ABSTRACT
In early August 1913 the Irish Worker, a radical paper of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, produced a front-page article entitled ‘the jovial revolution’.1 ‘Revolution’ must have been an often-used word in Ireland in the summer of 1913. There were the rantings of Edward Carson and his paramilitary followers; the indignant pledges of leading Tory Unionists, declaring their will ingness to resist Home Rule whether it came by revolutionary or constitutional methods. There was James Connolly honing down his Marxism to a degree of theoretical sharpness that is still the envy of the Irish and British left - and this despite the frustrating pressures of the north, which he was experiencing first-hand as the Belfast secretary of the ITGWU. There were the Sheehy SkefFingtons extolling in the streets and parks of Dublin their vision of a new Irish citizenship based on the emancipation of women. There were the Larkins, Jim and Delia, fighting a series of smallscale but persistent batdes against the forces of capitalist exploitation rooted in the sweatshops, the laundries, the confectionery and bis cuit factories, and the docks of industrial Dublin. There was the im minence of industrial conflict on a horrific scale in the form of the ‘Dublin lock-out’. And there were the shockwaves of social unrest sent out by liberal England as it died its strange death.
