Mick Lynch

Over the past few days, I have found it impossible to ignore the Mick Lynch phenomenon on my social media feed.

Just in case you haven’t , he is the  General Secretary of the RMT union, which is currently in dispute with the railway employers.

The union itself was an amalgamation of the NUR (National Union of Railwaymen) and the National Union of Seamen in 1990.

The first trade union membership card I ever remember seeing was my grandfather’s.

He was a wagon builder and a shop steward in the NUR for decades.

I was reared on tales of how he tried to make his workplace a safer place.

It must have stuck with me as I listened to the man that reared me.

As I sometimes joke with my NUJ colleagues, I was genetically designed to be a trade union activist!

My shop steward grandfather occasionally quipped that it was no surprise that the leader of a strike in Britain, someone leading from the front for the common good, often had an Irish surname.

I reckon that tickled my aul fella, who was a proud Murphy.

Like Mick Lynch, both his parents hailed from here in Ireland.

No doubt the RMT fella’s people would have seen the not-so-welcoming signs that my Mayo father saw at the same time.

Lynch has become the originator of many social media memes as he has swatted away various interviewers (term deployed VERY loosely) from Kay Burley to the delightful Piers Morgan.

The latter seemed to want to focus on the Lynch sense of humour on his Facebook page, where he used the evil genius from Thunderbirds as a dead ringer for the London Irishman.

As a wee lad, I loved that puppet creation.

Little did I know that FAB might mean Fenian at the barricades!

Throughout it all, the RMT leader remained utterly unflustered during their interview despite what Ms Burley would think.

He then said on camera that his hero was James Connolly.

I rather doubt that the person in the TV studio had any idea who Lynch was talking about, so he politely and patiently gave her a quick synopsis of the man they shot in a chair in Kilmainham.

He correctly noted Connolly’s nationality.

“He was an Irish socialist republican”.

This seemed to trigger a couple of tartan patriots on my timeline.

The Edinburgh-born signatory to the Easter Proclamation was always very clear about who and what he was.

For the avoidance of doubt, if the Scots are so keen to claim Connolly then they might want to have a statue of him on a plinth in the city of his birth.

Even if that means moving one of their slave-trading imperialist heroes.

Of course, they are the very types that looked down on the Irish in the Cowgate ghetto where James Connolly first saw the light of day.

I wasn’t surprised in the least to learn of Mick Lynch’s backstory.

As I  walked my bóithrín earlier today, I thought of the words of Eric Hobsbawm.

I bought his book just before I became an undergraduate.

His chapter “the other Britain” still resonates with me four decades after I marked these pages.

“They provided the British working class with a cutting edge of radicals and revolutionaries.”

Quite so…

On the wall of my study is a collage which is the featured image of this piece.

It was a wedding present from a solid socialist who hails from the same city as Connolly.

I’m sure the London Irishman who is currently battering the clotted cream of the Brit media would approve of it.

I reckon that my NUR shop steward grandfather and Professor Hobsbawm was onto something about the Irish thing and collective working class action.

Mick is on BBC Question Time tonight.

I hope that he gets a fair hearing from the hand-picked gammon audience, but he might not.

As we say here in the land of his parents, he’ll be well able for them.