The President of Ireland, Dr. Patrick J. Hillery, unveiling the monument of Jim Larkin, June 1979 (Image Credit: Dublin City Public Libraries Digital Depository)
There is something magic about the monument to trade union leader James Larkin in the centre of O’Connell Street. Monuments to political leaders tend to capture men and women in a particular pose, which is relaxed but commanding. By comparison, Larkin is captured in Oisin Kelly’s monument exactly as he was in life. It calls to mind the words of biographer Samuel Levenson, who insisted that Larkin was “revolution incarnate; a man able to set crowds aflame while seeming to speak to each listener individually.” In a similar vein, Seán Ó Faoláin would recount him as a man who “burned with a simplicity of belief in his fellow-man, and his speech to them was like a lava.”
The monument to Larkin, in popular memory, is most synonymous with the days of the 1913 Lockout, calling to mind the defiant meeting held on Sackville Street despite a police proclamation prohibiting the gathering at the end of August 1913. In reality, the depiction of Larkin is based on a later image of the union later, captured by the photographer Joseph Cashman in 1923, as Larkin returned from the United States and a period of grueling imprisonment which had played its toll. He returned to an Ireland partitioned and a Dublin where Liberty Hall was in the hands of a new union leadership. In some ways, he was at his lowest ebb, far removed from the heroic spirit of 1913 Dublin a decade earlier.
It was perhaps in the spirit of Jim Larkin that when the President of Ireland unveiled the monument on a summer evening in 1979, there were a few dissenting voices in the crowd. Placards reading “the inner-city has not changed since 1913” were reportedly carried by some. Among the great and the good gathered for the unveiling were the Auxiliary Bishop of Dublin, the Soviet Ambassador to Ireland, leaders of the Workers Union of Ireland and Irish Congress of Trade Unions, and the leaders of the major Irish political parties. Hillery proclaimed:
This statue is a monument to the achievement of so much of what Larkin laboured for. In the ages to come it will stand, a work of art raised to the memory of a great man who spent his energies and talents in the cause of his fellow-man, an inspiration to all who gaze upon it to strive on behalf of their brothers and sisters everywhere.
Larkin would have found humour in the Irish Independent describing him as “the greatest of our Labour leaders” in its report on the unveiling of the monument, given the role of the paper in the 1913 dispute. Much had changed, and a dead Larkin was no threat. Press coverage was overwhelmingly positive on the artistic merit of the monument, depicting a bronze figure of Larkin, weighing almost a ton and some nine feet high, standing proudly upon his plinth.
Denis Larkin, President Patrick Hillery, Russian Ambassador Anatoli Kaplin, Fintan Larkin attend the unveiling of the monument (Dublin City Public Libraries Digital Depository)
Within days of the monument being unveiled, camera crews were filming for Strumpet City in the vicinity of the monument, struggling to keep Larkin out of sight. There were other issues too; an Irish Press reporter noted of filming that “Jim Larkin’s cab was pulled by a very sweet-natured horse, who couldn’t quite get the hang of stopping in the right place. I fear his career in show-business could be quite short lived.”
What strikes many people immediately about the monument is the size of the hands of Larkin. As art historian Paula Murphy has noted, this is a distinctive feature of Kelly’s work, clearly demonstrating the artists awareness of how important they were to capturing the spirit of the subject:
Hands are an important device in Kelly’s work generally, and perhaps nowhere more obviously than in the Larkin statue, where they have immense presence. Fergus Kelly remembers his father worrying away at the hands and the difficulties of them being seen from below. Although the sculptor never knew Larkin, he clearly recognized not just that the man had what were described elsewhere as ‘great hands like shovels’, but how important they were to the passionate nature of the depiction.
By 1979 Oisín Kelly was considered the leading public sculptor in Dublin. His work included the stunning Children of Lir monument in the Garden of Remembrance, ensuring his standing in Irish artistic life. On O’Connell Street, his bronze statue would be joined by the immortal words of Seán O’Casey and Patrick Kavanagh on either side of the monument, while a bronze plaque below Larkin includes words borrowed from the French Revolution, and which once appeared in the masthead of radical newspaper The Workers’ Republic:
The great appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise!
Ní uasal aon uasal ach sinne bheith íseal. Éirímis!
Le grands ne sont grands que parce que nous sommes a genoux. Levons-nous!
A curious feature of the monument, still visible today, concerns the year of Larkin’s birth. At the time of the unveiling of the statue, this was listed as 1876, though later historic research has established 1874 as the year of his birth with certainty. The correction of this mistake is still visible in the plinth today.
Jim Larkin died in January 1947. In a memorial piece entitled ‘The Catholic Communist’,capturing many of the complexities and contradictions of the giant of Irish Labour, Bertram D. Wolfe wrote that:
During a bitter blizzard on January 30, 1947, Jim Larkin died. Despite the cold and snow, the tumult of Irish crowds which be so loved surrounded the approaches to Saint Mary’s Church on Haddington Road, Dublin…He lay in state in the church while those who loved him, and many who did not, passed the coffin where one could see the brown rosary beads in his hand, given him by the Archbishop of Dublin.