I posted an earlier blog about the 1913 Dublin lockout centennial, but here are some new links heading into the commemoration weekend. (Also Labor Day weekend here in the U.S.)

• President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, will lead the State commemoration of the 1913 Lockout on Saturday, 31st August – 100 years to the day of Bloody Sunday 1913. Higgins will lay a wreath at the statue of the ITGWU leader James Larkin on O’Connell Street.
• The Civil Public & Services Union is also supporting numerous events.
• Here are two stories about the status of Irish unions 100 years after the lockout, one in the Financial Times; the other in The Irish Times. The later publication says,

Unions have been declining in modern Ireland to a significant degree because they have struggled to gain recognition from employers who are increasingly reluctant to work with them. The ways unions have sought to represent members and the ways employers’ have resisted recognition are, of course, dramatically different from 100 years ago. In place of turbulent and sometimes violent opposition, they now face a more silent process of marginalisation.

• Here is a piece from The Irish Story that considers the lockout as “the first of a series of momentous events to be commemorated in Ireland’s forthcoming decade of centenaries,” but one that “is in many ways an awkward guest at the table of commemoration.” John Dorney writes,

The Lockout was tangential to the developing storm over whether Home Rule for Ireland would be passed in the face of unionist opposition in Ulster. It occurred at the same time but the two had little to do with each other. … However, there is an argument to be made that the Lockout played a role in radicalising some republican activists.

• Finally, those who haven’t read James Plunkett’s novel Strumpet City, which is set during the lockout period, are urged to pick up a copy, put on the kettle and settle in for a great story.

Civil Public & Services Union poster for the lockout centennial.