Stars and Strikes

Have you ever been engaged in an industrial dispute? It would frighten the life out of you, and our great revolutionary leaders hardly ever acknowledge this.

A month after I got my first real job, on a Dublin newspaper in the seventies, I was given “protective notice”. This meant, the union leader explained to me, that the paper reserved the right to close down if agreement was not reached between bosses and workers. I was not to mind since the boss class issued a protective notice every time workers asked for their rights. However, I did mind and I offered to agree to everything the paper wanted, since I owed rent, wasn’t due wages until four wages hence, had no savings and couldn’t seek shelter with my parents who lived a hundred and fifty miles away.

The matter, as it happened, was resolved in days. There wasn’t even a mass meeting. The union leadership and the bosses sorted it out among themselves. Happens all the time, I was told. Next time it did, a decade later, there wasn’t even the courtesy of a protective notice. I had left an established paper to join a newly launched one, and the new one closed within a fortnight. No pay, no warning, nothing, and dozens of journalists scrambled to rejoin their old firms, where newcomers had already taken up places.

humiliating panic

The panic was humiliating, the prospects bleak, and I determined to salvage something from the wreckage by taking an electric typewriter from the office as down payment from my allegedly bankrupt employer against the ultimate payment of monies due me. As I marched with this armful to the door, his son blocked the way and said “No way.” He was bigger than me, the union officer present cautioned that I might face criminal charges of theft if I persisted, and I went out empty-handed, meek as a lamb, to eventually continue my career elsewhere, writing about strikes among other things. I never again did make a speech blithely urging workers in other places to down tools against the boss class.

One thing I do remember from that bleak period between jobs was an unsolicited, private, two hundred pound loan from a graceful friend – which I badly needed – and a union meeting at which Shay Healy, newly rich from his Eurovision song-writing success, wrote a huge cheque for sacked staff.

I mention Shay specifically because our paths crossed again at a recent industrial dispute, involving us both. We were two among nine performers who had contracted with Eamonn Doran to do a revue in his Temple Bar hostelry. Before the curtain rose on the last night we were told, without consultation, that Mr Doran had incurred losses by staging the revue and that we would not be paid full wages.

Having had a full-time day-job anyway this last long while, the financial loss to be was easily bearable – and bitter experience had taught me to put by something for a rainy day. Also there with day-jobs to fall back on were John Waters, Eamonn McCann and the redoubtable Shay. This was not the happy lot of the much younger professional performers in the revue, who do this work for a living. Shay, now working in television, but the most experienced person there in the matter of gigs, recalled many nights on the circuit when he had to choose between half-pay or no pay at all.

The only other muscle available was media contact – the four of us worked for national daily and Sunday papers and RTE, and there were many journalists in the audience. Nonetheless, a small strike involving nine workers, however well-known, is no more than that – a small strike, an item of gossip, a one day news wonder – and the professional performers risked getting no pay at all if they refused to go on. They also ran the risk of being known in future as people who let the show down for reasons that no-one could any longer remember; who wasted a Saturday night out for hundreds of blameless people who had paid good money to see them; and who had thrown away an opportunity to show-case their talent, anyway, before a large media contingent.

They were the real workers, dicing with real danger, and they were admirable. The dispute went down to the wire and beyond. Twenty minutes after the curtain was due to go up, we got a promise in writing of payment in full.

journalist amateurs

Five memories stand out from the only completely successful industrial dispute in which I was ever engaged: first, had Eamonn Doran consulted us beforehand, and convinced us of his losses, and asked us to consider a cut in pay, instead of giving us a unilateral ultimatum, we would have been at least biddable – bearing in mind that he got loads of free review publicity for a fledgling pub-theatre, on the strength of the willingness of us journalist amateurs to risk making a laugh of ourselves before other journalists (with professional workers to give value for money no matter what else happened.)

Second, since the majority of our putative media allies in the semi-darkened theatre audience were male and therefore not necessarily distinctive among the other suits present, the sight of a female member of the media concentrated management minds wonderfully. Marian Finucane, whose name was muttered in dispatches between bosses and workers, is nearly six feet tall, strikingly blonde and enjoys putting on the glitter for a night out. Third, it’s a lot easier to stand up against the boss if you have another job to fall back on. Fourth, my phone hasn’t rung since with offers and I don’t know if that’s because I was a showbiz flop or a briefly militant, magnificent, brave, wealthy member of the striking classes.

Fifth, Mr Doran, just over from New York, where I had many a roisterous night in his establishment there, has brought a bit of Big-Apple style to pub-life in Temple Bar and I hope he, all contracts being honoured in full or honourably re-negotiated, goes from strength to strength.