James Baird is one of the lost souls of modern Irish history. His story coincides with the revolutionary era in Ireland, but also represents one of its neglected currents. Emanating from the townlands of County Tyrone, Baird’s family were a typical mix of Protestant denominations, and he was one of many who moved to Belfast for work in the late nineteenth century.
He listed his occupation in the 1901 Census as an ‘iron caulker’, and he joined the Boilermakers’ Society, which had a complicated relationship with the broader Labour movement in Ireland. Baird applied to be a Boilermakers’ delegate to the British Labour Party at the same time as he surfed the waves of socialism and Irish Home Rule.
Baird was one of roughly 1,850 Protestant socialists and trade unionists who were attacked along with an estimated 7,500 Catholic workers during the shipyard expulsions of June 1920. He was hurled into the River Lagan and, while struggling in the water, was showered with rivets and washers. For this reason, Baird might be seen as the original and archetypal ‘Rotten Prod’. It was the ‘44’ hour strike of 1919, however, which brought Baird to prominence in the eyes of some Irish workers. Baird was aware that the First World War had altered the game in terms of the struggle between capital and labour, which led him to think strategically about the ‘44’ action.
Baird was one of roughly 1,850 Protestant socialists and trade unionists who were attacked along with an estimated 7,500 Catholic workers during the shipyard expulsions of June 1920. He was hurled into the River Lagan and, while struggling in the water, was showered with rivets and washers. For this reason, Baird might be seen as the original and archetypal ‘Rotten Prod’. It was the ‘44’ hour strike of 1919, however, which brought Baird to prominence in the eyes of some Irish workers. Baird was aware that the First World War had altered the game in terms of the struggle between capital and labour, which led him to think strategically about the ‘44’ action.
The strike’s leaders, including ‘Islandmen’ workers, unsuccessfully sought a shorter working week (44 rather than a 54 hours), but Baird was also aware that the ‘hunger weapon’ and the ‘haunting fear of starvation’ that might be used against the strikers to thwart their spirit. Though Baird was clearly influenced by James Connolly’s Marxism and militant industrial trade unionism, rank and file trade unionists had arranged mass meetings of shipyard and engineering workers in August 1919, generating a broad subaltern movement that could include a leader as different as William Grant (later a Unionist cabinet minister). In the January 1920 municipal elections, commonly acknowledged as the high point of Labour politics in Ireland, Baird crowned his promise by being elected as a councillor for the Ormeau ward.
After the targeted workplace violence, Baird was a signatory of the Belfast Expelled Workers’ Fund, though his requests for help from British trade unionists at the September 1921 Trades Union Congress in Cardiff fell on deaf ears. Baird compared the rioting and expulsions with those of previous decades and laid the blame for the violence of 1920 firmly at the door of Sir Edward Carson’s ‘ascendancy gang’. Baird railed how ‘The “boss” class’ had ‘resurrected old spites to divide Irishmen, and labour men whether they were trade unionists, whether they were Sinn Feiners or not’, which led to the violence in the shipyards. Thus the ‘real objects of the capitalists in the North of Ireland in fostering religious differences was to break trade unionism and to represent Irishmen to the British people as unable to manage their own affairs’ (Irish Times, 8 September 1921). That same month Baird was part of a delegation that met with Éamon de Valera to protest against partition. Baird factually asserted that this would place power in the hands of those responsible for the violence of 1920, and earlier that year he was the only Corporation representative to oppose a motion backed by James Craig and the Lord Mayor of Belfast calling for Belfast City Hall to hold the opening proceedings of the new parliament of Northern Ireland.
O’Connor briefly addresses the present author’s work on the ‘Rotten Prod’ profile, referring to a ‘celebratory’ essay I co-authored with Dr Aaron Edwards on the subject. As it was published in a book called Essays in Honour of Joe Law (2018), edited by Dr Seán Byers – who worked in the Trademark organisation with Law, who died suddenly in 2016 – it would have been strange if the essay had been anything other. The present author and Edwards are also stated to have produced work that amounts to ‘little more than a list of radical or socialist Protestants’. Aside from chiding an obituary essay to a trade unionist who died prematurely, this is a similarly odd contention, as just one other individual was ‘listed’ in our essay on Joe Law. My own single-authored article in the Studi Irlandesi journal concentrated on the shipyard expulsions and then looked at Baird, Betty Sinclair, and Joe Law as exemplars of the ‘Rotten Prod’ tradition (of which more later). One senses the average miff of a scholar simply beaten to the punch in print. Henry Patterson’s important paper on the Belfast shipyard expulsions, delivered in Belfast in November 2019, also precedes Rotten Prod and offers a more cogent analysis of that critical episode.
After the targeted workplace violence, Baird was a signatory of the Belfast Expelled Workers’ Fund, though his requests for help from British trade unionists at the September 1921 Trades Union Congress in Cardiff fell on deaf ears. Baird compared the rioting and expulsions with those of previous decades and laid the blame for the violence of 1920 firmly at the door of Sir Edward Carson’s ‘ascendancy gang’. Baird railed how ‘The “boss” class’ had ‘resurrected old spites to divide Irishmen, and labour men whether they were trade unionists, whether they were Sinn Feiners or not’, which led to the violence in the shipyards. Thus the ‘real objects of the capitalists in the North of Ireland in fostering religious differences was to break trade unionism and to represent Irishmen to the British people as unable to manage their own affairs’ (Irish Times, 8 September 1921). That same month Baird was part of a delegation that met with Éamon de Valera to protest against partition. Baird factually asserted that this would place power in the hands of those responsible for the violence of 1920, and earlier that year he was the only Corporation representative to oppose a motion backed by James Craig and the Lord Mayor of Belfast calling for Belfast City Hall to hold the opening proceedings of the new parliament of Northern Ireland.
O’Connor briefly addresses the present author’s work on the ‘Rotten Prod’ profile, referring to a ‘celebratory’ essay I co-authored with Dr Aaron Edwards on the subject. As it was published in a book called Essays in Honour of Joe Law (2018), edited by Dr Seán Byers – who worked in the Trademark organisation with Law, who died suddenly in 2016 – it would have been strange if the essay had been anything other. The present author and Edwards are also stated to have produced work that amounts to ‘little more than a list of radical or socialist Protestants’. Aside from chiding an obituary essay to a trade unionist who died prematurely, this is a similarly odd contention, as just one other individual was ‘listed’ in our essay on Joe Law. My own single-authored article in the Studi Irlandesi journal concentrated on the shipyard expulsions and then looked at Baird, Betty Sinclair, and Joe Law as exemplars of the ‘Rotten Prod’ tradition (of which more later). One senses the average miff of a scholar simply beaten to the punch in print. Henry Patterson’s important paper on the Belfast shipyard expulsions, delivered in Belfast in November 2019, also precedes Rotten Prod and offers a more cogent analysis of that critical episode.
The best parts of this book occur when Baird’s instinctively thran northern Labour profile is matched with southern rural agitation as Ireland negotiated the end of its revolutionary era. Indeed, one of the chief contributions of this book is its exploration of the neglected agrarian strife in Waterford, which also spilled over into Kilkenny and Carlow. O’Connor has always been a talented digger and there is much in the sixth and seventh chapters that will add to the knowledge of historians of the revolutionary era and the Labour movement. By this point, in 1923, Baird had lived through the tumult of Belfast as a local councillor and was versed in public speaking and in his role as a union branch secretary.
Baird stood as an Irish Labour candidate at the August 1923 Dáil election, polling surprisingly well in Waterford, though relinquishing a seat on transfers to his running mate John Butler, a farmer and trade unionist. A ‘Special Correspondent’ for the Irish Times (25 August 1923) printed in its preamble to polling day that Baird had ‘made himself conspicuous by the extreme bitterness of his speeches during the past few months’, speeches it claimed might win him votes from East Waterford agricultural workers, but not the trade unionists of the city nor West Waterford workers.
The following month Baird was arrested and imprisoned without charge in Kilkenny Prison under the Public Safety (Emergency Powers) Act. Poems and articles appeared in his honour in The Workers’ Republic journal, and it also called for workers to submit resolutions to their unions across Ireland for a general stoppage to secure his release. All evidence of Baird’s activities showed a man increasingly out of step with the nascent Free State; the intolerance he faced in the north in the summer of 1920 arcing round to coercive anti-trade union treatment set against him in Kilkenny. After a hunger strike, undertaken at the same moment as republican prisoners, he was soon released from prison. Baird emigrated in 1927 to Brisbane, Queensland, where little was known of his life. He died in Brisbane in 1948, and it was to be hoped that O’Connor would have helped fill this void.
We find out a fraction about Baird’s daughters Helene and Nora, who were recognised by the Australian government for their services to schools and music. Then a strange thing happens. O’Connor concedes prior to the abbreviations page in ‘A note on James Baird in Australia’ that Baird’s granddaughter Victoria supplied him with information as the book was going to print. Baird struggled to secure work so helped his wife Frances open a boarding house. He continued to describe his occupation as a ‘boilermaker’ in the Australian census, and Victoria recalled him recounting his memories of Belfast (including working on the Titanic) and taking long walks. Other memorabilia is mentioned; but having been presented with this potential quarry, the opportunity is left behind before the book begins and Baird ultimately evades the historian once more.
There is absolutely nothing in this book on the legacy of ‘Rotten Prods’, and thus nothing on their significance. They exist in isolation, locked in the one man. No lineage here. The fact the term was still in usage decades later was – is – a clue as to its potency. There is also precious little on the religiosity of this phrase (which is referenced in the exact title of the book, the name of the ‘insult’), which is never explored. O’Connor suggests that Baird was reflective of many Protestant workers, though the bigger contradictory question (he thinks) is why there were not more, and that this form of Protestant dissent was merely a part of a broader laager of Ulster Liberalism. Simple but complex.
Rotten Prods were always plural; never singular, but we get only the latter in this book because that is the author’s frame. Handsomely produced by the ever-excellent offices of UCD Press, Rotten Prod should have been an important biographical entry into the expanding histories of Labour and political division in Northern Ireland. Though it falls short – and is short at 98 pages (minus references) – the important thing was the attempt. The book’s inherent limits prompt more.
Emmet O’Connor, 2022, Rotten Prod: The Unlikely Career of Dongaree Baird. UCD Press 130pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1910820858We find out a fraction about Baird’s daughters Helene and Nora, who were recognised by the Australian government for their services to schools and music. Then a strange thing happens. O’Connor concedes prior to the abbreviations page in ‘A note on James Baird in Australia’ that Baird’s granddaughter Victoria supplied him with information as the book was going to print. Baird struggled to secure work so helped his wife Frances open a boarding house. He continued to describe his occupation as a ‘boilermaker’ in the Australian census, and Victoria recalled him recounting his memories of Belfast (including working on the Titanic) and taking long walks. Other memorabilia is mentioned; but having been presented with this potential quarry, the opportunity is left behind before the book begins and Baird ultimately evades the historian once more.
There is absolutely nothing in this book on the legacy of ‘Rotten Prods’, and thus nothing on their significance. They exist in isolation, locked in the one man. No lineage here. The fact the term was still in usage decades later was – is – a clue as to its potency. There is also precious little on the religiosity of this phrase (which is referenced in the exact title of the book, the name of the ‘insult’), which is never explored. O’Connor suggests that Baird was reflective of many Protestant workers, though the bigger contradictory question (he thinks) is why there were not more, and that this form of Protestant dissent was merely a part of a broader laager of Ulster Liberalism. Simple but complex.
Rotten Prods were always plural; never singular, but we get only the latter in this book because that is the author’s frame. Handsomely produced by the ever-excellent offices of UCD Press, Rotten Prod should have been an important biographical entry into the expanding histories of Labour and political division in Northern Ireland. Though it falls short – and is short at 98 pages (minus references) – the important thing was the attempt. The book’s inherent limits prompt more.
Emmet O’Connor, 2022, Rotten Prod: The Unlikely Career of Dongaree Baird. UCD Press 130pp.
🖼 Dr Connal Parr is an Assistant Professor in History, Northumbria University.
