Trade union organisation in Ireland

Abstract

It would seem that the Society confesses to a certain ignorance concerning Trade Unions in Ireland, though they number in their membership some hundreds of thousands of our fellow-countrymen. This paper has been prepared as a contribution towards the dissipation of that ignorance. But it is by no means an easy task to present a clear picture of the present state of Trade Unionism in Ireland, even though the matter is restricted, as it will be in this paper, to the forms of organisation, without reference to questions of policy. Trade Unions have a long history; they have been moulded by the pressure of economic circumstance as well as by the ideas of their leaders and members; they have had to meet and cope with conditions that vary from year to year and from trade to trade; and in this country they have been affected not only by local conditions but also by conditions in Great Britain. Empiric value rather than theoretic logic is necessarily their governing principle. Consequently it is extremely difficult to analyse them in any strictly logical form. They refuse to be confined within logical categories.