Ireland’s unions: ‘We’ve made a lot of mistakes and we haven’t been good at self-criticism’

Anyone who has organised a conference will know all about most of the challenges Jack McGinley lists off as he speaks about the work that has gone into next week’s Irish Labour History Society (IHLS) event.

With almost 40 panel discussions, speeches and sessions of other types, logistics is right up there, along with scheduling, sponsorships and now, with a few days to go, ticket sales.

This all being all about a movement based on solidarity and co-operation, though, coping with the fallout of deeply held grudges rooted in events largely forgotten inevitably play a part too. McGinley shakes his head a little as he acknowledges that some late changes to the line-up were required after one proposed speaker announced they would not share a platform with another.

“They gave no reason for it and when I spoke to the person who had been speaking to them, he was mystified so I asked someone to look into it and what came back was that seemingly there was an issue between the two unions they were involved with that goes back to a strike in 1962.”

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The conference, titled Visions of Labour and Class, spread over four days from Thursday to Sunday at three different Dublin city centre venues – Liberty Hall, Trinity College and Fórsa’s offices at Nerney’s Court – is the second organised by the society, a band of mainly volunteer workers, many of them retired, who document the history of Ireland’s unions, their members and the workplaces in which they spent so much of their lives.

Delayed by three years due to Covid, the event, originally intended to mark the organisation’s 50th anniversary, covers a wide range of topics although there are a few that might, on the face of it, struggle to appeal to many outside the movement’s hardcore.

McGinley, though, insists that neither the work of the ILHS, which is based at Beggars Bush in Dublin, nor Labour historians generally, is not all about obscure and ancient history. The event’s keynote speech, to be delivered on Friday evening by Séamus Dooley of the National Union of Journalists, will deal with the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the working world.

“I was at a conference yesterday where a gentleman from the German union, IG Metall was talking about the ways in which the far right there are infiltrating the union movement. We’ll have speakers at this conference on migrant workers, the far right, gender issues . . . I think there’ll be plenty that’s topical. And these conferences are about ideas. They’re always important.”

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McGinley, a distinctive-looking figure familiar to regulars at the Irish football team’s games, is a former president of the ILHS who now chairs the committee with responsibility for organising the event. But the idea of staging it, he says, came from the historian Francis Devine and a long list of people have worked on putting together what is an extensive programme.

He sees events like this as an opportunity for the union movement to learn some lessons from its own history.

“One of the things that we haven’t been good at is self-criticism,” says McGinley who, though never a paid official himself, was an activist though 45 years working in Trinity’s library where he represented colleagues inside the college and displayed an endless appetite for the nuts and bolts of committee work in the back rooms of the Workers Union of Ireland then Federated Workers Union of Ireland then Siptu outside of it.

“And the second one is not learning from the failures of the past. We have made a lot of mistakes and we’ll continue down the same line unless we have frank discussion about why we made certain decisions.”

He cites the work done by Siptu’s campaigns unit in relation to halting the proposed raising of the age at which the State pension would become available as an example of what unions can still achieve when they do things well but “running a good campaign is hard and it helps to look at what’s been done before”.

Ensuring the evidence survives has sometimes been a colourful business.

“During my first time as [ILHS] president in the early noughties, I would regularly get phone calls from people to say such and such a union are closing their doors today and there’s a skip outside. And there’s this guy called Gerry Doherty, from Donegal. Gerry had an ould van and a tarpaulin so he’d go around and cover up the skip then the following day three or four of us would go along and salvage as much as we could.”

These days, with so many records digitised, the society finds itself pleading with office managers to back up computer records so they are not eventually lost without even the warning a skip outside the front door affords the outside world.

Just about everything else moved on too, he suggests.

“There are an awful lot of things on that programme that the Labour History Society wouldn’t have touched 20 years ago,” he says. “There’s a session on gay men during the Irish revolutionary period and there are a lot of strong feminists too, women like Mags O’Brien and Mary Muldowney, views that it’s important we hear.”

McGinley, who has himself completed a PhD in industrial relations, also runs a niche publishing company, Umiskin press, bringing out books on sometimes quite obscure aspects of labour history in Ireland.

He had previously been involved in a similar initiative with a group of colleagues who each put in €1,000 to start a company Watchword and though they lost most of the money, each got at least one title published before they went their separate ways.

Then, in 2013, a colleague from Trinity library, Dermot Sweeney, died suddenly and friends wanted to do something to remember him.

“Dermot was an inveterate letter writer to The Irish Times,” he recalls. “So a few people came to me and said, ‘Jack what about publishing arm of yours? We’d like to have Dermot’s letters reprinted.’

“I said ‘I don’t have a publishing arm at the moment but give it a couple of months and I could have again’.”

Almost 20 books on, he routinely has to do some ducking and diving to recoup initial outlays that can approach €10,000 despite the short runs involved on what are fairly niche titles.

In the days before we meet he has been running around dropping off copies of William Partridge, The Forgotten Leader, a recent title on one of the key figures in the 1913 Lockout, written by former Irish Times journalist Padraig Yeates.

The economics of it all are very tight and he recounts minor successes like getting new shops to stock copies and similarly sized setbacks like getting an order from Canada then realising posting a book there costs as much as the cover price.

In the end, though, the books keep coming with individual unions sometimes helping out where they have a particular interest in the subject matter and, he says, with some pride, “only two owe me money”.

Aware, he says, that the subject matter is not attracting too many young people, Umiskin, he says, has contributed €600 to making free tickets available to schools and individual students.

The age profile of the organisers, himself included, presents something of a problem in terms of attracting a new generation, he acknowledges, suggesting that perhaps a couple of dozen among the audience over the four days would represent a minor victory.

Many more, somewhat inevitably, will themselves be trade unionists, activists, academics and historians for apart from the overseas speakers it’s something of a who’s who of the sector in Ireland with the leaders of Siptu, Fórsa and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Joe Cunningham, Kevin Callinan and Owen Reidy respectively joined by historians, writers and academics like Devine, Mary Daly and Margaret Ward.

“It’s the second time the society has run the event and the last time Eric Hobsbawm was the main speaker. It’s been a lot of work for everyone involved this time round but if it all goes well, I think it will stand the test of time”.

Details on the Visions of Labour and Class programme and how to buy tickets are available here.