 During the 1913 Dublin strike and lockout, unlike other contemporary upper-class commentators, Kettle supported the locked out workers and published a series of articles which revealed the terrible living and working conditions of Dublin's poor, and was involved in the formation of a peace committee which endeavoured to negotiate a settlement between workers and employers.In 1913 Kettle also became involved with the paramilitary Irish Volunteers, a new Irish Nationalist militia that formed in response to the creation in the north of the Ulster Volunteers by Edward Carson to oppose the creation of an all-Ireland government based in Dublin via the passage in the British Parliament in London of the Government of Ireland Act 1914.In July 1914 he left Dublin and travelled to Belgium on behalf of the Irish Volunteers seeking to purchase rifles and ammunition for the organization's armoury.