On Friday 11 April a meeting of the United Trades and Labour Council,
to which Byrne had been a delegate, took place. At that meeting Irish
Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU) representative Sean
Dowling proposed that the trade unions take over Town Hall and have
meetings there, but the proposal was not voted on.[5] On Saturday 12
April the ITGWU workers in the Cleeve's factory in Lansdowne voted
to go on strike. On Sunday 13 April, after a twelve-hour discussion
and lobbying of the delegates by workers, a general strike was called
by the city's United Trades and Labour Council.
The union was founded by James Larkin in January 1909 as a general
union.[1][2] Initially drawing its membership from branches of the
Liverpool-based National Union of Dock Labourers, from which Larkin had
been expelled, it grew to include workers in a range of industries. The
ITGWU logo was the Red Hand of Ulster, which is synonymous with ancient
Gaelic Ulster.
James Larkin (28 January 1874 – 30 January 1947), sometimes known as Jim
Larkin, was an Irish republican, socialist and trade union leader. He was
one of the founders of the Irish Labour Party along with James Connolly
and William O'Brien, and later the founder of the Irish Worker League
(a communist party which was recognised by the Comintern as the Irish
section of the world communist movement), as well as the Irish Transport
and General Workers' Union (ITGWU) and the Workers' Union of Ireland
(the two unions later merged to become SIPTU, Ireland's largest trade
union). Along with Connolly and Jack White, he was also a founder of the
Irish Citizen Army (ICA; a paramilitary group which was integral to both
the Dublin lock-out and the Easter Rising). Larkin was a leading figure
in the Syndicalist movement.[3]
So a strike instigated by a union founded by syndicalist who also founded
revolutionary unions endorsed by the cominform, who was yet to pivot to the NEP
and still advocating global union based insurrection to trigger socialist revolution.
Doesn't mean the proto-SU planned this activity particularly, but claiming 'no connection'
when people involved were part of global revolutionary activity directly connected
to groups descending from the internationale and associated with the cominform is also just as tenuous if not moreso.