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
Significantly, James Sexton, who was the leader of the National Union of Dock Laborers, which represented many of the men on Liverpool docks, and also a labour MP for St.
Helens, confirmed that the strike was not recognized by his union.
Indeed, Sexton asserted that if Schinfeiners strike they will do so without any authority from the Union and they will receive no strike pay.
Sexton was of Irish Catholic ancestry.
He'd actually been a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Lancashire in his youth.
By this stage now, as a Labour MP, he was opposed to strikes if they can be avoided.
And he was very conscious of the danger as he saw it of the Irish question splitting the British Labour Movement.
So a strike had begun on the twenty ninth of April.
But the main Liverpool newspapers refused to carry strike notices, while the Unionist press in both Britain and Ireland described the stoppage as an ignominious failure and as a very partial affair, with little inconvenience caused.
The Belfast newsletter claimed that despite pickets and speeches from what they call the dinner hour agitators, eighty percent of the workforce had stayed at work.
and that there was no lack of substitutes for the Irishmen who did go on strike.
Other reports noted that the strike is mainly confined to the men engaged on the Irish boats, but some ocean sailings had been postponed.
Because a fair percentage of the strikers are coal heavers who would have been needed in the engine room of the Great Liners.
The strikers returned to work on the second of May, claiming success, as the hunger strike in Mormood Scrubs was called off.
Now during the strike Sexton had explained that his union could not back this action because it was composed of a very mixed political crowd.
We have English members who have no views on the Irish question, and some whose views are very pronounced on one side or the other.
Probably Liverpool dockers are half Schinfeiners, and the other half the other way of thinking.
But as a union, we can do nothing at all.
At a Labour meeting in St.
Helens, Sexton was heckled as a traitor, but responded by asking why Irishmen did not call out their own trade unions.
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