At this time the British Prime Minister repeatedly assured the country that there never could and never would be an Irish Republic; while Lloyd George talked De Valera acted, and the Republic came into being while Lloyd George was still talking.
During the summer of 1919 a very ordinary and at first uninteresting strike of shop assistants took place in Ballybor for higher wages and shorter hours, and the shopkeepers managed to carry on with the aid of their families, and few of the public suffered any inconvenience from the strike.
Good relations still existed between master and employee in nearly every shop in the town, and the shopkeepers were just on the point of an amicable settlement with their assistants when a Transport Union agitator, or, as he called himself, a Gaelic organiser, appeared on the scene, and in a few hours the whole situation was changed. The local secretary of the Transport Union, to which the shop assistants belonged, at once broke off all negotiations with the shopkeepers, and before night several acts of sabotage had been committed in the town.
The next morning saw the strike begin afresh in deadly earnest. Every street was picketed by strikers, who refused to allow any one, townspeople or country people, to purchase any foodstuffs until the shopkeepers had given in to their impossible demands. Doubtless the idea was that the starving people would bring such pressure to bear on the shopkeepers that they would be forced to give in and grant practically any terms to the shop assistants. In a word, the old game of blackmail.
Several unfortunate old country-women, who had managed to evade the pickets and to purchase provisions, were caught on their way home by the strikers and their purchases trodden into the mud of the streets. One old clergyman, who lived several miles from Ballybor in an isolated district, managed not only to dodge the pickets and buy much-needed food, but to get two miles on his way home. However, a picket of shop-boys, mounted on bicycles, overtook him, threw all his provisions into a bog-hole, beat him severely, turned his pony loose in the bog, and left him by the roadside.
At first the shopkeepers were bewildered and at a complete loss to understand the sudden change in the attitude of their assistants, but on hearing Paidraig O’Kelly, the so-called Gaelic organiser, make his first public speech, they knew at once what they were up against.
In 1914, before the war broke out, all thinking Irishmen knew that the coming and growing danger in Ireland was the Transport Union, formed originally for the perfectly legitimate object of raising the status and wages of the working classes (quite apart from the small farmer class) by combined action. But in a very short time this Union became the instrument of Bolshevism in Ireland under the able command of James Connelly, a disciple of Lenin’s long before the latter had risen to power.
And so thoroughly and well had Connelly made out his plans for the future that in every town and village the complete machinery of Soviet Government had been prepared, ready to start working the instant the revolution should break out. Men had been appointed to every public office, and the houses of the well-to-do allotted to the different Commissioners and officers of each local Soviet.
Luckily for Ireland, the rebellion of 1916 saw the end of James Connelly, probably the most dangerous and one of the cleverest men of modern times in Ireland.
With the death of Connelly and the disappearance of Larkin to America, the Transport Union fell into the hands of less able men, but still carried on successfully with agrarian agitation, though marking time as regards revolution.