This Thursday will see the biggest strike in the history of the Northern Irish state. At least 15 trade unions, representing workers from across the public sector, will participate in what ICTU’s assistant general secretary, Gerry Murphy, has labelled “a generalised day of action”.
The strike will impact upon education, health, transport and the wider civil service and has come about because of the sense of collective anger and frustration amongst workers at the failure to address the chronic underfunding of our public services.
This has resulted in rates of pay falling considerably behind counterparts across the water and in the Republic, as well as leading to a deterioration in provision, most notably within health and education.
It will be a difficult week for Jeffrey Donaldson and the DUP, whose refusal to accept the deal sitting on the table since before Christmas has provided the British government with an excuse to hold back from releasing funds that could effectively meet the demands of the strikers.
The DUP leader has walked his party into the invidious position of being responsible for depriving tens of thousands of workers of a much needed and deserved pay rise at a time when people continue to experience severe financial pressures.
Up to 170,000 public servants will be involved in the strike, and those on the picket lines will represent all shades of political opinion. Ulster will come to a deafening standstill, the sound of protesting strikers only adding to Jeffrey Donaldson’s woes.
In the event of the DUP and British secretary of state continuing to refuse to budge, there is every expectation strikes will escalate in the weeks and months ahead.
It is somewhat ironic that, in a few months’ time, we will mark the 50th anniversary of the Ulster Workers’ Council Strike.
The DUP leader has walked his party into the invidious position of being responsible for depriving tens of thousands of workers of a much needed and deserved pay rise at a time when people continue to experience severe financial pressures
Those protesting half a century ago were doing so with the expressed intention of bringing down a fledgling power-sharing administration. Their success in realising that objective was in no small part due to the campaign of intimidation waged by loyalist paramilitaries aimed at frightening workers into staying at home. This campaign of terror included murdering two Catholic publicans outside Ballymena for the crime of opening their pub during the strike.
The striking loyalists of 1974 were successful because the state and society continued to be exclusively reflective of and dominated by unionism. The major industries were vulnerable to a coordinated plan of disruption by loyalists due to both the composition of the workforces and knowledge that a sympathetic RUC would not move against them.
Back then, Ulster could only be brought to heel by its loyal sons.
The experience did, however, leave a bitter taste amongst the Westminster elite, captured in Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s scathing assessment of the loyalists as people who “spend their lives sponging on Westminster”. His rueful words betrayed a retreat; the No men would have their day.
Fast forward a decade to the post-Anglo Irish Agreement ‘Day of Action’ in March 1986 inspired by the events of 1974. Feargal Cochrane’s book Unionist Politics and the politics of unionism since the Anglo-Irish Agreement records how, while addressing loyalists in Larne, a certain Jim Allister proclaimed that “the Agreement will either destroy us or we will destroy it. We have shown today that we, loyalists, control this province. Today the prime minister knows that we are not going to be trampled on”.
Alas, in spite of Allister’s hyperbole, the day proved to be a relative damp squib. The Agreement endured, laying the foundation for 1998′s Good Friday accord.
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Further ‘days of action’ and protests designed to bring society to a standstill followed, most notably during the Drumcree protests. These ultimately failed and hastened the process of delivering essential reforms to policing.
More recent efforts to mobilise mass protests and disruptive action as part of the anti-Protocol campaign proved to be an abject failure.
The No men are no longer in control.
Shorn of the ability to bring Ulster to a standstill, they must content themselves with padlocking the gates of Stormont in protest at their relative impotence in the modern age.
The labour movement’s impressive mobilisation this Thursday is beyond anything the No men could muster in 2024, a striking reflection of the pace and extent of change that continues to shape our developing society.
