AN annual trip across the Irish Sea has become something of a pilgrimage for Davey Hopper and a team of leading figures from the Durham Miners’ Association.

The same goes for Anne Scargill and Betty Cook, leaders of the Women Against Pit Closures movement.

They make the journey to celebrate at the Spirit of Mother Jones Festival in Cork.

“Mother who?” is the usual response from many citizens of Cork when they’re told about the four-day event.

But across the water in the United States the name Mother Jones was known to millions of workers, and still is.

Even though she died 85 years ago, she remains an icon of the labour movement. She is the US movement’s matriarch.

Mother Jones was born Mary Harris in Shandon in Cork in 1837. When the Great Hunger struck Co Cork was one of the worst-hit parts of Ireland. Starving people died by the roadside.

Mary and her family, along with hundreds of thousands of others, emigrated to Canada. A few years later Mary moved to the US where she became a teacher.

She married George Jones, an iron founder and union man, in 1861.

Her husband and their four children died in a yellow fever epidemic in Memphis in 1867. She set up a dress-making business which burned down in the great fire of Chicago in 1871.

But in the late 1890s, now in her sixties, she became a union activist. She helped build the fledgling United Mineworkers of America, travelling from pit town to pit town, making fiery speeches, inspiring strike action, and at the same time winning her a following of tens of thousands.

In 1903 she led the “March of the Mill Children” against child labour. Children as young as four were employed in textile mills, some suffering shocking injuries when their limbs became trapped in machinery.

She was arrested and imprisoned several times, kept in solitary confinement for months illegally and without charge. Thousands of people, particularly women, protested, demanding her release.

The early 1900s were tumultuous times for the US labour movement. From 1912 to 1914 industrial battles known as the “coal wars” broke out in West Virginia and Colorado.

Mine owners and state authorities deployed troops and armed company guards against striking miners and their families who were resisting poverty pay and appalling conditions.

Fourteen people died in the Ludlow massacre in Colorado when troops and company thugs attacked a camp set up by 1,200 evicted striking miners and their families in 1914.

The troops and guards set fire to the tents, causing the deaths of those in shelters created beneath them.

Mary was known across the US labour movement — and to the mill and mine owners, who dreaded her arrival — as Mother Jones.

She had no settled home, simply walking from town to town, appearing wherever there were injustices against working people, rousing them to action with the call “pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

She organised bottle washers, domestic workers, steel workers.

Charged with inciting a riot, she was described by a prosecutor as “the most dangerous woman in America.”

In a filmed interview a few months before she died in 1930 at the age of 93, she said: “You know, I am considered a Bolshevik, and a red, and an IWW and a radical, and I admit to being all they charge me with. I am anything that would change this moneyed civilisation to a higher civilisation for the ages to come and I long to see the day when labour will have the destiny of the nation in her hands and she will stand a united force and show the world what the workers can do.”

She was rebellious to the end. At her request she was buried in the US miners’ union cemetery in Illinois, where a monument stands in her memory.

Her funeral was attended by 40,000 people, and when she was reburied six years later in front of a new granite memorial at the cemetery, 60,000 turned up.

The Spirit of Mother Jones Festival in Cork was founded four years ago and lasts four days, bringing together union and political activists, speakers and performers from the US, Ireland and Britain.

Davey Hopper of the Durham Miners’ Association was a speaker both last year and this at the Firkin Crane Theatre, one of the festival’s two venues.

In a speech Mother Jones might have been proud of, he attacked the boss class, the Tories and Blairite Labour, calling for widespread union action against the Tories’ next raft of anti-union legislation.

He said that there are now 214 food banks in Durham, feeding thousands driven to absolute desperation by austerity. He sang the praises of Mother Jones.

“She cared about humanity and the cause of labour,” Hopper said. “We need Mother Jones to come back now. We live in a horrible, terrible world — the first generation to leave it worse for our kids than we found it. We will take the story of Mother Jones into our communities and tell them, look what one woman achieved in America — and there are thousands of us.”

Other speakers from Britain included Chris Mullin, author and former Labour MP for Sunderland, who fought for years against the unjust imprisonment of the Birmingham Six, falsely accused of being IRA activists who planted a bomb which killed 21 people. The six were cleared and released after more than 16 years in prison.

US radical and actor Kaiulani Lee gave a stunning performance playing Mother Jones in a self-penned drama, Can’t Scare Me … The Story of Mother Jones.

No Irish festival would be complete without music, and on each of the four days there were performances at either the theatre or at the festival’s second venue, the Maldron Hotel.

The final concert was a tribute to Joe Hill, the IWW organiser falsely charged with murder and executed by firing squad in 1915.

Hopper and his delegation from the Durham coalfield will be back next year, and hope that other British trade unionists will attend the festival.

The Communist Party of Ireland, Cork Council of Trades Unions and several Irish trade unions support the festival, including the Services Industrial Professional and Technical Union (Siptu), Unison and Irish teachers’ union ASTI.

Michael O’Donnell, secretary of Munster Council of the CPI, lived in England for a time and was a member of Fulham Trades Union Council, and was also a Morning Star seller. His team ran a daily book stall at the festival.

The festival is organised by the Cork Mother Jones Committee which dedicates the festival to “Mary Harris/Mother Jones and inspirational people everywhere who fight for social justice.”

In the United States the spirit of Mother Jones lives on through a women’s political campaign group, The Daughters of Mother Jones, and a magazine which is named after her.