Madam, – Joe Joyce’s archive column (October 23rd) is a timely reminder that, as the centenary of 1913 looms, the agenda has not really changed. The appalling treatment of children during the Great Lockout is one of the most shameful aspects of that dreadful year and one that has been largely brushed under the carpet. The issues of the time, such as the rights of minorities, workers, children and their parents, are still very much alive.
In many ways the lockout was the nearest thing we ever had in this country to a debate on what the nature of a future Irish state should be. The 1916 Proclamation and the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil were documents handed down by political elites, however worthy their motives may have been, and the debate on the treaty was dominated by the oath of allegiance.
The struggle in 1913 was as much a battle of ideas as about economic and industrial power. The victory of big business and the Catholic Church that year foreshadowed their dominance of the Free State and the Republic of Ireland.
If the coming decade of centenaries is to mean anything other than the usual recitation of dubious historical guff, given a veneer of hi-tech gadgetry, we should start with a serious debate over what it was those events were all about.
There is no better place to start than by asking, what were the forces that made so many well-off Irish people prefer to give money to the Loyal Tramway Men fund for William Martin Murphy’s strikebreakers, or the China Missions, than to save children on their own streets from starvation? – Yours, etc,