A Century of Service

A History of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, 1919–2019

Mark Loughrey

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781788550628
• eBook ISBN: 9781788550642
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

In February 1919, 20 nurses and midwives meeting in Dublin to discuss their poor working conditions took a historic decision to establish a trade union - the first of its kind in the world. The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) now numbers 40, 000 and is Ireland's largest nurse and midwife representative association.

This book examines the heady social and economic backdrop that gave birth to the INMO, putting names and faces to the founders and delving into the challenges they encountered. It details the Organisation's conservative middle years and its recent emergence as one of the most vocal protagonists for nurses, midwives and patients in Ireland, while also exploring the vast and varied service that the Organisation provides to its members. The prospect of a nurses' or midwives' strike always raises concerns for patient welfare, and the book looks closely at how the INMO has negotiated this tension, most especially during the 1999 national nurses' strike - one of the largest strikes in Irish history. A Century of Service is brought to life by a fascinating series of in-depth interviews with the INMO's members and leaders in a story of an organisation that with talent, tact and tenacity is delivering despite the odds.

CHAPTER 1

Setting the Scene

I. A (Very) Brief History of Trade Unionism in Ireland

From the late 1600s, ‘combinations’ of workmen, precursors to today’s trade unions, were beginning to form in Ireland. Combinations comprised skilled craftsmen and had practical concerns; for example, the carpenters’ society provided assistance to carpenters’ widows, buried dead members and established an institution in which sick carpenters could receive care.1 Workers also combined to maintain wage rates and working hours. Combinations were not welcomed by employers, who feared being unable to meet the cost of employees’ increasing demands; capitalism dictated that market demand alone should determine wage rates and the price of goods. The state did not look upon combinations favourably, either, and a number of laws were passed in an attempt to quell their activity. These laws saw workers being whipped, imprisoned and pilloried for their involvement in combinations but did not succeed in suppressing the fledgling movements.2

Increasingly, violence and aggression began to characterise combination activity; employment was a valuable commodity, and when it or workers’ wages were threatened, trouble ensued. Combination activity was decriminalised in 1824 but organising remained mainly associated with skilled craftsmen – earning the title ‘craft unionism’. Craft unions were regarded as ‘model’ or ‘responsible’ unions as they tended to forego the use of striking as a weapon.3 Protectionism, through the restriction of entry to trades, was their main strategy – a ploy that prevented craft labour surplus and ensured a constant demand for the skills of artisans. Members of craft unions were not permitted to work with non-unionised employees, were forbidden from working for less than the union-stipulated wage and had to serve a full apprenticeship before joining. These practices were vehemently adhered to, and their breach was treated most severely; twenty plasterers attacked a man for working for less than the union rate in 1824. In other incidents, a carpenter was beaten and subsequently died for not observing union rules; a blacksmith suffered a fractured skull for refusing to strike; and an employer was beaten for refusing to fire a non-unionised employee.4

As the 1800s drew to a close, a new type of trade unionism, referred to as ‘new unionism’ emerged. New unionism marked a departure from the relatively tame protective labour practices of the craft unions and involved organising unskilled workers. Its supporters were overt in their pursuit of better terms and conditions and had a marked tendency toward ‘aggressive’ strike action.5 Proponents of new unionism sought to address their grievances not only at work but through political engagement.6 The advent of new unionism in Ireland was most apparent through the efforts of James Larkin and the union he founded, the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU). The ITGWU soon found itself at the centre of one of the most pivotal events in European labour history: the 1913 Lockout. That year, much to the irritation of prominent businessman William Martin Murphy, Larkin sought to organise tram drivers. This precipitated the lockout of 25,000 trade union members from thirty-seven trade unions by a federation of 400 employers, all at Murphy’s behest. The Lockout lasted six months and caused severe hardship for employees and their families, who turned to the soup kitchens for food. Workers returned to their jobs in February 1914, having won neither concessions nor union recognition. The Lockout was a battle waged against a bleak social and economic backdrop. Poverty, unemployment and an oversupply of unskilled labour was rampant in Dublin.7 Over 25,000 families in the city lived in tenements, and four out of five of these lived in one-room dwellings.8 The collapse of two tenement houses in Church Street claimed seven lives during the dispute and added to the poignancy of events. Writer George Russell boomed:

You determined deliberately, in cold anger, to starve out one-third of the population of this city, to break the manhood of the men by the sight of the suffering of their wives and the hunger of their children … Your insolence and ignorance of the rights conceded to workers universally in the modern world were incredible, and as great as your inhumanity … You reminded labour you could always have your three square-meals a day while it went hungry.9

Russell’s broadside suggested that the Lockout was about forcing men to capitulate and denounce trade unionism. The implication was that women were not unionised, but this was not wholly the case. Women too were organising, and a harder line was emerging among Irish female trade unionists. One commentator wrote:

If there is any class of employers in Ireland more worthy of damnation … it is the class that builds up its wealth on the exploitation of girl and women labour … the wages paid [sic] women and girl workers are the lowest paid in any country with pretensions to civilisation … But the real wonder is why womankind does not rise up in revolt and sweep the whole accursed order of exploiters into the hell that surely awaits them.10

The rise in the Irish women’s labour movement was reflected in the formation of the Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU), the founding of which broadly coincided with a strike of 3,000 women at the Jacob’s Biscuit Factory in Dublin in 1911. The Women Workers’ Union was rejuvenated by events at Jacob’s during the 1913 Lockout when the company decided to employ strike-breakers.11 What followed was bitter acrimony and a column in the Irish Worker, edited by Women Workers’ Union Secretary Delia Larkin (sister of James Larkin and a nurse12) claimed: ‘Jacob’s and their scabs will doubtless wish they were not only dead, but dead and buried before this fight for freedom is finished.’13 As of yet, nurses and midwives remained outside the trade union fray in spite of their sisters’ activities in other occupations. This would soon change.

II. An Essential Dilemma

In 1919, unskilled men at the Ford car factory in County Cork earned £239 per year.14 Women bank officials earned between £100–£190 per year.15 In contrast, nurses at the Dublin Union Hospital earned £52–£65 per year and received an allowance of ¾ lb of butter and 1 st of potatoes per week, as well as a ½ pt of milk per day. They also worked sixty-five hours a week and were obliged to make up for any annual leave or sick leave they took by elongating their working days ‘till the total is worked off’.16 Many nurses had no pension entitlements. Their conditions reflected deeply engrained sexual inequalities in which men, not women, were regarded as the breadwinners. A comment by a nurse in the British Journal of Nursing in 1919, arguing that ‘a society for the prevention of cruelty to nurses was badly needed’, came very close to the mark.17

In early 1919, a small group of nurses and midwives in Ireland began to question whether their poor employment conditions might be best addressed by forming a trade union. Their plans, at least on the surface, appeared neither problematic nor unusual. Ireland had a long history of trade union activity; unions were by then a primary means of addressing workplace grievances and, following the drubbing that trade unionism suffered in the 1913 Lockout, union membership was in recovery. Trade union membership rose from 100,000 in 1916 to 225,000 in 1920.18 But things were not quite that simple. The writer of a commentary piece in the Irish Times, while readily acknowledging and sympathising with the ‘toil’ and poor conditions of ‘tender-handed’ and ‘self-sacrificing’ nurses, condemned their action in organising.19 The commentator took issue with the very idea of a nurses’ trade union, which neither served the ‘noble profession’, the hospital nor the public.20 Trade unions were incompatible with the spirit of professional work, and the writer fretted that nurses were about to ‘cheapen the magnificent repute which the profession has won for itself’.21 The commentator reminded nurses that their role was not wholly about material gain; rather it was about public service and such service was incompatible with strikes in which nurses would be compelled to ‘desert their patients’.22 But nurses and their supporters responded defiantly: ‘That funny paper, the “Irish Times” … Comment would really spoil this gem … we are grateful to the newsboy who inadvertently slipped [it] into our letter-box: he enabled us to face a new day joyously.’23 In their defence, nurses asked:

Although the public at large, whose servants they are, is quite loud in its praise of the courage and devotion of nurses … when it comes to a question of supplying the practical needs of nurses … there is a strange lack of understanding … nurses are beginning to ask why poverty and slavery must be the necessary accompaniments of this virtue.24

The Irish Times endorsed nursing work as a public service. Such work carried a service-obligation or implied understanding that the needs of the service superseded the needs of the nurses. The resultant dilemma, particularly the view that strike action contravened that obligation, was to bedevil nurses, midwives, and the union they founded, for the next century. The contributor to the Irish Times was by no means peculiar in their opinion. The International Council of Nurses (ICN), in its International Code of Nursing Ethics, decreed that ‘service to mankind is the primary function of nurses’.25 The spirit of the council’s decree was endorsed by many nurses themselves. Renowned Irishwoman Catherine Black, who served as a personal nurse to King George V, remarked in her autobiography: ‘Nurses are born, not made … [nursing] must be a vocation first and a profession afterwards. It is the job that of all others demands the most constant self-sacrifice, and we only get any satisfaction out of sacrificing ourselves when we do it for love of someone or something.’26 Some nurses even paid to work. In Mercer’s Hospital in Dublin, trainee nurses paid thirty-five guineas (approximately £37) to train for four years, yet they received a salary of just £10 per year for the first three years of their training and £20 for the last year.27 ‘Good’ nurses were clearly selfless and dedicated while ‘bad’ nurses were out to indulge their own material needs.28 Those pioneers who considered establishing a nurses’ union challenged the old adages. They questioned why their role should be synonymous with self-sacrifice and hard...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Author Biography
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword. No Pressure – No Progress by Liam Doran
• Introduction. 100 Years Young: 1919–2019
• Presidents of the Irish Nurses’ and Midwives’ Organisation
• General Secretaries of the Irish Nurses’ and Midwives’ Organisation
• Headquarters of the Irish Nurses’ and Midwives’ Organisation
• 1.  Setting the Scene
• 2.  The Foundation of the Irish Nurses’ Union
• 3.  The Early Years of the Irish Nurses’ Union, c.1919–24
• 4.  New Name, Familiar Aim: From Trade Union to Professional Association, 1925–37
• 5.  War and Wage Rounds, 1938–47
• 6.  Religion and the Religious: Roots and Repercussions, c.1948–59
• 7.  Promise and Progress, 1960–9
• 8.  Marriage, Money and (Moderate) Militancy, 1970–7
• 9.  Some Striking Developments, 1978–90
• 10.  Resemblance amid Rupture: The 1999 National Nurses’ Strike, 1991–9
• 11.  From Aftershow to Afterglow, 2000–8
• 12.  A Decade Never to be Forgotten, 2009–19
• Conclusion, Epilogue … and Over to You
• Endnotes
• Bibliography and Sources
• Abbreviations
• Index
• Plates