A Lonely Passion; James Plunkett and The Trusting and the Maimed

James Plunkett (1920-2003) the Dublin novelist, short story writer and playwright is

most recognized as the author of the epic novel Strumpet City (1969) set during the

prelude to and events of 1913’s upheaval of the Dublin Lockout of tens of thousands of

city workers from employment for more than half a year – the result of a titanic wage and

hours strike called by James Larkin, the fiery and charismatic socialist labor organizer

who had come to Dublin in 1908 from Belfast, where he had organized dockworkers the

year before.

Bred in the Liverpool slums of Irish parents, “Big Jim” Larkin, 32, was strikingly

handsome, “tall and broad-shouldered, with a commanding presence,” Plunkett wrote in

a 1961 article The Mission of Discontent. “His hat was dark and wide-brimmed – and

my mother remembers it being rumoured in those early days that he never removed it

because he was anti-Christ and was obliged to hide a third eye that was set in the centre

of his forehead.” To crowds of the city’s impoverished and working poor Larkin

“thundered against low wages and bad housing in nightly harangues that mixed the

vernacular with quotations from Whitman and Shelley. The masses listened spellbound,

even when they didn’t quite understand.” 1.

The strike lasted for nearly seven hard and violent months. It ended, in a sense, in

failure – the employers including the man who led them, William Martin Murphy, the

unflinching owner of the Dublin United Tramway Company among other businesses,

refused to grant tangible concessions to the city’s by then hungry or famished workers,

among them coal carters, dockers, tram workers, porters and others. But Larkin inspired a

generation of Irish – among them Sean O’Casey who deemed Larkin the “Irish

Prometheus” and worked in food kitchens and collected funds during the strike and as

secretary of Larkin’s Irish Citizen’s Army protected worker’s demonstrations.

Still another, from the following generation, was James Plunkett. Plunkett called Larkin

the greatest man he ever knew and supported trade unionism throughout his life, and

between 1945 and Larkin’s death in February 1947 worked personally for Larkin as his

branch secretary for his Workers Union of Ireland in a small office beside Larkin’s own.

Plunkett recalls in the 1985 essay Remembrance of Things Past once

telling Larkin he had proof that an employer had “lied deliberately to us” during a

conference, but Larkin “refused to let me make use of it. ‘Hit a man in his pocket,’ he

told me ‘but never in his pride.’”