Given the week that was in it, Bertie Ahern can't have been too happy that the book he agreed to launch was Lockout: Dublin 1913, but he did it anyway at the Labour Relations Commission in Dublin last night. It was just a couple of hours after unions and employers met to try and salvage the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness. If they don't succeed, all parties and pillars might find some useful tips in Lockout on how to deal with strikes, or even lockouts.
The author, Irish Times industrial and employment correspondent, Padraig Yeates, comes up with interesting info. Dublin employers, he writes, who were very vocal denouncing the unions for accepting English "charity" in the form of donations from the British TUC, themselves received over £9,000 in handouts from the British Shipping Federation, the main employers' body in Britain at the time. Union leaders were equally tight-lipped about the fact that they had to use ships manned by strike-breakers to attend conferences in Britain. The first food ship sent by the TUC was strike-bound on the Manchester ship canal in a dispute over union recognition, and had to get special TUC dispensation to sail, provided it took food for starving Dublin workers with its other cargo - empty Guinness barrels.
The churches don't come out well either. Catholic priests picketed the docks to prevent strikers' children being sent to Protestant homes in England, and Protestant charities opened soup kitchens to attract converts. One of the most bizarre incidents involved G. H. Walton, a bookseller with Gill & Son. The company's main business was selling Catholic religious tracts, and it was threatened with a trade boycott after it was discovered that Walton, a Protestant, was spending his Sunday afternoons "proselytising", by helping out in the Central Missions food kitchen in Abbey Street.
Gill & Son bowed to the inevitable, claimed to be shocked at the revelation and sacked Walton, although providing him with a month's salary and an ideal reference. It emerged later that Walton had been helping out at the Mission for 35 of the 39 years he worked for the company. Not only that, but one indignant Irish Times reader wrote to the newspaper to say he had visited Gill's and found pamphlets on sale appealing for funds to buy "Buddhist infants at five pence ha'penny a head" in Peking to rescue them from "paganism".
Lockout is published by Gill & Macmillan, the commercial descendants of M. H. Gill & Son. They accepted the revelations about their past with stoic equanimity, says Yeates.