Brian Hanley
speaker
1,140 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 16 Sep
Brian Hanley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
During nineteen nineteen there was an orgy of looting and rioting during a police strike.
And in the same year there were very significant race riots in June.
When mob violence was directed against African and Chinese sailors and against Liverpool's black community itself.
Now was significant that the Liverpool Irish were notable for their involvement in all these disturbances.
So it was always going to be important how the struggle for independence was viewed in a city like Liverpool, a city with very deep connections to Ireland north and south, and a city divided along the lines of Unionist and Nationalist.
During April nineteen twenty there was a hunger strike by Republican prisoners in Ireland.
The trade union movement in Ireland called a general strike, which lasted two days and was hugely successful, leading to the release of the prisoners.
During this period, a similar hunger strike involving over thirty prisoners took place in London's Wormwood Scrubs.
A Liverpool counsellor, PJ Kelly, who was president of the Irish Self Determination League, called for similar strike action to support these prisoners in Liverpool.
Kelly was from Tyrone originally.
He'd been a home ruler before the war, then became immersed in labor politics, and after 1916 had shifted towards Irish republicanism.
In april nineteen twenty he asserted that there is no doubt Liverpool is with Ireland.
And he demanded that the city's mayor intervene with the British Government on behalf of the prisoners in Warrenwood Scrubs, or he threatened there would be stoppages on Liverpool stocks that would then spread to elsewhere in the city.
So officials of the Dockland Unions warned that Kelly had no right to threaten sussaction.
Two days later Kelly would claim that sixteen thousand dockers, two thousand warehouse men, and two thousand coal heavers had come out.
These strikers also then called on our British fellow workmen to uphold the true principles of liberty and democracy.
Again it was significant that Irish women began to pick at the docks which were a male preserve.
But it was also significant that this strike did not have official trade union backing.
At Westminster, TP O'Connor, the MP for Scotland Road, a home ruler, expressed his fear of what might follow if the situation with the hunger strike in Wormwood Scrubs was not resolved.
But the British Home Secretary, Edward Short, stressed that the government would not yield to any sort of threat from Liverpool.
Showing 561–580 of 1,140 · page 29 of 57
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