The Dublin Docker: Working Lives of Dublin’s Deep-Sea Port

Description

As a port city, Dublin owes much to the labourers who strove against the heavy-duty tide of imports and exports; a league of thousands who were hired on a day-to-day basis for generations, defining the bustle of Dublin city centre – a cornerstone of the urban industrial working class in Ireland. The Dublin Docker is a sumptuously illustrated history that determines the dockers’ and stevedores’ importance as an industrial subculture within the Dublin that they navigated.

The authors excavated the archive of the Dublin Dockworkers Preservation Society to discover a wealth of photographs, spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s, that capture the dockers’ arduous labour and the energy of Dublin port. These evocative images bring this beautifully designed social history to life, complementing the inimitable voices revealed in interviews with the dockers themselves. How they negotiated working hours and pay, the changes that came with epochal events – the Dublin Lockout, the First World War, the Easter Rising and War of Independence – and the innumerable myths and ‘dark stories’ that shrouded their image: The Dublin Docker is a history of the dockers and their deep-woven connection to the city.

Table of Contents

1. The Buttonmen and The Read
2. Blue Brimstone, The Twelve Man Reel, and the Singer-Out
3. The Port, Hobblers and The Gulls of Ringsend
4. God Didn’t Make Half Days
5. The Home Front
6. The Legendary Dublin Docker
7. The Essence of a Tradition
8. Afterword: No More on the Dockside

About the Authors

Aileen O’Carroll is the author of Working Time, Knowledge Work and Post-Industrial Society: Unpredictable Work and a contributor to Time & Society, Saothar and Sociology. She is the manager of the Irish Qualitative Data Archive and a research associate attached the Life History and Social Change project.

Don Bennett has lectured in University College Dublin and at universities in the United States. He has published on a variety of topics, including that based on research on the street traders of Dublin and on the Concerned Parents Against Drugs movement in Dublin.