Ulster Unionist Labour Association

The Ulster Unionist Labour Association (UULA) was an association of trade unionists founded by Edward Carson in June 1918, aligned with the Ulster Unionists in Ireland. Members were known as Labour Unionists. In Britain, 1918 and 1919 were marked by intense class conflict. This phenomenon spread to Ireland, the whole of which was part of the United Kingdom at the time. This period also saw a large increase in trade union membership and a series of strikes. These union activities raised fears in a section of the Ulster Unionist leadership, principally Edward Carson and R. Dawson Bates. Carson at this time was president of the British Empire Union, and had been predisposed to amplify the danger of a Bolshevik outbreak in Britain.

Founding

The Ulster Unionist Labour Association was made up of trade unionists and Ulster Unionists and was founded by Carson along with J. M. Andrews as a means of instigating a purge from the local trade union movement of 'Bolsheviks' and republicans. Both Carson and Bates feared this class conflict and the development of a militant Sinn Féin would threaten the class alliance with dissolution which had been embodied in the old Ulster Volunteers. By sounding the counter-revolutionary alarm, it would be a call to "loyal workers" against what it considered the twin threats of socialism and republicanism. Members included Tommy Henderson, later an independent Unionist member of parliament.

1918 General Election

During the 1918 general election the aims of the UULA were set out by Bates. In a letter to Carson he stated that they would be used as a means of distracting younger members of the working class from the Independent Labour Party, who held views which were very different from their own organisation, i.e. socialism.

The Belfast Labour Party put four candidates forward, but they lost out to two UULA and two Unionist candidates. Thomas Henry Burn in Belfast St Anne's, Samuel McGuffin in Belfast Shankill, and Thompson Donald in Belfast Victoria.

Workers' strike

Predominantly Protestant, Belfast engineering and shipyard workers, traditionally well organised, staged a three-week strike demanding a 10-hour reduction in the working week. This was done in defiance of the national leadership of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions. The strike was extended to include electricity and municipal gas workers, causing large sections of industry and commerce to close down. They began to publish a daily newspaper and a General Strike Committee was formed and began to issue permits allowing only "necessary" production.

Paul Collins suggests that the expulsions were partly the result of a speech made by Carson on 12 July, Orange Order celebrations linking Labour with Sinn Féin: "…These men who come forward as the friends of Labour care no more about Labour than does the man in the moon. Their real object, and the real insidious nature of their propaganda is that they mislead and bring about disunity amongst our own people and in the end before we know where we are, we may find ourselves in the same bondage and slavery as is the rest of Ireland in the South and West."

Collins however suggests that the direct cause of the expulsions was the killing of Banbridge RIC man Colonel Smyth on 7 July in Cork. Rail Union members in the south of Ireland refused to allow his body to travel home by train, leading many Loyalists to then identify the Labour movement with his assassins. It was on the day of his funeral, Collins says, that the expulsions began, resulting in ten thousand Catholics and so-called "Rotten Prods" with connections to Labour.

Decline

The organisation was never able to attract leading trade unionists, and soon declined in importance. While Andrews and William Grant were initially able to speak on its behalf in the Parliament of Northern Ireland, in later years only the less prominent John William Kennedy and occasional senators sat in the Stormont Parliament.

The Great Depression saw many workers look instead to the official trade union movement and the Northern Ireland Labour Party, and many branches of the UULA became moribund. A drive to reinvigorate the UULA was launched in the 1950s, although only one new branch was formed, in Derry.

References

Bibliography

Peter Barberis, John McHugh and Mike Tyldesley, Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations
Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson, Northern Ireland: 1921 / 2001 Political Forces and Social Classes, Serif (London 2002),
Jurgen Elvert, Northern Ireland, past and present (Nordirland in Geschichte und Gegenwart), Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1994. .
Graham S. Walker, A History of the Ulster Unionist Party: Protest, pragmatism and pessimism, Manchester University Press (2004),
Brian Lalor, The Encyclopaedia of Ireland, Gill & Macmillan (Ireland 2003),