workingclasshistory:

On this day, 31 August 1913, police attacked a crowd in Dublin in a drunken rampage that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” It was one of many violent confrontations that took place in the early days of the Dublin Lockout, a bitter industrial dispute that lasted until 1914 and saw two strikers killed and many hundreds wounded. Jim Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers Union had attempted to organise the workers on Dublin’s tram network, and the owner of the company, William Murphy, had fired hundreds of workers whom he suspected of sympathising with the union. When the workers struck in protest, the Dublin employers demanded en masse that their workers sign a pledge declaring that they would neither join the ITGWU nor strike with them in solidarity. When workers refused, the employers locked them out, replacing them with scab labour from Britain or elsewhere in Ireland. From the start, the strike was characterised by intense violence between the strikers on one side and the scabs and police on the other. In pitched battles, strikers and their families smashed tram windows and fought with the police, throwing stones and firing slingshots that had been supplied by James Connolly. In response to the escalating violence, the authorities banned a proposed march. But Larkin was not a man easily deterred, and he promised he would appear that dead or alive. The road was overlooked by the Imperial Hotel, which was part-owned by Murphy. Wearing a fake beard, the fiery trade unionist shuffled into a hotel dressed as an elderly man, and once a crowd had gathered on the street below, he cast off his disguise and ran to the window, from where his booming voice exhorted the workers to action and victory. Immediately, around 300 police attacked, beating the crowd, most of whom were uninvolved onlookers. One such onlooker, the MP Handel Booth, later described how the police, “behaved like men possessed… wildly striking with their truncheons at everyone within reach.” https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1199960030189145/?type=3