MacPartlin, Thomas (1879–1923), trade unionist, was born 22 August 1879 in Thomas Street, Sligo town, son of John McPartland, builder, and Margaret McPartland (née Burns). The family moved to Dublin in his infancy. After attending St Mary's Christian Brothers' School, he apprenticed as a carpenter. Joining the British-based Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners (ASC&J; latterly the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers) in 1900, from c.1908 he represented the union on the Dublin Trades Council (DTC) and in 1910 was elected president of the union's Irish section. As a member for many years of the ASC&J/ASW general council (1913–23), he travelled extensively on union business throughout Britain as well as Ireland. Elected to the parliamentary committee (reconstituted in 1914 as the national executive) of the Irish Trade Union Congress (ITUC), he was reelected annually 1912–22, generally with the highest vote. Throughout this decade MacPartlin was one of the most prominent and influential leaders of the Irish trade union movement. As DTC chairman in 1913, he was prominent in a summer campaign mobilising urban workers to promote trade union organisation among Co. Dublin farm labourers, and was a leading figure throughout the 1913–14 Dublin lockout. He was among the DTC officials who determined, after serious disturbances in the city on 30 August 1913, to transfer the banned Sackville (O'Connell) Street workers' meeting on Sunday 31 August to Croydon Park, Fairview, where he was among the speakers. After the subsequent ‘bloody Sunday’ police baton charge against a Sackville Street crowd, he went to Manchester to address the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) on the conflict (2 September). Chairman of the DTC strike committee, in testimony before the Askwith inquiry (October) he presented a cogent statement of the workers' position and submitted the trade unions' settlement proposals. He toured British cities on behalf of the lockout aid funds campaign and attended the TUC special London conference (December). Involved in several fruitless conciliation initiatives, with the workers under severe stress, he proposed in January 1914 that those who could return to their jobs without signing ‘the document’ pledging non-union-membership ought to do so. Chairman of the Dublin Labour Party, he was defeated in the January 1914 municipal elections, North Docks ward, by sitting alderman Alfie Byrne (qv). He was a signatory of the ITUC manifesto of March 1914 opposing inclusion of a partition option in the draft home rule bill and asserting workers' right to arm and fight for ‘economic freedom.’
A vociferous foe of worker participation in the first world war, as president (1916–17) of the now combined Irish Trade Union Congress and Labour Party, he chaired a special conference (December 1916) on the wartime food crisis that demanded rationing, price controls, and compulsory tillage of unused farm land, and threatened trade-union disruption of foodstuff transport should governmental action not transpire. While he was not an eloquent orator, MacPartlin's presidential address to the ITUC & LP annual congress in the Derry Guildhall (August 1917) was celebrated for many years in trade union circles, reprinted in its entirety following his death by the Voice of Labour (27 October, 3 and 10 November 1923). His description of the slaughter of workers ‘in the interests of the greedy capitalists of all the belligerent nations’, praise for the efforts of the Russian labour movement to withdraw that country from the war, and appeal for similar action by workers throughout Europe aroused fierce criticism in the daily press. Equally contentious were his assertions that nationalist and unionist were united by a common desire to crush organised labour, and that the advent of an Irish parliament would signal ‘the real opening of the class war’ and the consequent necessity of a strong, independent labour organisation ‘ready to grapple with any tyranny no matter what flag it sails under’.
MacPartlin displayed considerable acumen in uniting the divergent forces within his union and the building trades generally behind the 1918 anti-conscription campaign. Selected as Labour Party parliamentary candidate for College Green, he voted in the party executive in favour of withdrawal from the December 1918 general election, though in later years he would question the wisdom of the decision. With Thomas Johnson (qv), he played a key role in organising the two-day general strike in support of sixty-six republican prisoners on hunger strike in Mountjoy jail for political status (April 1920). Consulted by Johnson regarding the advisability of calling the strike, MacPartlin referred the question to a group of workers (including his brother Sylvester, a plasterer) playing cards in the Carpenters' Hall, finding them unanimous in their approval. Growing ever closer to Johnson as a trusted adviser and confidant, MacPartlin, as an official in a cross-channel union, repeatedly in 1920–21 represented the position of Irish labour on issues arising from the Anglo–Irish conflict before officials of the British Labour Party and TUC, especially during the strike against munitions transport (July 1920). He was among the several labour leaders who conferred regularly with the dáil cabinet and Sinn Féin leaders.
Again elected president in 1921 of what was now styled the ILP (Irish Labour Party) & TUC, he was forced by ill health to resign early in 1922 and to be absent from labour movement debates on the Anglo–Irish treaty and strategy in the June general election. Under strong pressure throughout the movement to stand in the election, he declined for health reasons, but took a role in canvassing for Labour candidates. Anguished by the prospect of civil war, he was in the forefront of labour movement efforts to mediate between the divided wings of Sinn Féin. Yielding reluctantly to renewed pressure, he accepted a Labour Party nomination to the first Seanad Éireann (1922–3). As members of the Free State government's commission on reconstruction and development (1923), he and Johnson (now parliamentary party leader) were instrumental in securing an interim report recommending an extensive roads improvement scheme to employ some 40,000; when President William Cosgrave (qv) rejected the scheme as impracticable, the two Labour members resigned and the commission effectively expired. While eager to effect a reconciliation, MacPartlin supported the position of William O'Brien (qv) and Thomas Foran (qv) in their bitter contest against James Larkin (qv) for control of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (1923).
Like other labour moderates of the period, MacPartlin tended toward rhetoric more radical than his actions. Nevertheless, the trajectory of his responses to nationalism, militant direct action, pacifism, syndicalist ideology, workers' revolution, and, finally, partition and the treaty constitutes an accurate measure of the majority opinion within organised Irish labour. One of the most respected and beloved labour leaders of his generation, acclaimed for his shrewd intellect, practical counsel, genial disposition, good-humoured wit, blunt and unceremonious manner (he once told the long-winded Lady Aberdeen (qv), spouse of the lord lieutenant, to ‘cut out all the speeching and let us get down to business, I want home for my tay’ (Voice, 27 Oct. 1923)), ‘Mac’ was highly regarded across the spectrum of labour opinion.
Accompanying Johnson as the two labour representatives on the six-person Irish delegation to the International Labour Office conference in Geneva, Switzerland, MacPartlin, aged forty-four, was found dead of heart failure in his hotel room on the morning of 20 October 1923. The return of the remains to Ireland and burial in Glasnevin cemetery, attended by the government, trade unionists, and large numbers of the public, were occasions of deeply felt mourning. He was survived by his wife, Hannah, and their nine children. MacPartlin's papers are in the University College Dublin (UCD) Archives.
More information on this entry is available at the National Database of Irish-language biographies (Ainm.ie).