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In War to the Death! The Waterford Farm Strikes of 1922 and 1923, leading labour historian Emmet O’Connor delves into an intense local movement during a time of constitutional upheaval in Ireland. Between August 1921 and December 1923 boom yielded to slump and employers struggled to cut wages. Buoyed by four years of steady growth and inspired by revolution at home and abroad, the Irish Trade Union Congress pledged to ‘hold the harvest’ of wage gains. Two of the biggest conflicts occurred in Waterford, where farm labourers won a headline victory in resisting reductions in 1922.
Under the astute leadership of Sir John Keane, and buttressed by the restoration of stable government, the Waterford Farmers’ Association returned to the fray in 1923, determined not only to slash wages, but to smash trade unionism on the land, and put an end to Irish ‘Bolshevism’. The long-suffering labourers were equally resolved to defend their far from generous living standards and had a redoubtable champion in ITGWU organiser James ‘Dongaree’ Baird.
What followed was a miniature civil war, with clashes of ‘Red Guards’ and ‘White Guards’. Over seven months, east Waterford was turned into a conflict zone. To supplement extensive picketing and transport blockades, workers resorted to incendiarism and varieties of sabotage. As agriculture was to be central to Free State economic policy, the government deployed two battalions of the Special Infantry Corps and imposed martial law to help the WFA ‘hold the ring’. Some farmers went further, inflicting a ‘white terror’ on union parish secretaries. A doctrinaire conservative, Keane repeatedly refused pleas for compromise, knowing that he was bleeding the union white. As Liberty Hall put it, it was ‘war to the death’.
In December 1923 the strike of 1,500 labourers and over 500 others affected by sympathetic lockouts finally collapsed. A selfless solidarity crumbled with the withdrawal of strike pay. It marked a turning point for the entire Labour movement, gutting the radical spirit of the post 1917 years, discrediting the parliamentary Labour Party, and destroying trade unionism in Ireland’s major industry of the time - agriculture.
Like Limerick's abortive Soviet in the same era, the radicalism of workers in the revolutionary era has not been as well documented as it might be - this book is the first major study of these events.
War to the Death! is a thoroughly engaging and essential read for local historians, academics, labour history enthusiasts, and the general reader.
