC used them as a revolutionary army in 1916 and planned to go ahead with the rising with or without the Irish Volunteers.

And, "first blood" in Easter 1916 goes too Sean Connolly of the Irish Citizen Army.

And the point you are trying to make is ????

CDfm

Jolly Red Giant wrote: »

And the point you are trying to make is ????

That this indicates that the ITGWU & the ICA were part of (or at least its members were) & parcel of the rising and probably the WOI .

And, that the Labour Movement therefore was not inherently pacifist.

We do know that they weren't exclusively Labour Party either .

I am trying to get to grips with the level of involvement and where they fit. Personally, I came across a few items years back in family history that wouldn't fit into the accepted history.

The whole thing seems to be blurred and I would like to know more.

Qualitymark

It seems to me that the working classes and the left were the biggest loser in the Civil War that followed on the War of Independence. Liberal leftists like Thomas MacDonagh and hard leftists like James Connolly were among the leaders of the Rising; by the end of the Civil War it was almost impossible for any leftist or real nationalist to get a job, and they emigrated in vast numbers or sank into poverty.

I am *astonished* at the claim that there was not great class division in Ireland at the time of the Rising. There were three major classes: Protestant ascendancy and their runners; right-wing Catholics of the William Martin Murphy class (Fine Gael are their inheritors); and a vastly impoverished working and workless class.



But coming back to the first question: what would have happened if the leaders had not been executed. It's an interesting question; I don't know that it would have made such a huge difference. The mass arrests of "suspects" who were sent to jails and internment camps where they were politicised by the genuine revolutionaries among them, who ran universities of Irish culture and revolutionary methods, probably had more to do with the War of Independence than the executions of the leaders.

As for how England was changed after the Great War... well, part of that came from the fact that their upper classes were slaughtered en masse; another part came from the series of revolutions sparked off by the Rising, which ended with the British Empire dismantled.

Jolly Red Giant

CDfm wrote: »

That this indicates that the ITGWU & the ICA were part of (or at least its members were) & parcel of the rising and probably the WOI .

No it doesn't -

To start with, by 1916 the ITGWU membership was less than 5,000 mainly organised in two Dublin branches. By 1920 the membership of the ITGWU was well in excess of 100,000.

Secondly - there is zero evidence of the active involvement of the ITGWU or the ICA in military activity during the War of Independence.

CDfm wrote: »

And, that the Labour Movement therefore was not inherently pacifist.

I never claimed that the labour movement were inherently pacifist - they were engaged in a class war - not a nationalist war. There are numerous examples of trade union activists carrying weapons - but their use was defensive and mainly for defence against employers and their goons, the Farmers Freedom Force and the IRA. There are records of pitched battles between striking workers and the RIC attempting to break strikes - but they were more akin to riots than military encounters and rarely involved guns.

CDfm wrote: »

We do know that they weren't exclusively Labour Party either .

The evidence is contrary - the LP vote in 1920 was substantially greater than trade union membership at the time. While not all TU members were LP voters (some did vote SF) the LP could not have achieved the vote it did without a significant majority of trade union members voting for them.

CDfm wrote: »

I am trying to get to grips with the level of involvement and where they fit. Personally, I came across a few items years back in family history that wouldn't fit into the accepted history.

It doesn't fit into the accepted history because it has been completely written out of the accepted history. A major work of research has to be done on the labour movement during this period and over a more prolonged period. The work of Emmet O'Connor, Conor Kostick and others barely scratches the surface and when you go deeper even their work raises some red flags (no pun intended) as to its accuracy. I have been researching labour history for several years and the more research I conduct the more I find that the 'accepted' history is closer to propaganda rather than actual events etc. Furthermore there are a growing number of researchers looking into the history of labour and the Irish working class and peasantry from the creation of a working class in the late eighteenth century. I am sure this research will result in some very interesting published work over the next period.

CDfm wrote: »

The whole thing seems to be blurred and I would like to know more.

A lot of stuff is out there if you search for it. A lot of stuff that demonstrates that the Irish business, merchant and farming class were more brutal in their treatment of the Irish working classes and peasantry than the landlords ever treated the Irish - some examples from just one source -

http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/servant%20boys%20and%20girls.pdf

http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/Media,3937,en.pdf

http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/Media,3952,en.pdf

http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/Media,3947,en.pdf

http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/siege%20of%2064%20great%20strand%20st%202.pdf

http://www.limerickcity.ie/media/Media,4126,en.pdf

Qualitymark

Jolly Red Giant wrote: »

Secondly - there is zero evidence of the active involvement of the ITGWU or the ICA in military activity during the War of Independence.

Have you read Peadar O'Donnell's The Gates Flew Open? Do you regard, for instance, Liam Mellows (judicially murdered on December 8, 1922) as a leftist?

CDfm

I had a quick look there . The Limerick Municipal Election 1899 mention in the table's IRB affiliations for lot of the elected Labour candidates.

And, I certainly see that there was a "class" of labourers etc.So bit's and pieces fit into a Marxist analysis right enough.

Then, I go back thru family history in West Cork and I realise that the very people in the farming class etc were poor too and the poverty was universal and not linked to any particular class. Maybe some were poorer than other's but thing's like an aspiration to emigrate by families was a big thing.

I seem to remember way back BriantheBard posting about the outflows of money from Ireland to England actually changing around the time of the rising with the Welfare System and pensions etc. For the first time ever Ireland was taking in more than it sent out.

I am also conscious how families operated in the wider scale and how a farm was inherited by a great aunt in Wexford. A small farm and not a ranch.

The Wolfe Tone's Song " Street's of New York" springs to mind .

At the time Uncle Benjy was a policeman in Brooklyn
And me father the youngest, looked after the farm
When a phonecall from America said
'Send the lad over'
And the oul fella said 'Sure wouldn't do any harm' for I've spent me life working this dirty old ground
For a few pints of porter and the smell of a pound
And sure maybe there's something you'll learn or you'll see
And you can bring it back home make it easy on me

Like it or not these were peasant's and land ownership gained thru the Land Wars gave them security of tenure.

Even the good times were bad.

The safety valve was emigration and lot's of it.

While the condition's may have existed to satisfy a Marxist analysis in some location's it was not generic or universal.

And, maybe things weren't sectarian per se but certainly there were protestant elites. The Rising in Cork was in no small part influenced by how the harbour and other parts of the establishment worked and public service recruitment.

And, there was the migration's etc of protestant tradesmen and their families from West Cork following the Dunmanway killings. Peter Hart's book got lot's wrong and sectarianism didn't drive the West Cork Brigade my Grandfather was in. Nonetheless, this happened and is unexplained.

It's explainable in the North thru sectarianism

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=78812798&postcount=30

So can you explain the West Cork event's thru Labour and violence. And you did have Marxist's like Frank O'Connor , the writer, active at the time.

Dan Spring in Kerry was anti-communist & a democrat & a Catholic.

My grandfather spoke of guys who got IRA pensions that shouldn't have .

So there is a bit of me that says one elite replaced another too.

There is a lot of "unexplaining" to do.

LordSutch

lestat21 wrote: »

The Irish public immediately supported the English who had stopped the violence. Just think of the amount of damage to Dublin city and the number of innocents caught in the crossfire...

I would love to get to the bottom of this once and for all. Were the soldiers who stopped the 1916 Rebellion actually "English" or were they British (as in Irish soldiers within the British army)? I only ask because I hear from time to time that it was the Irish barracks that delt with the rising, and that those barracks were full of Irish (British) soldiers! or was it really the case that English soldiers with English accents put dow the rising?

Maybe somebody with the knowledge could give the definitive answer.

Qualitymark

LordSutch wrote: »

I would love to get to the bottom of this once and for all. Were the soldiers who stopped the 1916 Rebellion actually "English" or were they British (as in Irish soldiers within the British army)? I only ask because I hear from time to time that it was the Irish barracks that delt with the rising, and that those barracks were full of Irish (British) soldiers! or was it really the case that English soldiers with English accents put dow the rising?

Maybe somebody with the knowledge could give the definitive answer.

Sure. They were a mixture of both; the most involved were the Sherwood Foresters, shipped hastily over from England, but the Royal Irish Regiment, the Dublin Fusiliers, Georgius Rex, etc were also fighting.

MarchDub

Qualitymark wrote: »

Sure. They were a mixture of both; the most involved were the Sherwood Foresters, shipped hastily over from England, but the Royal Irish Regiment, the Dublin Fusiliers, Georgius Rex, etc were also fighting.

There is also much anecdotal evidence that many of the Sherwood Foresters, when they arrived in Dublin, thought they were actually in France participating in WWI , so hastily were they dispatched to Dublin.

mikemac1

How is that even possible?

You get the train West, you get on a ferry and you land in Dublin

And all that time you did not see a single sign?

I understand the officers not telling their men anything much at all.
But unless you were blind you know where you landed

MarchDub

mikemac1 wrote: »

How is that even possible?

You get the train West, you get on a ferry and you land in Dublin

And all that time you did not see a single sign?

I understand the officers not telling their men anything much at all.
But unless you were blind you know where you landed

That's why I called it anecdotal - it's something that comes up frequently and I heard it first years ago from survivors of 1916. Here is the story also on a Sherwood Foresters Memorial site.

They were volunteers, recruited from the towns and villages of Nottinghamshire. From Newark and Bingham from Huthwaite and Hucknall, Robin Hood county, the English folk hero from which the regiment took it's name. They had responded to Kitchener's posters, to fight in the trenches of Belgium and France, but had been caught instead in a smaller cause and had been pulled out of basic training at Watford to be thrown into street fighting against the Irish Rebels in Dublin
They were so raw. Most had less than three months of military service. They were unfamiliar with their weapons and had not yet had live firing practice. Young men with guns and little training are as much of a danger to themselves as they are to anyone else. On Dublin's dockside their officers issued live ammunition but ensured that as the men charged their weapons they were pointing their rifles safely out to sea - just in case of accidents amongst such unskilled soldiers.

The officers, all volunteers from English public schools, breakfasted at St. George's harbourside Yacht club while the men opened tins of bully beef and biscuits. Some of the men thought they had landed in France. They were excited, keen, anxious and apprehensive.

http://www.crich-memorial.org.uk/sherwoodforesters.html

CDfm

Qualitymark wrote: »

Sure. They were a mixture of both; the most involved were the Sherwood Foresters,

The available evidence does point to the firing squads after the rising largely being from the Sherwood Foresters while in Cork the one execution was carried out by sailors.

Qualitymark

mikemac1 wrote: »

How is that even possible?

You get the train West, you get on a ferry and you land in Dublin

And all that time you did not see a single sign?

I understand the officers not telling their men anything much at all.
But unless you were blind you know where you landed

Signs are normally taken down in wartime, in case of invasion.

Here's an account of the executions, by the way:

Áine Ceannt was told by Fr Augustine, who attended many of the executions, that "in every case it would appear as if it were necessary for the officer in charge of the firing party to dispatch the victim by a revolver shot". Capt E Gerrard subsequently spoke to Capt HV Stanley, who told him "I was the Medical Officer who attended the executions of the first nine Sinn Féiners to be shot. After that I got so sick of the slaughter that I asked to be changed. Three refused to have their eyes bandaged . . . The rifles of the firing party were waving like a field of corn. All the men were cut to ribbons at a range of about ten yards."

Snickers Man

Ellis Dee wrote: »

In addition, the Irish Volunteers under Redmond had gone off to war for the British and they believed, probably very naively, that Britain would honour the promises that it had made to them.

Not entirely true. The Volunteers split more or less down the middle on this very issue of participating in Britain's war with Germany. Many did indeed join up but many others did not.

In start contrast to the Ulster Volunteers who joined up almost to a man.

The simple, and unsurprising, truth is that there was a hugely divergent spread of opinion on the Great War in Ireland. Only recently my mother showed me a little document that her uncle, a clerk in the Dublin corporation, had to carry around with him. It was a certificate that he had in fact volunteered for the army but had not been called up as yet.

This was necessary because in the early years of the war, strident young women in Grafton Street would bear down on young men of military age and give them white feathers for not joining up. My great uncle's little document was issued to men who actually had volunteered with which to beat these harridans off.

This to me is slightly reminiscent of the recent haranguing of Irish bands who announce they are touring Israel. The zeal of righteous indignation burns bright with each young generation.

My point is that there was an atmosphere of enthusiasm for military struggle at large across many sections of the community in Ireland. Which is not to say that the brandishers of white feathers were supportive of the Rising but they would have found it hard to argue against military action per se if they're every waking moment was spent demanding that young men join the army.

Qualitymark

Getting back to the original question.

It's un-answerable from this distance, because Ireland has changed so much that we simply cannot understand what it was to live in a country where, for instance, children learned in school to sing "I am a happy English child", where all history taught was English history, where Catholic and Protestant children played on opposite sides of the street, where a Protestant enclave employed only Protestants, while Catholic, nationalist employers like William Martin Murphy exploited Catholic workers, paying them a lower rate than that earned in London or Glasgow.

It's un-answerable also because the whole world has changed; the early years of the 20th century saw a battle across Europe and Russia between syndicalist forces who ran huge strikes - including a transport strike that crippled British industry - and industrialists whose wealth is unimaginable even to the most avid of today's greed kings.

But we can make some conjecture about the possible futures of the men and women who led the Rising, if no Rising had happened. Thomas MacDonagh, a brilliant and revered teacher who was at the time lecturer in English literature, would have taught generations of Irish people, with his gentle combination of humour and kindness; his friend Eoin MacNeill and he would have worked together to foster the love of the Irish language. His distinctly backed-off attitude to all churches would have influenced his students, perhaps changing Ireland more yet...

MacDonagh's future brother-in-law Joseph Plunkett (MacDonagh was to be his best man, but of course when Plunkett was married, at 1.30am on May 4, MacDonagh had been dead for 22 hours) might have died young, if it was actually tuberculosis that he suffered; Grace Gifford, who was married to him for two hours before he was killed, might have retained her joyous fun and the glorious artistic talent that had won her a medal in the Slade, rather than becoming a sad ghost.

PH Pearse would certainly have continued to run schools and teach generations of boys the same dedication and social awareness that sent most of the pupils of St Enda's into the arts, civil service and humanitarian work such as medicine. He would have continued to write in Irish and to foster the writing of others.

Thomas Clarke - well, it's hard to imagine Clarke not being a revolutionary, as this was the form and passion of his life, as it was for Sean MacDiarmada, his acolyte and colleague.

Eamonn Ceannt would have continued to work for the Irish language and for music - he was a famous piper - and would have risen in the civil service as far as a dedicated Catholic then could.

Constance Markiewicz would have continued the social work in which she led hundreds of women to run feeding stations in the starving Dublin of the time; she would have helped people into work, as she did for the rest of her life. But her life would have been very different - she would not have lived on with her best friends slaughtered in their youth, but would have lived amid a circle of creative friends.

Roger Casement would have continued to expose the villainy of capital around the world, publishing more searing reports on colonial horrors in Africa, Europe, America north and south and the Antipodes.

Liam Mellows and Cathal Brugha and Rory O'Connor and Michael Collins and hundreds of others would have lived and spread their beliefs.

They would have travelled, as they got older - all of them had contacts abroad; many had lived in Europe, Africa and America. Ireland would be quite different; Ireland's leftists would not have been forced to emigrate en masse after the Civil War - there would have been no Civil War.

Or, of course, they could all have perished in the 1918/19 Spanish flu epidemics and none of this could have come to pass.

MarchDub

Qualitymark wrote: »

Getting back to the original question.

It's un-answerable from this distance, because Ireland has changed so much that we simply cannot understand what it was to live in a country where, for instance, children learned in school to sing "I am a happy English child", where all history taught was English history, where Catholic and Protestant children played on opposite sides of the street, where a Protestant enclave employed only Protestants, while Catholic, nationalist employers like William Martin Murphy exploited Catholic workers, paying them a lower rate than that earned in London or Glasgow.

It's un-answerable also because the whole world has changed; the early years of the 20th century saw a battle across Europe and Russia between syndicalist forces who ran huge strikes - including a transport strike that crippled British industry - and industrialists whose wealth is unimaginable even to the most avid of today's greed kings.

But we can make some conjecture about the possible futures of the men and women who led the Rising, if no Rising had happened. Thomas MacDonagh, a brilliant and revered teacher who was at the time lecturer in English literature, would have taught generations of Irish people, with his gentle combination of humour and kindness; his friend Eoin MacNeill and he would have worked together to foster the love of the Irish language. His distinctly backed-off attitude to all churches would have influenced his students, perhaps changing Ireland more yet...

MacDonagh's future brother-in-law Joseph Plunkett (MacDonagh was to be his best man, but of course when Plunkett was married, at 1.30am on May 4, MacDonagh had been dead for 22 hours) might have died young, if it was actually tuberculosis that he suffered; Grace Gifford, who was married to him for two hours before he was killed, might have retained her joyous fun and the glorious artistic talent that had won her a medal in the Slade, rather than becoming a sad ghost.

PH Pearse would certainly have continued to run schools and teach generations of boys the same dedication and social awareness that sent most of the pupils of St Enda's into the arts, civil service and humanitarian work such as medicine. He would have continued to write in Irish and to foster the writing of others.

Thomas Clarke - well, it's hard to imagine Clarke not being a revolutionary, as this was the form and passion of his life, as it was for Sean MacDiarmada, his acolyte and colleague.

Eamonn Ceannt would have continued to work for the Irish language and for music - he was a famous piper - and would have risen in the civil service as far as a dedicated Catholic then could.

Constance Markiewicz would have continued the social work in which she led hundreds of women to run feeding stations in the starving Dublin of the time; she would have helped people into work, as she did for the rest of her life. But her life would have been very different - she would not have lived on with her best friends slaughtered in their youth, but would have lived amid a circle of creative friends.

Roger Casement would have continued to expose the villainy of capital around the world, publishing more searing reports on colonial horrors in Africa, Europe, America north and south and the Antipodes.

Liam Mellows and Cathal Brugha and Rory O'Connor and Michael Collins and hundreds of others would have lived and spread their beliefs.

They would have travelled, as they got older - all of them had contacts abroad; many had lived in Europe, Africa and America. Ireland would be quite different; Ireland's leftists would not have been forced to emigrate en masse after the Civil War - there would have been no Civil War.

Or, of course, they could all have perished in the 1918/19 Spanish flu epidemics and none of this could have come to pass.

:cool::D I like it - when's the film version out?

I mean the one without the flu ending...

Qualitymark

MarchDub wrote: »

:cool::D I like it - when's the film version out?

I mean the one without the flu ending...

Heh - we can make it be! Too late for those poor lads, but we can make their country ours.

CDfm

Qualitymark wrote: »

where a Protestant enclave employed only Protestants, while Catholic, nationalist employers like William Martin Murphy exploited Catholic workers, paying them a lower rate than that earned in London or Glasgow.

AFAIR , the return on investment in the Irish Market was 20% or so lower in Dublin than London or Glasgow.

William Martin Murphy might have been a nasty man but he had shareholders and he is isolated as the only employer .

His newspaper was the voice of the Home Rule Party whose main opposition was the Labour Party /ITGWU under James Connolly / Jim Larkin. Connolly being executed in 1916 might have led to him not being looked at objectively.

Take this and read the link

ENTREPRENEURSHIP, POWER AND PUBLIC OPINION IN IRELAND; THE CAREER OF WILLIAM MARTIN MURPHY

ANDY BIELENBERG

ABSTRACT: Until recently, the limited historiography on William Martin Murphy has focused on his role as the leader of the employers in the 1913 Lockout. It is now possible to view his career from a wider perspective. This article examines the nexus between Murphy's business interests and the power he gradually acquired over nationalist public opinion, notably in the critical years between 1905 and 1919, as a result of his investment in the Irish newspaper industry.
KEYWORDS: William Martin Murphy, public opinion, Irish Independent, Irish newspaper industry.
Andy Bielenberg, Department of History, University College, Cork

http://www.ucc.ie/chronicon/bielen.htm

Qualitymark

CDfm wrote: »

AFAIR , the return on investment in the Irish Market was 20% or so lower in Dublin than London or Glasgow.

William Martin Murphy might have been a nasty man but he had shareholders and he is isolated as the only employer .

It's true - Shackleton's Mills in Lucan were just as vicious to their employees who joined the union - but Murphy was by far the largest and most powerful employer of the 400.

The Lockout reflected and continued enormous strikes across Europe and the US at the time; but it was particularly harsh, in the dreadful conditions of Dublin, which was then half-starving at the best of times.

CDfm

Qualitymark wrote: »

It's true - Shackleton's Mills in Lucan were just as vicious to their employees who joined the union - but Murphy was by far the largest and most powerful employer of the 400.

The Lockout reflected and continued enormous strikes across Europe and the US at the time; but it was particularly harsh, in the dreadful conditions of Dublin, which was then half-starving at the best of times.

And James Connolly was a Marxist and Union organiser who targeted Murphy & he was a big noise in union & marxist political circles worldwide.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1914/01/murphy.htm

He was active in Ireland, UK & spent 7 years in New York in the 1900's.

He had a military force with the Irish Citizen Army.

Murphy was not responsible for everything wrong in Ireland and it is often made out that he was.

Connolly & Larkin were as radical as any available worldwide .

Qualitymark

CDfm wrote: »

And James Connolly was a Marxist and Union organiser who targeted Murphy & he was a big noise in union & marxist political circles worldwide.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1914/01/murphy.htm

He was active in Ireland, UK & spent 7 years in New York in the 1900's.

He had a military force with the Irish Citizen Army.

Murphy was not responsible for everything wrong in Ireland and it is often made out that he was.

Connolly & Larkin were as radical as any available worldwide .

Of course they were. As Connolly said, in an accurate forecast of what Ireland has become:

If you remove the English army to-morrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs. England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that Freedom whose cause you had betrayed.
Nationalism without Socialism – without a reorganisation of society on the basis of a broader and more developed form of that common property which underlay the social structure of ancient Erin - is only national recreancy.
It would be tantamount to a public declaration that our oppressors had so far succeeded in inoculating us with their perverted conceptions of justice and morality that we had finally decided to accept those conceptions as our own, and no longer needed an alien army to force them upon us.
As a Socialist I am prepared to do all one man can do to achieve for our motherland her rightful heritage – independence; but if you ask me to abate one jot or tittle of the claims of social justice, in order to conciliate the privileged classes, then I must decline.

By the way, I went looking for William Martin Murphy in the 1911 census (when I think he would have been living on Dartry Road (between Palmerston Park and Temple Road), but can't find him.

thecommietommy

MarchDub wrote: »

There is also much anecdotal evidence that many of the Sherwood Foresters, when they arrived in Dublin, thought they were actually in France participating in WWI , so hastily were they dispatched to Dublin.

Roughly from memory, there was also some Australian soldiers invovled in putting down the Rising. And also appearently, some individuals in the Irish regiments, the more stauncher Redmondites/Trinty unionists, had an insignia attached to their uniform in ' honour ' of putting down the Rebellion. I'll see if I can dig out some info later.