Sir, – Now that the campaign to have the new bridge across the Liffey named after Rosie Hackett has succeeded, and it is a very welcome decision marking the role of “ordinary” women in the development of the modern labour and independence movements, it is time to set the historical record straight.
One of the worst examples of the historical distortions that marked the campaign was in Mark Lawler’s Irishman’s Diary (August 19th), which traced the roots of the Lockout to a strike at Jacob’s Biscuit Company on August 22nd, 1911. “The person who galvanised these ‘3,000 girls’ was Rosie Hackett, an 18-year-old messenger at Jacobs, and her successful negotiations led to an increase in wages and better working conditions at the factory.”
Unfortunately there is no evidence that Rosie Hackett played any pivotal role in this strike. In her own statement to the Bureau of Military History, Rosie Hackett merely says, “It was as a result of the big strike in 1913 that I first became attached to Liberty Hall. A workroom was opened to assist girls who had lost their employment as a result of the strike”.
The strike action in 1911 originated among bake house operatives where the ITGWU, and later the Irish Women Workers’ Union, were strongest. Rosie Hackett was a teenage messenger not a bake house worker.
It would be one of the first companies to lock out workers in 1913 after male employees who were members of the ITGWU took sympathetic action by refusing to accept “tainted” flour from Shackleton’s Mill in Lucan on August 30th. On September 1st, 1913, 670 of the 1,000 male workers came out in support of their colleagues but only 303 women out of over 2,000 did so. While this was the largest and most vocal group among the 840 women workers involved in the Lockout, Rosie Hackett does not appear in any contemporary accounts.
The extravagant claims made by some champions of Rosie Hackett in order to have the new bridge named after her do no service to rescuing the legacy of the 1913 Lockout. We do not need a matriarchal mythology to replace a patriarchal one. In fact, we do not need myths at all if we are to reclaim the past honestly. Rosie Hackett does not need to be presented as some sort of super-hero to be a worthy representative of her gender and her class. – Yours, etc,
PADRAIG YEATES,
The Links,
Station Road,
Portmarnock,
Co Dublin.