A history of the mutiny of 70% of the Belfast police force during a dockers’ strike which brought together Catholic and Protestant workers in struggle.
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
This article is just an extract from a longer work on the 1907 Dock Strike in Belfast. This unearthing of the Labour history of Northern Ireland is not a purely academic exercise. History, or rather mythologies of history, remain a potent force in Irish politics, and yet the real traditions, the real record of class struggle particularly in the North has been ignored or conveniently buried by bourgeois historians. In published works the 1907 Dock Strike, the first attempt by the unskilled industrial workers of Ireland to organise and fight, rates a few paragraphs, the police mutiny a few sentences. No published work covers the 1919 General Strike, and the unemployment riots of 1934 again rate no more than a few paragraphs.
Continue reading The Belfast police mutiny of 1907 – John Gray