From division to dissension - Irish trade unions in nineteen-thirties

Abstract

In 1930 the Irish labour movement divided, the Irish Trade Union Congress forming one organisation and the Labour Party another. It was an amicable recognition, despite reservations and regrets, that Connolly's syndicalism was incompatible with parliamentary democracy -although for many reasons this could not be said, nor even perhaps contemplated in such stark terms. It was also. an amicable recognition that while the industrial arm of the movement, the trade unions, could still hope to represent workers throughout the whole island, the political arm, the Labour Party, could not. The Belfast group had quite some time before, declared themselves to be the Northern Ireland Labour Party and there was nothing in common sense that anyone could do about it. Thus the decade began. It ended with a far from amicable recognition that the whole trade union movement was cleaved on the issue of Irish-based and British-based trade unions; it ended with the establishing o f the Council o f Irish Unions, a body which was declared to be advisory in character but which was to provide the basis, six years later, of the new nationalist congress, the Congress of Irish Unions.