Merrigan, Matthew Paul (‘Matt’) (1921–2000), trade unionist and socialist, was born 25 June 1921 in a two-room cottage at 5 Thomas Place, Dolphin's Barn, Dublin, eighth of nine children of Matthew Merrigan (c.1884–1928), builder's labourer, and Anne (‘Nanny’) Merrigan (née Clifford) (d. 1977). Reared in severe poverty, he was six years old when his father, an ITGWU card steward, died of tuberculosis. While his mother charred for a living, Merrigan and his siblings worked at part-time jobs outside school hours. Educated at Rialto national school, he left at age thirteen for full-time employment as a laundry van boy. After working briefly as porter in a textile factory, he was employed as a general operative in the Rowntree–Mackintosh chocolate plant, Kilmainham (1936–57), where he joined 11/19 (Dublin) branch of the British-based Amalgamated Transport and General Workers’ Union (ATGWU). Active in the union at works level, he was elected assistant shop steward (c.1942), and senior shop steward and member of 11/19 branch committee (late 1940s). He engaged in support activities for republican Spain (1936–9), and in protests against the emergency wages standstill order and the 1941 trade union act. Joining the Labour party, Crumlin branch, he was also active in the small, Trotskyite Revolutionary Socialist Party (mid 1940s). Influenced by the ideas of the American Trotskyite revisionist Max Shachtman (1904–72), he wrote for the journal of Shachtman's International Socialist League into the 1950s. Reading widely in socialist theoretical literature, he attended both the People's College and the Review Group classes of John de Courcy Ireland (qv) (1911–2006), and did a correspondence course with the British National Council of Labour Colleges. He was the lowest placed of three Labour candidates in Dublin South-West in the 1954 general election, losing his deposit. Expelled from the Labour party in 1957 for supporting the independent dáil candidacy of Noel Browne (qv), he was readmitted in 1964.
Becoming a full-time ATGWU official as 11/19 branch secretary (1957–86) – which comprised some 4,000 members, forty per cent of total ATGWU membership in the republic – Merrigan was a delegate to the inaugural conference of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) (1959). As ATGWU district secretary for the republic of Ireland (1960–86), he provided militant leadership, retaining wide popularity with his union's membership despite frequent conflict with moderate trade-union leaders. Describing corporate profits as the ‘unpaid wages of the workers’ (Saothar (2000), 14), he consistently opposed national wage agreements for reshuffling, rather than increasing, the workers’ share of the national wealth. Critical of the corporatist tendency of Irish industrial relations in contrast to the less malleable and more socialist ethos of British trade-unionism, he analysed the predilection of successive Irish governments to favour Irish-based against amalgamated British-Irish unions as an accommodation of the anti-union culture of foreign (especially American) investment. He served on ICTU's executive council (1975–6, 1977–9, 1982–6), and was congress president (1985–6).
Labour candidate in a March 1970 Dublin South-West by-election, he polled 5,004 first-preferences and came within 262 votes of the seat on the last count, but suffered from the independent candidacy of Cora Dunne (widow of the deceased Labour incumbent, Seán Dunne (qv)), and his own refusal to seek transfers from Fine Gael. A member of Labour's administrative council, he resigned when the body failed to expel Stephen Coughlan (qv), TD for Limerick East, for anti-Semitic remarks (1970). He opposed Labour's 1970 electoral pact with Fine Gael and subsequent joint manifesto for the 1973 general election. Remaining a vociferous foe of Labour participation in coalition governments, which he condemned as ill-fated weddings of ‘irreconcilable class and social forces’, he flayed pro-coalition party leaders as ‘wretched middle-class careerists’ eager for ‘a place in capitalism's squalor’ (Gallagher (1982), 192). He campaigned against Irish entry into the EEC (1972), and urged ICTU to withdraw from the Labour Court (1976). Chairman of the Liaison Committee of the Labour Left, an internal pressure group, during Labour's period in government (1973–7) he sought to galvanise party militants behind radical policies. Chafing against the imposition of a running mate in the Dublin (Finglas) constituency, he contested the 1977 election as ‘independent labour’ on a joint manifesto with Noel Browne; his 1,512 votes deprived Labour of a seat. Duly expelled from the Labour party, and aspiring to unite a broad spectrum of the left, he was co-founder and chairman of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) (1977–82), which foundered owing to fractious left-wing sectarianism, and tensions with Browne (the party's only TD) over Northern Ireland policy. One of seven SLP candidates in the 1981 election, Merrigan polled a feeble 473 votes in Dublin North-West; he drew only 334 votes in a Dublin West by-election (May 1982).
Arguing the incompatibility of socialism and constitutional unionism, Merrigan campaigned for a British declaration of intent to withdraw from Northern Ireland, and urged working-class leadership of the anti-partition struggle, rather than tail-ending of constitutional or physical-force nationalism. He was especially prominent in the tax marches of the early 1980s, protesting the disproportionately heavy burden on PAYE workers. Strongly anti-militarist and supportive of Irish neutrality, he criticised US policy on Cuba, Vietnam, and central America, and also opposed repressive aspects of the communist systems of the USSR and eastern Europe. After retirement from his trade-union posts in 1986, he launched the ATGWU retired members’ association, was active in the ICTU pensioners’ parliament, and served on the committee of the Irish Labour History Society (1986–93). He wrote an impressionistic history, Eagle or cuckoo? the story of the ATGWU in Ireland (1989), and drafted an autobiography (as yet unpublished).
One of the leading figures of the Irish left for over thirty years, Merrigan exemplified the combative, confrontational, politically radical style of trade-union leadership inherited from such figures as James Larkin (qv) in Ireland and Jack Jones in Britain, a legacy that he bequeathed to subsequent elements within the ATGWU. He married Rose Cavanagh (d. 1997), a fellow worker in Rowntree–Mackintosh and ATGWU departmental representative; they had two sons and one daughter. Indifferent to the enmities engendered by reaction to his numerous outspoken advocacies, he was a devoted family man and avid supporter of St Patrick's Athletic football club. While attending the ATGWU annual conference at the Grand Hotel, Malahide, Co. Dublin, and approving calls for a re-negotiation of the Partnership for Prosperity and Fairness, he collapsed and died suddenly on 15 June 2000.