‘Stopping business as usual’

The three-year strike which followed the July 1984 refusal of eleven workers at Dunnes’ Stores Henry Street branch in Dublin to handle South African goods is perhaps the most celebrated episode of anti-apartheid activism outside Southern Africa, yielding memoirs, academic scholarship, radio and television documentaries and even a play.

While still recounting the essential narrative of the strike for those unfamiliar with it, Padraig Durnin’s talk will explore what made it exceptional in both a national and international context, and how the Dunnes workers’ struggle ran counter to the prevailing tendencies within both Irish trade unionism and the global anti-apartheid movement.