Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress response to approval of the Treaty. Voice of Labour, 14 January, 1922.

TO THE WORKERS OF IRELAND :  With the vote of Dail Eireann approving the Treaty between Ireland and England one more chapter of the still uncompleted story of Ireland’s struggle for national freedom has been closed.

To-morrow the struggle for the freedom of Ireland’s men and women begins anew.

Whatever may be the immediate outcome of the vote of the National Assembly, responsibility for the government of Ireland will rest in future on the Irish people alone.

Henceforward, the struggle which you, the workers, must perforce engage in shall be plainly and openly a struggle against capitalism;  you are now called upon to fight the fight which is your fight;  for the rights of men to life, and to life in abundance.

Henceforward your fight will be against conditions which make your lives a perpetual struggle against sordid poverty, dirt, and ignorance;  a fight against the soul-destroying grind of wage slavery.

During the period of crisis in the nation’s life you have subordinated your claims and demands to the need for national solidarity.  Individually and collectively the workers have borne their full share of the pains and sacrifices of recent years, they have freely given of their lives and substance.  They entered the fight full of faith that their endeavours would win for the common man and woman opportunities for a fuller and freer life in their own land, untrammelled by a haunting dread of involuntary and degrading poverty.

The Republic conceived of and demanded by the workers is a Republic in which those who give labour and service to the commonwealth—and none but they—are the citizens, the rulers, and the owners; a Republic in which wealth is the servant not the master of mankind, where property is forfeit to the State if it is wrongfully used or kept out of use against the interest of the people;  where free men and women and children are held to be the real wealth of the nation;  where all the powers of the State are instantly available to protect and succour the meanest citizen;  where none may be rich until all have enough;  where wealth may not command labour, because labour is supreme;  where all who are capable and willing to work may find opportunity to work and are ensured in exchange for their labour a decent livelihood.

Whatever form of government may be established, whatever name it may assume, Free State or Republic, unless it realises these aspirations it is not a Republic in the eyes of the workers.

No such Republic having been achieved by the party which has been in the ascendent, it is no retrogression on the part of the Labour Party to avail of the machinery of whatever political instrument may be fashioned in pursuance of our objective — i.e. The establishment of a Workers’ Republic.

During the war the workers have refrained from pressing their demands for a decent standard of material comfort.  Rather than be a cause of weakness in the national struggle they have been content to accept increases in money wages seldom exceeding, usually not reaching, the increase in the cost of living.

The hour has now struck for the workers to emerge from the shade.  When the contest opens in the political arena we shall take our place.  At the moment the call to action comes from the industrial field.  Our opponents are our employers.  During the war and the truce they have been gathering strength and preparing to dispute our claim that we are something more than beasts of burden let out for hire;  something other than mere repositories of man-power to be turned on or off according as we are producing a profit or a loss.

These employers, stewards of the nation’s patrimony, being proved incompetent to fulfil their trust of providing for the national household, threaten to close down their mills, factories, railways, docks, warehouses, shops and farms, if we will not work for a starvation wage!  We need not be astonished at their incompetence.  For the greater part they are men who, fed fat on their privileges as England’s faithful garrison, have opposed every effort of the people to throw off the feudal yoke that oppressed the nation.

They survive only because they have been sheltered by laws made in the English Parliament by thieves and the friends of thieves to protect thieves and the friends of thieves.  Their thoughts are bounded by profits, and interest, and title deeds, and scrip.  Such people cumber the ground.  When justice comes into the land they shall be cast into outer darkness!

These are the men who are attacking even the low standard of life that the workers are enduring.  We call upon all workers to line up for action.  You must not suffer a worsening of your standard of life or conditions of labour without resistance or reprisals.  We must challenge the employing class of Ireland to find a way out of the economic bog which their incompetence and greed has led us all into.  They must find the way out now, if they can, or surrender their power and authority.  Hitherto, they have thought of one road only—lower wages—but that road leads back into the middle of the bog—and it is blocked by the massed forces of Labour.

True to the traditions of their class, in anticipation of favours to come, our employers are already showing zeal in their professions of adhesion to the new political order.  Where patronage, titles, and social power were to be found, there these people and their kind might always be looked for.  Royalist sycophants when kings were in the ascendant, we now discover them seeking favours of the Republic.  Upholders of the old regime when it paid, they are now suspiciously eager to make their peace with the new.  Always the enemies of the people’s cause, they now claim special favours from the people when their own champion has retired from the fight.

If they would prove the sincerity of their professions of loyalty to the new Government they will withdraw their threats to reduce wages, to drive the workers down to the barest margin of subsistence.  They will refrain from action which seems deliberately designed to cause trouble for the new Government.

To the workers, again, we say:  Unite and stand fast!  Do not allow yourselves to be drawn into opposing camps.  As you have shown solidarity in the nation’s cause, let you now show the same solidarity in your struggle for bread!

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(6.12.1921: Anglo-Irish “Treaty”signed in London under threat from Prime Minister Lloyd George of ‘war within three days’.

14.12.1921: Dail Eireann meets to debate the “Treaty”.

7.1.1922: Dail Eireann approves the “Treaty”. 64 votes for to 57 against. The Labour Party abstained. Thomas Johnson was leader of the party.

In the 1918 General Election, the Labour Party supported the Nationalist cause, agreeing with Sinn Fein not to put

forward candidates in order to avoid splitting the Nationalist vote, similarly, they did not take a stand on the Treaty—hence the jibe 

“Labour must Wait”.