On Saturday August 31st, I will take that 85km journey across the Irish sea to the land of my parents, as so many have done before me, with the same equal determination that another of my own took 100 years ago, the great socialist, James Larkin. However, both our circumstances could hardly be different in the nature and cause that bonds us today.
On Saturday, I will present my concept piece titled '1913-We serve neither Murphy nor King’ at the Workman’s Club in Dublin. This event will fuse live theatre and music, bringing the disparate and eclectic sounds of Andy Irvine, Jinx Lennon, Ian Prowse, Captain Moonlight and the Annulments together on one stage, followed by my own one hour re-enactment of the 1913 lockout with the very same artists. It will be some celebration and homage to the brave and noble men and women of Dublin who stood up against the very elite and corporate scallywags of the day, championed by the Irish Scouser, Big Jim Larkin.
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Larkin’s story, and the events that shaped the lockout of 1913, is a quiet reminder that 100 years may have passed, but to avoid repeating a cliché here, nothing much has changed. What would Larkin think today of the modern day William Martin Murphy’s of this world whose Dublin Tramway Company could well be the modern day equivalent IMF/ECB?
The Troika said that to save Ireland then we needed to declare you bankrupt so whereby we could enforce a crippling austerity on you, which quite clearly as the Anglo tapes have shown, was engineered by an out of control bunch of Snake oil salesmen and their drinking pals who literally pulled the wool over the Irish people’s eyes, or, to use a grubby metaphor, ‘’literally out of their a***’’ (sic), I can imagine Larkin smiling wryly ‘’I warned you, but you wouldn’t listen’’.
The statue of Jim Larkin standing tall with the GPO in the background
The 1913 lockout also brings into sharp focus something that both Larkin, and the other great hero of the lockout, James Connolly, were well aware of back then, insomuch that if they had succeeded this would have made 1916 simply redundant, as Larkin said ‘’an injury to one is an injury to all’’, taking power aware from the elite run privateers and given to the rightful owners, the Dublin working class.
A victory would have raised the working class profile to unprecedented heights, of self-ownership and control over their own labour, the right to vote on education and health, none conscription in foreign wars. Many argued, in particular the writer Fintan O’Toole, had this victory been achieved it would have put Home Rule and the nationalist issue to bed once and for all, it was a defining moment in history, but, as we have seen, the defeat ushered in a different Ireland, one where business carried on as usual after Independence and the wealth distribution with it, into the pockets of the Dublin elite, who with the facilitation of the church and the Murphy run media, had the working class right where they wanted them, divided and ruled, its echoes still resonate with us today.
It is surely not a coincidence then that the heroes of 1913 were men and women revered and lionised, then as they are today. Larkin whose monument stands proudly on O’Connell Street, ironically perched on his plinth opposite Murphy’s old haunt, Cleary’s, as if to remind his old nemesis that his ghost hasn’t gone away and Connolly himself standing proud looking over the river at the masses rushing off to work.
These two men stand out as men of integrity, unsullied and uncorrupted by the asinine politics that we see today, that once in power they would have succumbed to all too familiar pattern of the gravy train railroad of freebies and broken promises. The fact that both these men disappeared shortly thereafter 1913, and equally from the pages of history, Larkin to America and jail in Sing Sing a few years later and Connolly, as we now know, at the execution courtyard in Kilmainham jail, its poignanancy came to represent the disillusionment and the breaking up of organised labour, as the issue was not ‘’bread and butter’’ as Larkin said at the time, but self determination and the nationalist question, that superseded everything.
To me 1913 represents, and deserves a greater legacy than the one shown to it this year in Ireland, it still feels like the elephant in the room, the embarrassing little brother who won’t go away while his elder brother, 1916, gets all the attention. 1913 lockout ‘We serve neither Murphy nor King’, its title simply replacing Kaiser with Murphy, won’t be lost on many who come this week, but to the initiated, but as we have seen so many times, even the deepest rivers flow with the least sound, a quiet legacy can sometimes give birth to a new legacy, maybe the Scouser Larkin and the Scot Connolly are still with us and if they are, well, I’ll have there ticket ready for the next fight.
Marcus Maher is a Liverpudlian born scriptwriter and playwright, his concept show, 1913-lockout ‘We serve neither Murphy nor King’ where polemical theatre meets polemical art, is on at The Workman’s Club, Saturday 31st August- with Andy Irvine, Jinx Lennon, Ian Prowse, Captain Moonlight, The Annulments.
