There are no murals in Belfast to men like James Baird, but there should be. A Presbyterian from Tyrone, as an activist in the boilermakers union at Harland and Wolff he helped lead the 1919 Belfast strike for a shorter working week.
A “pronounced Home Ruler and socialist”, Baird was elected for Labour to Belfast Corporation in 1920, where he caused sensation by turning up in his work clothes, the unionist press contemptuously dubbing him ‘Dongaree Baird’. He was then one of the hundreds of “rotten Prods” driven from their workplaces during 1920 along with thousands of their Catholic workmates.
Moving south, Baird was an organiser of farm labourers in Waterford during 1923 and, in the midst of a bitter strike, was locked up by the new Free State. After narrowly failing to be elected as a TD for Labour, Baird and his family ultimately left Ireland for Australia.
As Emmet O’Connor notes, within a few years of Baird’s emigration “it seemed incredible that he or his kind could ever have existed in Ireland”. Neither society, north or south, wished to remember the type of working-class radicalism that had briefly flourished during the 1917-23 period. O’Connor, the doyen of Irish labour historians, typically does not mince words in charging the Labour movement with their own role in this.
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While James Larkin had been able to turn defeat in 1913 into a moral victory that lingers in public memory, the leaders of a much larger workers’ movement during the revolutionary era were “unable to handle the consequences or manage the perceptions of the postwar struggles. Labour preferred to forget.”
But while Baird’s story was exceptional, he was also typical of many Protestant trade unionists in Ulster in becoming radicalised after 1917, in being victimised for their politics and in concluding that “partition was inimical to working class unity and that unionism was an inherently reactionary force”.
These men and women have been largely forgotten, north and south. Perhaps the trade union movement, which continues to organise workers from both communities in Belfast, might now think about properly commemorating Baird and the brave “rotten Prods” of that city.
