Part 2

Is Ireland poor? I decided to base my answer to that question on personal investigation. I dressed myself as a working girl--it is to the working class that seven-eighths of the Irish people belong--and in a week in the slums of Dublin I found that lack of employment is continually driving the people to migration, low-wage slavery, or acceptance of charity.

At the woman's employment bureau of the ministry of munitions, I discovered that 50,000 Irish boys and girls are annually sent to the English harvests, and that during the war there were 80,000 placements in the English munition factories.

"But I don't want to leave home," I heard a little ex-fusemaker say as we stood in queues at the chicken-wire hatch in the big bare room turned over by the ministry of munitions for the replacement of women who had worked on army supplies. Her voice trembled with the uncertainty of one who knew she could not dictate.

"Then you've got to be a servant," said the direct young woman at the hatch. "There's nothing left in Ireland but domestic jobs."

"Isn't--you told me there might be something in Belfast?"

"Linen mills are on part time now--no chance. There's only one place for good jobs now--that's across the channel."

The little girl bit her lip. She shook her head and went out the rear exit provided for ex-war workers. Together we splashed into the broken-bricked alley that was sloppy with melting spring sleet.

"Maybe she doesn't know everything," said the little girl, fingering a religious medal that shone beneath her brown muffler. "Maybe some one's dropped out. Let's say a prayer."

Through the cutting sleet we bent our way to Dublin's largest factory--a plant where 1,000 girls are employed at what are the best woman's wages in Dublin, $4.50 to $10 a week.

"You gotta be pretty brassy to ask for work here," said the little girl. "Everybody wants to work here. But you can't get anything unless you're b-brassy, can you?"

We entered a big-windowed, red-bricked factory, and in response to our timid application, a black-clad woman shook her head wearily. Down a puddly, straw-strewn lane we were blown to one of the factories next in size--a fifty to 100 hand factory is considered big in Dublin. The sign on the door was scrawled:

"No Hands Wanted."

But in the courage of companionship we mounted the black, narrow-treaded wooden stairs to a box-littered room where white-aproned girls were nailing candy containers together. While we waited for the manager to come out, we stood with bowed heads so that the sleet could pool off our hats, and through a big crack in the plank floor we could see hard red candies swirling below. Suddenly we heard a voice and looked up to see the ticking-aproned manager spluttering:

"Well, can't you read?"

Up in a loft-like, saw-dusty room where girls were stuffing dolls and daubing red paint on china cheeks, an excited manager declared he was losing his own job. The new woman's trade union league wanted him to pay more than one dollar a week to his girls. He would show the union his books. Wasn't it better to have some job than none at all?

Down the wet street, now glinting blindingly in the late sun, we walked into a grubby little tea shop for a sixpenny pot of tea between us. Out of my pocket I pulled a wage list of well-paying, imagination-stirring jobs in England. There were all sorts of jobs from toy-making at $8.25 a week to glass-blowing at $20. On the face of the little girl as she told me that she would meet me at the ministry of munitions the next morning there was a look of worried indecision.

That night along Gloucester street, past the Georgian mansion houses built before the union of Ireland and England--great, flat-faced, uprising structures behind whose verdigrised knockers and shattered door fans comes the murmur of tenements--I walked till I came to a much polished brass plate lettered "St. Anthony's Working Girls' Home."

"Why don't you go to England?" was the first question the matron put to me when I told her that I could get no factory work. "All the girls are going."

In the stone-flagged cellar the girls were cooking their individual dinners at a stove deep set in the stone wall. A big, curly-haired girl was holding bread on a fork above the red coals.

"Last time I got lonesome," she was admitting. "But the best parlor maid job here is $60 a year. And over at Basingstoke in England I've one waiting for me at $150 a year. If you want to live nowadays I suppose you've gotta be lonesome."

Next day at the alley of the employment bureau, I met the little girl of the day before. She said a little dully:

"Well, I took--shirt-making--Edinburgh."

Instead of migrating, a girl may marry. But her husband in most cases can't make enough money to support a family. To keep an average family of five, just going, on food alone, costs $370 a year. Some farm hands get only $100. An average unskilled worker obtains $260 a year. An organized unskilled worker receives $367, and an organized skilled worker, $539. Therefore, if a girl marries, she has not only to bear children but to go out to work beside. Their constant toil makes the women of Ireland something less than well-cared-for slaves.

Take the mother in Dublin. In Dublin there have long been too many casual laborers. One-third of Dublin's population of 300,000 are in this class. Now, while wages for some sorts of casual labor like dock work increased during the war, it has become almost impossible for Dublin laborers to get a day's job. For the unemployed are flocking for the good wages from the four fields of Ireland. On the days the man is out of work the woman must go out to wash or "char." I understood these conditions better after I spent a night in a typical one-room home in the dockers' quarters near the Liffey.

Widow Hannan was my hostess. The widow is a strong, black-haired young woman who took an active part in the rebellion of 1916, and whose husband was killed fighting under James Connolly. We slept in the first floor front. In with the widow lay her three children, and in the cot catty-corner from the bed I was bunked. Just when the night air was thinning to gray there was a shattering rap on the ground-level window. The half-dressed young factory daughter clambered over the others and ripped down the rain coat that served as a night-time window curtain. Against the square-paned window was hunched a forward-shouldered woman.

As she was being beckoned to the door, I rose, and to do my hair had to wedge myself in between the breakfast-table and the filmy mirror that hung among the half-tone pictures of the rebels of 1916. On the iron mantel, gray with coal dust, there was a family comb.

"God save all here," said the neighbor entering. "Mary, himself's had no work for four days. Keep the young ones out of the grate for me. I've got to go out washing."

"My sister-in-law has a husband and seven children to support," said the widow in explanation to me. "During the war, he could do with her going out just once in a while--now it's all the time." Then to the sister-in-law: "I've a wash myself today."