Centenary of 1913 Dublin Lock-out

The Dublin 1913 Lockout began on 26th August 1913 when all the trams on O’Connell Street stopped with workers seeking pay rises ranging from 1s to 2s a week. William Martin Murphy, the owner of the Dublin Tramway Company locked out members of the IT&GWU who refused to sign the pledge and leave the union and James Larkin, leader of the union called a general strike. In the disputes that followed more than 20,000 workers were either locked out of their jobs by their employers or went on strike. The Lockout continued for 6 months with families enduring widespread hardship, poverty and hunger and by early 1914 many of the workers were driven back to work. Housing conditions in Dublin at the time were very bad with the slums considered some of the worst in the UK. The 1911 census shows that 26,000 families in Dublin city lived in tenements, 20,000 of them in single rooms. The mortality rates per 1,000 were 22.3 in Dublin compared to 15.6 in London. On 2nd September, 7 people – including two children died when two tenements, numbers 66 and 67 Church Street collapsed



 



One room tenement dwelling Francis Street Dublin


Children at play on Henrietta Street in the early 1920s.
(RSAI: DD 44)
The story of Henrietta Street was replicated across the city, as streets amalgamated into slums. Life in the slums was raw and desperate. In 1911 nearly 26,000 families lived in inner-city tenements, and 20,000 of these families lived in just one room. Most families were dependent on intermittent casual labour; three out of five workers in the Heney household in Killarney Parade were unemployed. Remarkably, many one-room tenements did not just house a family, but that family also took in members of their extended families or tenants; the Dixon family at Buckingham St. also had a nurse-child, Thomas Power. In 1911 among the tenements of Mabbot Street and Tyrone Street ,17 families kept lodgers, most despite living in a single room.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ys1C4-kHc

Take the time to listen to some readings from "Strumpet City" written by James Plunkett (1969)  set in Dublin during the time of the "lock-out"