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
Now again this is quite remarkable, because the initial pickets were led by women.
the Irish American women pickets as they were known, who'd been set up to picket the British Embassy in Washington and to gain publicity for the Irish cause precisely because they were women.
But again, Dockland was a very male preserve.
So the fact that these women were accepted
and that their leaflets were taken and distributed by mail workmen.
gives you a glimpse of how this issue had struck a chord.
The strike began to spread.
At meetings there were calls for our brothers in every port where British ships enter to refuse to unload them.
The dockers particularly called on Labour in Great Britain, Canada and Australia to help in this fight for justice and civilization.
Some three thousand dock workers also took action in Brooklyn.
And speakers there asserted that Labour in ports throughout the world would soon combine to humble Great Britain and compel her to recognise the Irish Republic.
So this was very quickly and explicitly political strike.
Telegrams of support were read from dockers in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans.
pledging the support of the local waterfront unions in these cities for the growing movement.
Now this was recognized at the time as a very explicitly political strike and for a cause which was not intrinsic to American labour, but was actually about the freedom of Ireland.
It was also very notably a multiracial and multi ethnic protest.
One observer described how Negroes went out, Italians and Slavs went out, Englishmen went out, every race was represented in the protest.
Indeed, the leaflets distributed by the Irish American women pickets had included those aimed explicitly at Italian and also at African American workers.
One of the leaflets aimed at the blacks stressed, Brothers, if you scab Ireland, you scab the Negro race.
Emancipation of the earth is the emancipation of all mankind.
Showing 741–760 of 1,140 · page 38 of 57
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