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The Man who became the Irish Labour Movement Incarnate

By Dr Emmet Larkin, Professor of British and Irish History, University Chicago

James Larkin was a remarkable man.  On the day he died, Sean O’Casey wrote: “It is hard to believe that this great man is dead, for all thoughts and all activities surged in the soul of this labour leader.  He was far and away above the orthodox labour leader, for he combined within himself the imagination of the artist, with the fire and determination of a leader of a down-trodden class.”

Larkin was born in the slums of Liverpool in 1874.  He was raised in poverty, received only a few years of formal schooling, was thrown on a brutal labour market, and struggled to keep his family from sinking into a more abject poverty.  He stowed away to escape unemployment and find adventure, and then returned to Liverpool at the age of 20 to take his place among that vast army of casuals who prowled the docks in search of a day’s work.

He finally found regular work as a docker, and was soon promoted to a dock foreman.  When his men went out on strike in the summer of 1905 he went with them and became their leader.  The strike was lost, but he was asked to become a full-time organiser for the men’s union, the National Union of Dock Labourers.  He quickly organized the Scottish ports and was then assigned the more difficult task or organising the Irish ports.

Soon after his arrival in Ireland in January 1907, Larkin was involved in a series of strikes in Belfast, Cork and Dublin, which the executive of the national union was reluctant to support.  He then broke with the national union and founded the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union at the end of 1908.  The Transport Union, after a shaky start, rapidly gained in numbers and strength.  By 1913 it was the largest and most militant union in Ireland.

In the great Dublin strike and lock-out of 1913, Larkin challenged the employing classes in the persons of William Martin Murphy and his Employers’ Federation.  The epic struggle, which lasted some six months and involved 20,000 workers and their 80,000 dependants, resulted in a crushing def eat for the workers, in spite of massive support from the British labour movement.  The Transport Union was decimated in numbers and wrecked financially.

In early 1914 Larkin decided to undertake a speaking our in the US to raise the necessary funds to rebuild his union.  By the time he was able to sail for America in late October 1914, however, the first World War had broken out, and it would be nearly nine years before Larkin was to return to Ireland.  While in the US, Larkin was by turns a lecturer, a union organizer, an Irish propagandist, a socialist, an agitator, a founder of the American Communist Party, and finally a ‘martyred’ political prisoner who served nearly three years in prison.

Two overriding themes, however, gave his US career some coherence. The first was his implacable opposition to the first World War, and the second was his enthusiastic acceptance of the Russian revolution in November. Both these stands, needless to say, were very unpopular, and when the celebrated ‘red scare’ of 1919 following hard on the heels of the end of the war, Larkin was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a very stiff term in prison.  He was eventually pardoned in early 1923 in the interest of free speech and shortly after deported to Ireland.

Within a month of his arrival a fierce struggle or power broke out in the Transport Union, which was soon extended to the whole Irish labour movement, and Larkin was at the centre of it.  Larkin was suspended as general secretary of the Transport Union, and finally expelled.  He then approved the foundation of the Workers’ Union of Ireland, but was only able to carry a remnant of the Transport Union, mainly based in Dublin, with him.

With the advent of the Great Depression in 1929, Larkin’s power and influence on both the trade union and political sides of the labour movement were further impaired, and the man who had long been seen as the Irish labour movement incarnate now was only a part of it.

When Larkin first arrived in Dublin in 1907 he was shocked at the degradation of human life in the capital city of Ireland. Some 26,000 families, or nearly a third of the people of Dublin, lived in 5,000 decayed tenements.  Death, disease, immortality, insanity, crime, drunkenness, unemployment, low wages, and high rents formed an integral part of Dublin slum life.  By founding the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, Larkin was able to do something about raising the workers’ wages, shortening their hours, and improving their working conditions.

But Larkin attempted to make his Transport Union something more than an instrument for the material advancement of the workers.  He made it a vehicle for their social and cultural improvement as well.  When the Transport Union acquired Liberty Hall as its headquarters in early 1912, the old hotel was transformed into a centre for the social and cultural activities of the Union.

The crowning achievement, however, of Larkin’s imaginative social and cultural efforts was his rental of a house and three acres in Clontarf as a recreation centre for the Union members and their families.

These were the reasons why Larkin was the idol of the Dublin working classes.  He gave them more of his time, his energy, and himself than anyone had ever given them before.  He gave them a social life besides the public house and the tenement stoop or window.  And he brought a measure of hope and happiness into their narrow lives by providing them with new outlets for their neglected humanity.  The achievement was modest because the resources were slender, but a great deal was done with very little where nothing had been before.

In the last analysis, however, Larkin’s ascendancy over the Dublin workers was rooted in his remarkable ability to identify with them.  He was at one and the same time only one of them and yet something more than each.

In May 1911, Larkin increased both his presence and his influence in Dublin with the launching of the Irish Worker and People’s Advocate.  This novel production was and remains unique in the history of working-class journalism. Week after week, Larkin attacked with a monumental perseverance and determination the sweating, exploiting employers and the corrupt, cynical politicians, who were, in his view, responsible for he reprehensible social condition of Dublin.

He gave no quarter and expected as he vilified any and all, high and low, who had he misfortune to come under the notice of his pen. Still, even while exposing sordid tales of mischief, misery, jobbery and injustice, Larkin also never failed to call for something more for the workers: “We are going to rouse the working classes out of their slough of despondency, out of the mire of poverty and misery – and lift them to a place higher. If it is good for the employers to have clean clothing and good food and books and music and pictures, so it is good that the people should have these things also – and that is the claim we are making today.”

It was in that claim for social equality, in fact, and the true greatness of James Larkin is really rooted.  It was this demand for social justice for the working classes that not only gave real meaning to his life as an agitator and his work as a trade union leader, but which was his inestimable gift to the class from which he had sprung.

As an agitator he raised the social and political consciousness of the Irish working classes by preaching the gospel of divine discontent and prophesying for them a brave new world.  As a trade union leader he mobilized the power inherent in their aggregate numbers by organizing them for the winning of that brave new world.

Without his socialist faith, however, Larkin could never have convinced he Irish working classes of their real worth as human beings, and without that raised consciousness, they could never have been persuaded to make their world a less terrible place for their posterity.
    
Dr. Emmet Larkin is the author of an acclaimed biography of James Larkin, to whom he is not related. This article, which is reprinted by permission of The Irish Times is an abbreviated version of Professor Larkin’s lecture in the 1997 RTE Thomas Davis Lecture Series, James Larkin: Lion of the Fold – which is published in full in the book of the same name. For more information on the book, click here.

Larkin in His Own Words

From an address to the Board of Trade Court of Inquiry chaired by Sir George Askwith, Dublin Castle, October 5, 1913

Having referred to the housing conditions and the poverty in ‘this Catholic City of Dublin, the most church-going city, I believe, in the world’, Larkin declared:

The workers are determined that this state of affairs must cease. Christ will not be crucified in Dublin by these men.
    This Lock-out will arouse a social conscience in Dublin and in Ireland generally. I am out to help to arouse that social conscience and to lift up and better the loss of those who are sweated and exploited.
    The Irish workmen are out to get access to the means of life.  They are not going to be slaves; they are not going to allow their women to be the slaves of a brutal capitalistic system which has neither a soul to be saved nor a soft place to be kicked.
    I am engaged in holy work.  I have worked hard from an early age.  I have made the best of my opportunities. I have been called anti-Christ. I have been called an atheist. Well, if I were an atheist I would not deny it. I am a Socialist.
    When I came to Dublin I found that the men on the quays had been paid their wages in public houses, and if they did not waste most of their money there, they would not get work the next time.  Every stevedore was getting ten per cent of the money taken by the publican from the worker, and the man who would not spend his money across the counter was not wanted.
    I have tried to lift men up out of the state of degradation. No monetary benefit has accrued to me.  I have taken up the task through intense love of my class.  I have given the men a stimulus, heart and hope which they never had before.  I have made men out of drunken gaol-birds.
    Is it any wonder a Larkin arose?  Was there not a need for a Larkin?  If the employers want peace they can have peace, but if they want war they will get war.
    This great fight of ours is not simply a question of shorter hours or better wages.  It is a great fight for human liberty, liberty to live as human beings should lie, exercising their God-given faculties and powers over nature; always aiming to reach out or a higher betterment and development, trying to achieve in our own time the dreams of great thinkers and poets of this nation – not as some men do, working for their own individual betterment and aggrandisement.

Extracts from Presidential Address to the Irish Trade Union Congress, City Hall, Dublin, June 1, 1914

Comrades, we are living in momentous times.  We are now on the threshold of a newer movement, with a newer hope and new inspiration.  Whatever other classes in Ireland might do, we must march forward to the complete conquest of Ireland as representatives of the organized working lass as a whole.  The Irish working class are now rising rom their knees and attaining full stature.
    Looking back over the immediate past, we saw the attempt of an organised, unscrupulous capitalist class composed of different political parties and holding different sectarian views who had combined together for the purpose of destroying organized labour in Ireland.  The Lock-Out in 1913 was a deliberate attempt to starve us into submission, and met with well-deserved failure.  The workers emerged from the struggle purified and strengthened, with fierce determination and a fixed purpose.
    The outcome of the attack had been the initiating of a new principle of solidarity inside the unions, and for the first time in the world of labour, the beautiful and more human principle had received universal recognition, “An injury to one is the concern of all.”
    That motto would be emblazoned on the banner of labor the world over in the future.  We have established a great human principle.  Once again the Dublin workers stood as pioneers in the upward and onward march of labour.
    I submit that the working class have as much right as any section or class to enjoy all the advantages of science, art and literature.  No field of knowledge, no outlook in life, and no book should be closed against the workers.  We should demand our share in he effulgence of life and all that was created he enjoyment of mankind.
    The working class must be free, not only economically but intellectually.  The women and men in this movement are determined to enjoy the fullness of life and of the knowledge and the power that the Creator ordained them for.
    Those who were engaged in the 1913 struggle had shown magnificent courage – women and men, aye, and  little children – had proven their heroism.  Hunger, the gaol, and death itself did not deter them.  Let us not forget our comrades, Brady, Nolan and Byrne, who were murdered in the streets of this city by the hired hooligans of the capitalist class – the police.  We found that no political party, no church, made any protest against the abuse of the laws by the capitalist class.
    Let us not talk of wooden guns or tin guns.  What the working class wanted was the gun of intelligence.  Let ‘Solidarity’ be the watchword, and a few years will broaden out the liberties curtailed by the most unscrupulous and most vindictive capitalist class that any country was ever cursed with.
    Condemnation and calumny had been poured out upon the heads of the leaders of the working class.  The agitator had been denounced by press and pulpit, but thank God, the agitator was the salt of the earth.  The employers claim a victory but the employers did not beat back organised labour in this city.  I admit we had to retreat to our base.
    I hope we will see the day when we will take full advantage of our opportunities, cry ‘finis’ to our differences.  Give ear to all men who do worthy work.  Ireland must no longer be Nirobe but Mercury amongst the nations.  Le us be comrades in the true sense of the word, and join with our brothers the world over to advance the cause of the class to which we belong.
We are entering upon a new era to do work worthy of the cause to which we are attached.  Cathleen Ni Houlihan calls upon us to abolish old jealousies, old intolerances what she may sit enthroned in the midst of the Western Sea.  I claim we have the opportunity given us of achieving much in the future of our beloved country, to work and live for, and if needs be die, to win back, in he words of Erin’s greatest living poet, for Cathleen Ni Houlihan, her four beautiful fields.

Farewell Message to Members of the ITGWU, October 1914

I have found it necessary for the benefit of the Union and in the interests of its advancement to go on a lecture tour in the United States of America, it having come to my knowledge that the aims and methods and activities of the Union have aroused an amount of interest among the workers of that great continent.  Advantage hs been taken by our enemies, the capitalist class, here and there to malign the leaders of the Union and the labour movement in this country; to misrepresent our message and to deliberately misconstrue our ideals, aims and methods.
    We at all times have been careful to live p to our motto: “An injury to one is an injury to all.”  We have never watered down our principles.  We have been and remain truly national in our outlook and work because of our belief a real international labour movement.  Our convictions have been strengthened by the failure of labour movements in Great Britain, Germany, France and Belgium to stem the wave of jingoism and the worship of the god of militarism by our comrades  in those several countries: they talked internationalism but refused to live it.
    Our Union is a world movement. We have the honour of inspiring a new pirit into trade unionism. We have been defiant. We  have defended our class by attacking. We have been constructive by being destructive. We have given a new sprit, a new hope to those without a spirit, and without a hope. We have been pioneers of the newer time – ‘each for all, and all for each.’  That has been the belief animating and inspiring al our efforts.
“Swiftly spring to the front,
Pioneers, O Pioneers!”

Larkin As Others Have Seen Him

AE (George Russell)

This labour uprising in Ireland is the despairing effort of humanity to raise itself out of a dismal swamp of disease and poverty.  James Larkin may have been an indiscreet leader.  He may have committed blunders, but I believe in the sight of heaven the crimes are all on the other side.  If or Courts of Justice were courts of humanity, the masters of Dublin would be in the dock charged with criminal conspiracy, their crime that they tried to starve out one-third of the people in Dublin, to break their hearts, and degrade their manhood, for the greatest crime against humanity is its own degradation.
    I have often despaired over Dublin, which John Mitchel called a city of genteel bastards and bellowing slaves, but a man has arisen who had lifted the curtain which veiled from us the real manhood in the city of Dublin.

Charlie Chaplin

The last day in New York, I visited Sing-Sing with Frank Harris.  Jim Larkin, the Irish rebel and labour union organiser, was serving five years in Sing-Sing, and Frank wanted to see him.  Larkin was a brilliant orator who had been sentenced by a prejudiced judge and injury on false charges of attempting to overthrow the Government, so  Frank claimed, and this was proved later when Governor Al Smith quashed the sentence, though Larkin had already served years of it.
    Frank inquired about Jim Larkin and the warder agreed that we could see him; although it was against the rules, he would make an exception.  Larkin was in the shoe factory, and here he greeted us, a tall handsome man, about six foot four, with piercing blue eyes but a gentle smile.
    Although happy to see Frank, he was nervous and disturbed and was anxious to get back to his bench.  “It’s bad morally for other prisoners if I’m privileged to see visitors during working hours,” said Larkin. After we left, Frank said it depressed him to see a courageous, flamboyant character like Jim Larkin reduced to prison discipline.

Ralph Chaplin (Industrial Workers of the World)

At 817 North Clark Street, Chicago, in the Radical Bookshop, Jim Larkin came to meet Bill Haywood for interminable arguments about class-struggle philosophy and strategy.  Professor Robert Lovett of the University of Chicago, who always made a point of frequenting IWW meetings, admitted that Jim Larkin, the Irish longshore leader, could always attract a larger crowd to our educational meetings in the Wobbly Hall, than any professor in town.

Austin Clarke

Inscription for a Headstone 

(From Ancient Lights (1955) published by the Bridge Press.)

(Permission to use material by Austin Clarke has been granted by R Dardis Clarke, 17 Oscar Square, Dublin 8)

James Connolly

I knew the working class of Dublin before Larkin came. I knew them as slaves, most slavish industrially when they were most truculent politically. Contrast that with the heroism they displayed in the recent fight, Larkin had put courage into them lifted them to their feet, taught them not only their rights but their duty to stand by one another.
    We have amongst us a man of genius, of splendid vitality, great in his conceptions magnificent in his courage.

Daniel Corkery (Writer)

I took this to be a man of ideas, some of them wrong but most of them right, or at least right according to my lights.  I saw in him a powerful advocate of temperance and an apostle of nationality.  I regarded him as one earnest to a fault, for I never heard him speak to the class for which he stood that he did not half offend them by dwelling on the failings which kept them powerless and timid.  And in my estimate was much of pity, because I saw that the man stood alone and guideless; by dint of reading it was his custom to quote poetry as freely as I would myself if I had more courage; by brooding and thinking on problems he had raised himself so much above his fellows that he deceived himself if he believed he could find lieutenants in their ranks.  Here is a drama for any Ibsen that cares to write it – the failure of a leader of the democracy to find lieutenants.

Gabriel Fallon (Writer and Critic)

Well-to-do Dublin organized itself against Larkin. Pulpits thundered against his socialism.  It was considered that the sacred rights of property were in danger. But Larkin raged on, declaring that he spoke and acted in the spirit of the Beatitudes.  He was immediately dubbed Anti-Christ.”  A paper calling itself Catholic asked if the rats that infested the Dublin tenements were to be allowed to dictate to the respectable citizens of Dublin.  Trade unionism took on the scarlet of a new-discovered deadly sin.
    With the honourable exception of a handful of priests – all of them Regulars – the voice of every cleric in the diocese was set against the Red Hand of Larkin and his Union.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (American labour leader)

One day in 1914, a knock came on our door at 511 East 134th Street, in the Bronx.  There stood a gaunt man, with a rough-hewn face and a shock of greying hair, who spoke with an Irish accent.  He asked for Mrs. Flynn.  When my mother went to the door, he said simply: “I’m Jim Larkin.  James Connolly sent me.”
    Larkin was a significant orator and an agitator without equal. He spoke at anti-war meeting, where he thundered against British imperialism’s attempt to drag us into it.  My mother gave him the green banner of the Irish Socialist Federation and he spoke under it innumerable times, especially on the New York waterfront.

Keir Hardie, British Labour MP

Why is Larkin so much feared by the employing classes in Dublin?  I shall tell you.  It is because he has got down to the foundation and the whole super structure rises with the foundation.  The one man and the one movement which has shown how to get better pay for the downtrodden is Jim Larkin and his policy.  They say they don’t like Larkin’s methods, very likely not.
    Jim Larkin’s methods are not those of the rose leaf or the kid glove.  He is a man with more heart than head as any good man the world has ever seen, has been.  He doesn’t sit down and calculate and weigh up chances.  He sees a wrong to be righted and by God, Jim Larkin is going to do it.

Frank Harris (Writer)

It is difficult to meet Larkin, even casually, without becoming interested in him.  He is very tall, well over six feet, loose built, with the figure of a youth.  The large grey eyes are laughing and boyish; the features are all well-cut, Greek rather than Celtic; a very quiet unassuming, rather handsome fellow, with sympathetic, conciliatory manners.  He spoke admirable, quiet English, the English of a well-read man with a gift of fluent expression.
    Larkin understood labour conditions in Ireland and England and the United States better than any one with whom I have ever talked – a singularly wise, fair, fine mind.  I say, deliberately, there is no company of the most distinguished in the world where Jim Larkin would not hold his own and have its place.

William D. Haywood (Industrial Workers of the World))

When I arrived in London a meeting was arranged in the Albert Hall.  Larkin was released from prison in time to speak at what proved to be a wonderful meeting.  Twenty-five or thirty thousand people, more than could get in the hall, had gathered.
    Jim Larkin is a big bony man with a shock of iron-grey hair and marked features such as are appreciated by the sculptor or cartoonist.  He is a vigorous speaker and this meeting was the beginning of a crusade that he called the ‘Fiery Cross.’  I have never spoken in any meeting, with more satisfaction than in this auditorium.

Robert Kee (Historian)

Larkin was a wild and dynamic organising genius. All sensed in him, rightly, an independent, restless force dangerous to all carefully prescribed modes of thinking. His one concern, manically displayed through a powerful ego, was to organize for their own welfare the wretched urban working classes of Ireland.

Professor Emmet Larkin (American historian)

In the early years of the century, the most remarkable man among a remarkable generation of proletarian leaders was James Larkin.
    Words are almost impossible to find to describe Larkin’s ascendancy over the workers in the period 1911-1914.
    By 1913 he had convinced the Dublin working classes that he was their instrument, working only in their interest and for their welfare.  His honesty, integrity and sincerity of purpose is unquestioned.  He devotion to the cause of temperance won him the loyalty of the workers’ wives.
    In these years Larkin made his union something more than an instrument of industrial advance.  He made it a vehicle for social and cultural advancement as well.

F.S.L. Lyons (Provost of Trinity College, Dublin)

Larkin read widely and used his reading to fortify a vivid imagination and a natural gift, or rather genius for flamboyant oratory.  Larkin’s speeches were larger than life because Larkin himself was larger than life.  He was driven by a deep compassion and tenderness for the poor to preach “the divine mission of discontent.”

Countess Markievicz

Taller than most men, every line of him was in harmony with his personality. Not so much working man as primeval man.  Man without the trickeries and finishiness off modern civilization, a tital who might have been moulded by Michelangelo or Rodin, such is Jim Larkin, and this force of his magically changed the whole life of the workerws in Dublin and the whole outlook of trade unionism in Ireland.  He forced his own self-reliance and self-respect on them; forced them to be sober and made them class conscious and conscious of their nationality.

William O’Brien (President), Thomas Foran (Vice-President), John Farren (Treasurer), John Simmons (Secretary), Dublin Trades Council, October 1914

When you (Larkin) came on your mission of organization, you found the unskilled workers disintegrated, powerless, and practically at the mercy of their taskmasters. The work which you undertook to discharge would have dismayed an ordinary individual, but all obstacles disappeared before your indomitable energy and perseverance until eventually you had the happiness of seeing activity taking the place of lethargy, and manliness replacing despair.

Sean O’Casey

Another Irish chieftain has gone from us. One of the greatest of them all: a chief of the people – Jim Larkin is his name.  The banner and beacon-fire is out – a little heap of aches only.
    But what ashes!  Out of it will spring another flame, firing iself from that which Larkin indled, flaming in Ireland, and flaming everywhere. It is not only that Jim Larkin will never be forgotten (to forget  him would be to forget ourselves), it is that he can never be dead.
    In the great things he did for the Irish workers is everlasting life.  Not life that will remain as  it is now; but life growing into a fuller consciousness of its own worth, of its own power, its own right to the ownership of all things.
    I heard men, turning aside in moments of quiet from Irish-Ireand work murmur: “A man has come among the Irish workers.”
    Then I heard this man speak to dockers, coalheavers and drivers in Beresford Place.  There he was, larger than the life we knew, standing above the Dublin workers, telling them of the story the workers must write themselves. In this man’s burning words were the want, the desire, the resolution of the world’s workers.  Here before me was the symbol of the revolting proletariat.  The personal manifestation of “Each for all, and all for each.”  The symbol of a march forward; not in twos and threes; not this union today, that one tomorrow; but a march forward en masse for what the workers never had, but for what they will have and hold forever.

Ulick O’Connor (Writer)

Jim Larkin died in 1947. Nearly forty years before he had arrived as a Messiah to the stricken Dublin proletariat. He had pulled them off their knees and promulgated the message that they were no longer slaves but human beings with rights. A passionate orator with great poetic flair, he had a Trotskyesque gift of igniting words into phrases that spread like a flame through he mob mind.

Sean O Faolain (Writer)

Larkin had come out of the dark netherworld with the eyes and face of a poet. He burned with a fiery simplicity of belief in his fellow-man and his speech to them was like a lava. He had mild but wide, clear eyes, questioning almost staring; a long nose, sensuous lips; a somber lock of hair across his forehead; the hollow cheeks and high cheekbone of an ascetic.

Sir William Orpen RA RHA (Artist)

I used to go down to the dirt and filth of Liberty Hall and sit in Jim Larkin’s office in the afternoons just for the interest of watching the man.  He was always sincere, always modest, always thinking of others, during those terrible strike times when he was out against ‘graft’. Drink and starvation in the city.  The poverty in Dublin during that time of riots and strikes was terrible, and the basements of Liberty Hall were used as soup kitchens.
    One of the visitors that afternoon was a prelate of the Church.  He thundered at Jim.  Did he not realize that on the morrow, he was going to be spoken against from the pulpit; that ‘the Church’ had ordered him not to hold his meeting on that Sunday afternoon in the Phoenix Park; that if he did he was defying the Church?  So he railed on at his for a long time, his arms flying about, and occasionally thrusting his forefinger close to Jim’e face.
    All this time Larkin was sitting back in his chair puffing his cigar, with his clear eyes fixed on the prelate.  Not a move did he make.  When the prelate’s outburst ceased from want of breath, Jim got slowly out of his chair and said very gently,: “Pray god, Holy Father, that when you rise tomorrow morning you will be able  to say your prayers to your God with the same peace of mind that I will say mine.”  And turning to one of his men he said: “Show the Holy Father the way out.”  And he departed amid great silence.  And Jim continued his work and his cigar.

James Plunkett (Writer and Playwright)

James Joyce spoke of Dublin as the centre of paralysis.  It was a total paralysis, blinding conscience and soul.  It remained to Jim Larkin to see the slum-dweller as a human being – degraded, yet capable of nobility; perceptive, capable of living with dignity, capable even, of music and literature.  That was the message he began t address to the city at large – a message of love, delivered, one ust concede, by a man swinging wildly about him with a sword.
    In the course of forty years of social agitation Jim Larkin earned a reputation that was universal.  The employers of Dublin found the best name for his movement when they labeled it Larkinism.  His lifelong concern was not with theory, but with the immediate needs of the  underprivileged, the sweated men, the struggling mothers, the little children born to a life to drudgery in a sunless world.

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw described Larkin as “the greatest Irishman since Parnell.”  In a letter to James Larkin, Shaw wrote “You have been a leader and a martyr whilst I have never had a day’s discomfort.  I thought often about the injustice of that when they imprisoned you (confound them) in America.  Our own people do not know what you have done for them.”