Charleville Mall Library will host a talk by Joe Mooney entitled ‘We’ll give every one of them two black eyes’: The East Wall School Boys Strike of 1911. On 13 September 1911 pupils of the Wharf School in Dublin’s Docklands declared they were on strike!

The boys were inspired by what was happening in the area at the time. Jim Larkin’s Irish Transport & General Workers Union (ITGWU) was hugely influential among the local Port workers and a UK wide national rail strike had just spread to the North Wall. The boys identified themselves as a ‘Transport & School Boys Union’ and tried to draw other schools into their activity. This talk will explain the background to the strike, how the ringleaders were treated by the school authorities and how in the turbulent years that followed some of them continued to engage in revolutionary activity.

Joe Mooney is a member of the East Wall History Group and one of the organisers of the annual Sarah Lundberg Summer School.