Arthur Scargill speaks in Dublin

dublin | worker & community struggles and protests | event notice Wednesday December 08, 2004 00:36 by Des Derwin - Dublin Council of Trade Unions

20th Anniversary of the Great British Miners Strike

Remembering is Learning

Public Meeting

Organised by the Dublin Council of Trade Unions

Arthur Scargill speaks on the Great British Miners Strike, March 1984 - March 1985.

8 p.m. Monday 17th January 2005

Liberty Hall, Dublin.

Twenty years ago tens of thousands of British miners in the National Union of Mineworkers fought Margaret Thatcher and the Tory government for a whole year. They fought to save their industry. But they fought for the whole labour movement in Britain. The defeat of the miners was a turning point after which the trade unions were weakened for almost two decades. In recent times organised workers are finding a returned strength, in Britain and elsewhere.

When the strike began there were 181,000 miners. Today there are a few thousand. Thatcher’s breaking of the miners was a spearhead for what today is called neo-liberal economics: faced today here by workers from An Post to Irish Ferries to Aer Lingus. First the strongest section of British workers, the Miners, had to be broken. She literally sent in the cavalry to baton the miners and their wives off the streets. But the miners, the women’s support movement and the communities fought back with epic heroism.

In Ireland, the close links with Britain and the daily detail in the media meant that the Miners’ defeat was felt here too as a defeat for trade unionism. For years after it was said when workers faced struggle, ‘things have changed, if they can smash the British Miners how can we win?’.

The Miners strike was our struggle in a more direct way. Millions of pounds were raised in a great solidarity campaign, in which the Dublin Council of Trade Unions played a leading part. Irish involvement was even closer: when the British courts froze the assets of the NUM, funds were transferred here with the assistance of the Irish movement.

Arthur Scargill was the leader of the NUM throughout the strike. His name will forever be associated with it.

To mark the end of the Great Miners Strike Arthur Scargill will speak at a public meeting organised by the Dublin Council of Trade Unions on 17th January 2005 in Liberty Hall, Dublin. To remember and discuss the events and lessons of the Great Miners Strike is to learn from the past to provide for the future.