Dublin lockout

Dublin lockout (1913), Ireland's best remembered labour dispute. Commencing in August 1913, a group of employers, headed by William Martin Murphy, alarmed at the rise of industrial militancy, combined to compel workers to withdraw from the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union or face dismissal. The ITGWU responded by calling out other workers, and by late September some 20,000 were on strike or locked out. The dispute was prolonged and bitter: Larkin, Connolly, and other leaders were arrested for sedition; on 31 August members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police baton charged strikers in Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street), killing two men; workers drafted in to take the places of strikers were intimidated and attacked. The formation of the Irish Citizen Army testified to the intensity of the confrontation. The strikers, mainly unskilled labourers, lacked the reserves for a long dispute, and by the end of January 1914 most had returned to work on the best terms they could obtain.