The great achievement of Larkinism had withstood the test of time and had resulted in the conviction that workers should be organised and have collective representation in their place of work, the head of research at SIPTU, Mr Manus O'Riordan, told the Merriman Summer School here last evening.
Mr O'Riordan said the Irish Free State of the 1930s had seen industrial employment increase by 50 per cent under the de Valera-Lemass protectionist regime. With the growth in the working class came a growth in organised labour. But it was not, however, the one big union as envisaged by Connolly and Larkin. Unionisation developed along three strands - the Catholic nationalist Irishbased one led by William O'Brien's Irish Transport and General Workers Union, the British-based one led by the ATGWU, and finally the Larkinite Workers' Union of Ireland.
This would ultimately lead to a split in the Irish Trades Union Council in 1945 - just two years after the Irish Labour Party had itself split in two.
Mr O'Riordan said that if Larkin stood accused as the great wrecker of the mid-1920s, it was his embittered arch-opponent, William O'Brien, who opted to wreak havoc on both wings of the movement two decades later. "What primarily drove such destructiveness was that he objected to the constructive role which the two Jim Larkins - father and son - were now playing in both wings of the Labour movement. When Big Jim died in 1947, his son, young Jim, finally came completely into his own as both general secretary of the Workers Union of Ireland and a Labour TD. "Larkin junior's unique leadership contribution to Irish labour over the following two decades shaped the movement of today. From the Irish TUC side of the divided trade union movement, Larkin was the key figure in securing its reunification as the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in 1959. And from the word go, as a leader in his own right, he fought to raise the horizons of that trade union movement beyond the wages question.
"While he remained a loyal Labour Party member until his death in 1969, he had decided to leave Dail politics in 1957 and concentrate on giving his services to a trade union movement that was now half a million members strong," Mr O'Riordan said.
He added that in the 1990s, the Labour Party itself had advanced in maturity and that the leadership of Mr Dick Spring had finally forced a halt to futile factionalism. "While still not advancing beyond the third party status, Labour, nonetheless, succeeded in establishing itself as a natural party of power for five constructive years.
"The Labour Party that had enthusiastically bowed the knee to Rome rule in the 1930s and 1940s became the party that gave the edge to secular republicanism by introducing civil divorce. And the Labour Party that until the early 1970s had tolerated as its Limerick standard-bearer an anti-Semitic demagogue was the party that had two decades later entrusted the delicate task of such divorce legislation to the son of Russian Jewish immigrants."
Mr O'Riordan was speaking on the theme "The Cause of Labour and the Cause of Ireland". This year, the summer school is debating the subject of "Seventy-five Years of Independence - the Reckoning".