THE ULSTER CONFLICT natural part of their make-up, saw no contradiction between those two themes and even managed to add in a dissonant third - socialism. The major developing trade union at this time was the Irish Transport Workers Union which had been started by James Larkin in Dublin after he had been sacked from his N.U.D.L. job for over-activity. Lakin normally managed to give his socialism precedence over bis NationalismCatholicism, but the buried aspects of his ideology often carne to the fore at times of stress, as during the great 1913 strike and struggle in Dublin, at the time when the prospect of the separation of Ulster from Ireland was first mooted, and at the outbreak of the First World War when Redmond, the leader of the Irish parliamentary party, called on his supporters to volunteer for the British army. Larkin's lieutenant during the 1913 strike, James Connolly, had had close relations with the I.R.B. before he emigrated to America in 1903, and he was consciously nationalist as well as consciously Marxist in his ideas and propaganda. He considered, declared and published that the national liberation of Ireland was necessary before a true class struggle could develop in the country, and this was to have serious consequences since Connolly was left in charge of the Irish Transport Workers' Union and the Irish Citizens Army (a small force recruited to defend Dublin workers from the brutality of police repression) when Larkin departed, ostensibly temporarily, for America in 1914 on a fund raising trip. He did not return until eight years later, that is, after the 1916 rising, the war against the British, and the Irish civil war. HOME RULE, FOR THE THIRD AND LAST TIME The years 1909/10 had been occupied at Westminster by a struggle between the Liberal government and the predominantly Conservative House of Lords, for hegemony over legislation, because the Lords still retained an ultimate veto. This struggle had pushed the Irish question into the far background because the Liberals still had a huge majority in the House of Commons. In 1910 the Liberals decided to hold an election to gain support for their policy of restricting the obstructive powers of the Lords; as a result of this the Liberals once again became dependent on the vote of the Irish parliamentary_ party for their overall majority. The consequence of this was that they were pledged once more to introduce a Home Rule bill after the Lords problem had been resolved. 45
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