Connor Emmet O: Derry Labour in the Age of Agitation, 1889-1923: : Volume 2

by O, Connor Emmet

ISBN: 9781846826115

Published: 2016

After impressive progress in the 19th century, Derry's industrial growth started to falter after 1904. Wages stagnated, prices rose and workers in the shirt factories and on the docks grew restless. The city seemed ripe for one of the Larkinite revolts that shook the Irish cities in the early 20th- century, from Belfast in 1907 to Dublin in 1913. However, unions in Derry had their own agenda. The First World War eventually brought both an economic boom and renewed militancy. Capitalism was confronted with a deadly cocktail of food and labour shortages, price and wage inflation, a discrediting of the ruling elites for blundering into a catastrophic war, and revolution at home and abroad. Irish Labour responded by reviving Larkinism and developing it into syndicalism. The Derry trades council struggled to reconcile the radical challenge from Peader O'Donnell and the ITGWU with the more conservative policies of existing unions, all against the backdrop of the independence campaign,...