Struggle or Starve Book Event

Struggle or Starve: Working-Class Unity in Belfast's 1932 Outdoor Relief Riot by  Sean Mitchell One could be forgiven for assuming that deep and bitter sectarian divisions are an immutable and permanent facet of life in Belfast. The subject of this book, at first glance, would appear to be a confirmation of this. After all, the centrepiece of this work is a riot: one that involved all the usual violence, stone throwing and armed response from the state. A riot that involved Catholics and Protestants, barricades at interface areas, attacks on persons and property, even guns and murder. The riots of 1932, as we shall see however, were of a very different kind to those that the media is use to broadcasting across the globe. The backdrop of the story is familiar one, and of a piece with events elsewhere around the world during the same period: poverty, hunger, unemployment and a cruel and unforgiving government administration drove working people to a sharp break with tradition. The historical context was the Great Depression of the 1930s. Like many parts of the globe, the Northern Ireland economy had been decimated by the consequences of the Wall Street Crash. Thousands of Catholic and Protestant workers alike faced a future on the bread line. Those out of work were forced to sign on for ‘Outdoor Relief’ (ODR), where they would work on labour schemes and receive a bare pittance in return. As the unemployment rate skyrocketed to 40% in 1932, the failure of the Unionist government to alleviate the plight of the unemployed was causing serious consternation across the working class. It was here that a relatively small and previously uninfluential organization of communists grouped around the Revolutionary Workers Groups (RWGs) entered the fray. The communists formed an unemployment committee that unionised those on the ODR scheme and provided a focal point for the wider layers of unemployed workers, both Catholic and Protestant, to become organised. Driven by an unmatched audacity and an unyielding fortitude, the committee organised mass demonstrations of the unemployed—some numbering in excess of 60,000—across the city. A strike of the ODR workers themselves was organised, only to incur the wrath of a hostile and unappreciative Unionist administration, who decided to revert to type and crush the movement with force. The plan backfired and the ODR riots were born.