In March 1993, as the Minister for the new Department of Enterprise and Employment, I had the Cabinet agree to make the first Monday in May a public holiday. It was Ireland’s belated recognition of the international day in celebration of the contribution that working men and women make to the development of our society and to our collective prosperity.

It had taken a long time for the Labour Party to have this policy objective converted into law. Mayday is celebrated worldwide as a public holiday with the unique exception of the United States. Their Labour Day takes place in September of each year. The origins of Mayday, however, owe a particular debt to American workers and their trade unions.

It all began in the 1880s as the United States moved rapidly from its agrarian and farming origins to become an emerging industrial power, not unlike modern China today. The raw capitalism of that era produced enormous wealth for the owners of capital but at the cost of appalling working conditions for the men, women and even children who toiled in the new factories.

Many were forced to work fourteen-hour shifts in excruciatingly uncomfortable conditions. Legislative efforts by reform minded politicians to legally constrain these appalling conditions had failed.

In 1884 the Federation of Organised Trades and Labour Unions in the United States passed a resolution restricting the working day to eight hours from and after 1 May 1886. It also called for a general strike to achieve this goal in the light of the failed legislative attempts to change the law.
At that time, Chicago was the major centre of support for this proposal. It was also a predominately Irish city where more than 40 per cent of the population had Irish origins. But local business leaders were fiercely opposed to reform.

On May Day, 1886, demonstrators clashed with police in the famous ‘Haymarket Riots’, resulting in the deaths of seven policemen and four protestors. A bomb was thrown, and a number of labour radicals were charged with murder in what was as described as a ‘kangaroo court’.

Eight were found guilty of conspiracy to murder, but none were convicted of actually throwing the bomb. Four were hanged; one committed suicide and the remaining three were subsequently pardoned in 1893.

The whole episode galvanised not just America but the rest of the industrialised world. Not only was the eight-hour day demand to become standard across the globe, Mayday would become a public holiday as well.

We tend to think that globalisation is a recent, modern phenomenon, but it is not. International capitalism, at the turn of the second last century, was highly interconnected and as a consequence so too was the international labour movement.

When James Connolly and Jim Larkin founded the Irish Labour Party as the political arm of the trade union movement, they were well aware that, across Europe, socialist, social democratic and Labour parties had been established by the labour movement to campaign for the legal changes and improved social conditions which we now take for granted.

Connolly was an internationally known political figure. At the end of the 1913 Dublin lockout, another struggle about union recognition, Jim Larkin went on to the United States and ended up in jail for his labour organising activities in that country.

Today, the Irish Labour Party is a member of the Socialist International, a worldwide organisation uniting workers, trade unions and the politicians who support them, and is also a member of the Party of European Socialists– the second largest, and arguably the most influential, group within the European Parliament.

Mayday is celebrated, across the globe, in recognition of the role of labour and the dignity of work in our society. On 2nd April 1993, the day of my birthday, I was proud to sign, on behalf of all those who fought for the rights of workers, the Order making May Day a public holiday in Ireland.