The Dublin lockout of 1913 was the most important labor conflict in Irish history. Subject of a number of other studies, the lockout has nevertheless never had its story presented in and unto itself. In this enormous book, Padraig Yeates presents an extensive narrative history of this event for the first time. Yeates, a columnist for the Irish Times, presents this story in a journalistic style that is compelling at the same time it will no doubt frustrate academic historians. While Lockout: Dublin 1913 will be essential reading, it leaves many a stone unturned.

By the 1910s Irish industrial relations were, by any estimation, poor, and particularly so in Dublin. Into this arena strode James Larkin and, eventually, James Connolly. Larkin was a socialist before he became a trade unionist, and it was his experience in the Liverpool docks strike of 1905 as well as his work in the National Union of Dock Laborers that led him to Ireland. Larkin rose to the forefront of Irish labor in his willingness to challenge the conservative leadership of Irish trade unionism and his embrace of sympathetic job actions to increase the effectiveness of strikes. Especially noteworthy was his establishment of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, which set on a collision course with not only the management of Dublin's transport industry but the leadership of the Irish Trades Union Congress. “Larkinism” was a nascent form of syndicalism, strengthened by the presence of Connolly, a former International Workers of the World (IWW) organizer in the United States.

Their chief adversary was William Martin Murphy, who owned the Dublin United Tramways Corporation as well as the Irish Independent newspaper. Murphy watched with alarm the increasing popularity of Larkin, who proved to be the most charismatic figure in the history of Irish labor. Larkin's rhetoric inspired his troops, and the specter of sympathetic strikes led Murphy and other capitalists to lock out workers unless they forswore support of transport workers who went out on strike in August 1913. While Murphy won and the strike collapsed in January 1914, Larkin and his ideas had nearly carried the day.

Yeates provides the first really thorough study of these events. Much of the conflict was personal, at least for Murphy, who professed no real hostility to unions but enormous antipathy to Larkin. There is little doubt, however, that Larkin's ideas were a cause of great unease in Dublin. He employed the rhetoric of violence even when he was unwilling to use that violence, and like so many in Irish history, such as Charles Stewart Parnell, the use of it is enough to mark oneself as a threat and as a person of moral integrity. Larkin's great significance, besides his central role in the lockout, was in his introduction of syndicalist ideas to Irish unions. The call to sympathetic action was an irrational one built on the supposed moral purity of the general strike. Ultimately, Larkin's rhetoric was a call to create a new egalitarian socioeconomic order. Connolly was given the task of developing a paramilitary force that could be called on to protect the strikers against the capitalists and their allies in the police. This group, the Irish Citizens Army, never realized this purpose in the lockout, but it had its role to play some two-and-half years later in the Easter Rising of 1916.

Yeates has performed a most valuable service here, but he almost ruthlessly avoids concerning himself with the implications of these events and ideas. Syndicalism's call to action was Larkin's pathway to a new moral world, one not sullied by self-interest, social class, or political compromise. Yeates would have benefited from some attention to Emmet O’Connor's Syndicalism in Ireland (Cork, 1988). And while Yeates mercifully removes the lockout from the usual place it has in teleologically leading the way to 1916, there is no denying that Larkinism and Connolly's IWW activism played a role in the faith that many were to have in action, any kind of action, against British imperial interests. In their ability to mobilize and organize anticapitalist sentiment they provided a model of, as well as moral justification for, violent action.

Yeates does not provide us with much of the broader context of these events. With the European enamorment of syndicalist ideas it would seem some comparative discussion would be in order. This lack of context would appear to strengthen the cause of many revisionist historians who would have it that the alternative Ireland that Larkin and Connolly envisioned was impossible in an Irish culture that eventually embraced a conservative nationalism after 1922. Such a view betrays its own teleological assumptions. The reasons for the denial of this radical vision of Ireland still requires a history, one that can overcome the presentist disdain for ideas that lead people to act, not with their heads, but their hearts.