The defeat of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union in the 1913 Dublin Lockout broadly indicated how the balance of class forces in the Irish Free State would reside with the employers, owing partly to the support of an emergent, native class of landowners and partly to the ideological dominance of Catholicism and nationalism. Internally, the labour movement remained divided between the British-based amalgamated unions who advocated continued sectionalist, wage-militant organisation and their less organised colleagues who wanted to formalise labour-state relations along industrial unionist lines in order to increase the unions’ overall bargaining power. During World War II, the latter section of trade unions formed a partnership with Fianna Fáil to modernise industrial relations, a relationship that would endure into the twenty-first century. Prior to the war, unions had to be combative in order to achieve gains. After it, they became ‘part of the social furniture’.

From the 1960s onwards, as Ireland industrialised, this cooperative relationship would translate into ‘national’ pay rounds or voluntary, tripartite wage-bargaining mechanisms. Nevertheless, common to wider European mobilisations, there were periods of heightened wage militancy, notably in the mid to late 1960s.