The situation was made considerably worse by the high rate of disease in the slums, which was worsened by the lack of health care and cramped living conditions.

The most prevalent disease in the Dublin slums at the time was tuberculosis (TB), which spread through tenements very quickly and caused many deaths among the poor.

Poverty was perpetuated in Dublin by the lack of work for unskilled workers, who did not have any form of representation before trade unions were founded.

Another important figure in the rise of an organised workers' movement in Ireland at the time was James Connolly, an Edinburgh-born Marxist of Irish parentage.

In 1912, Connolly and Larkin formed the Irish Labour Party to represent workers in the imminent Home Rule Bill debate in the British Parliament.

In 1913, Murphy was chairman of the Dublin United Tramway Company and owned Clery's department store and the Imperial Hotel.

Even today, his defenders insist that he was a charitable man and a good employer and that his workers received fair wages.

Dublin tramway workers were paid substantially less than their counterparts in Belfast and Liverpool and were subjected to a regime of punitive fines, probationary periods extending for as long as six years and a culture of company surveillance involving the widespread use of informers.

Dublin's workers, despite being some of the poorest in the United Kingdom at the time, applied for help and were sent £150,000 by the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) and other sources in Ireland, doled out dutifully by the ITGWU.

He had been smuggled into William Martin Murphy's Imperial Hotel by Nellie Gifford, the sister-in-law of Thomas MacDonagh, and spoke from a balcony.

The event is remembered as Bloody Sunday, a term used for three subsequent days in 20th-century Ireland and for the murderous charge of police in the Liverpool general strike.

Another worker, Alice Brady, was later shot dead by a strike-breaker as she brought home a food parcel from the union office.

Influential figures such as Patrick Pearse, Countess Markievicz and William Butler Yeats supported the workers in the media.

It was badly damaged by its defeat in the Lockout and was further hit by the departure of Larkin to the United States in 1914 and the execution of Connolly, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916.

Many of the blacklisted workers joined the British Army since they had no other source of pay to support their families, and they found themselves in the trenches of World War I within the year.

Although the actions of the ITGWU and the smaller UBLU had been unsuccessful in achieving substantially better pay and conditions for workers, they marked a watershed in Irish labour history.

Although the occasion of the poem was the decision of Dublin Corporation not to build a gallery to house the Hugh Lane collection of paintings (William Martin Murphy was one of the most vocal opponents of the plan), it has sometimes been viewed by scholars as a commentary on the lock-out.

[11] In the poem, Yeats wrote mockingly of commerciants who "fumble in a greasy till, and add the halfpence to the pence" and asked: Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave?