James Connolly

Spouse Children7, including Nora and RoddyMilitary serviceBuriedService/branchYears of serviceRankCommandant GeneralUnitBattles/warsEaster Rising

James Connolly (Irish: Séamas Ó Conghaile;^[1] 5 June 1868 – 12 May 1916) was an Irish republican, socialist, and trade union leader, executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland. He remains an important figure both for the Irish labour movement and for Irish republicanism.

He became an active socialist in Scotland, where he had been born in 1868 to Irish parents. On moving to Ireland in 1896, he established the country's first socialist party, the Irish Socialist Republican Party. It called for an Ireland independent not only of Britain's Crown and Parliament, but also of British "capitalists, landlords and financiers".

From 1905 to 1910, he was a full-time organiser in the United States for the Industrial Workers of the World, choosing its syndicalism over the doctrinaire Marxism of Daniel DeLeon's Socialist Labor Party of America, to which he had been initially drawn. Returning to Ireland, he deputised for James Larkin in organising for the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, first in Belfast and then in Dublin.

In Belfast, he was frustrated in his efforts to draw Protestant workers into an all-Ireland labour and socialist movement but, in the wake of the industrial unrest of 1913, acquired in Dublin what he saw as a new means of striking toward the goal of a Workers' Republic. At the beginning of 1916, he committed the union's militia, the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), to the plans of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and the Irish Volunteers, for war-time insurrection.

Connolly commanded the ICA in the Easter Rising of that year, from the rebel garrison holding Dublin's General Post Office. He was wounded in the fighting and, following the rebel surrender at the end of Easter week, was executed along with the six other signatories to the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.

Connolly legacy was disputed by his contemporaries, and has been claimed by different political tendencies in Ireland including, with the imprimatur of his son Roddy Connolly, Communist and Labour parties, and, with the sanction of his daughter Nora Connolly O'Brien, the Provisional Republican movement.

Early life

Connolly was born in the Cowgate or "Little Ireland" district of Edinburgh in 1868, the third son of Mary McGinn and John Connolly, a labourer,^[2]: 28 Irish immigrants from County Monaghan. Throughout his life he was to speak with a Scottish accent.^[3]: 636

He left the local Catholic primary school at age 10 to seek work.^[4]: 14 At age 14, following his eldest brother John, he enlisted in the army, falsifying both his name and age.^[5] Little is known about his military service.^[6] Desmond Greaves learnt that Connolly had reminisced about being on guard duty in Cork harbour on the night in December 1882 when Myles Joyce (Maolra Seoighe) was hanged (on perjured evidence)^[2]: 24 for the Maamtrasna massacre (the killing a landlord and his family).^[7]: 26 This is consistent with Connolly having joined the 1st Battalion, King’s Liverpool Regiment, in which case, in the years that followed, the teenage recruit may have helped enforce Land War evictions in Meath, patrolled the streets of Belfast during deadly sectarian riots, and war-gamed the army's defensive plans for Dublin.^[8]

In 1889, months before the end of his enlistment, and in advance of rumoured deployment overseas, Connolly either deserted or was discharged.^[9] In Dublin, he had met Lillie Reynolds, and in the New Year the couple moved to Scotland where, with special dispensation (Reynolds was Protestant) they married in a Catholic church.^[4]: 15 While making his first contacts with socialists, Connolly and his new family in Edinburgh were hard pressed. After working, like his father before him, as a municipal manure carter, in 1895 he tried, unsuccessfully, to set up as a cobbler.^{[10][2]: 39}

Socialist republican

Scottish Socialist Federation

Again following in the example of his brother John, in 1890 Connolly joined the Scottish Socialist Federation, succeeding his brother as its secretary in 1893. Largely a propaganda organisation, the Federation supported Keir Hardie and his Independent Labour Party in the campaign for labour representation in Parliament.^[11]

Within the SSF, Connolly was greatly influenced by John Leslie,12 years his senior, but like him born to poor Irish immigrants. While Leslie did not envisage Ireland breaking the English connection before the advent of a socialist Britain, he was to encourage Connolly in the creation of a separate socialist party in Ireland.^[12]

In 1896, after the birth of his third daughter, Connolly considered a future for his family in Chile. But thanks to an appeal by John Leslie, he had the offer of employment in Dublin as a full-time secretary for the Dublin Socialist Club, at £1 per week.^[6][13]

Irish Socialist Republican Party

In Dublin, where he first became a navvy and then a proof reader, Connolly soon split the Socialist Club, forming in its stead the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP).^[14] In what was then, if briefly, the "literary centre of advanced nationalism",^[15]: 44 Alice Milligan's Belfast monthly, The Shan Van Vocht, he published a first statement of the party credo, "Socialism and Nationalism"", This suggested that, even if a step toward formal independence, the legislature that the Irish Parliamentary Party wished to see restored in Dublin would be a mockery of Irish national aspirations.

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.^[16]

By the same token, Connolly implied that there was little to be expected from the "Irish Language movements, Literary Societies or [1798] Commemoration Committees" of Milligan and of their mutual friends in Dublin (Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne, and Constance Markievicz whom Connolly was to join in "to-hell-with-the-British-empire"^[17] protests against Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and the Boer War).^{[2]: 51, 66–69} There could be no lasting progress toward an Irish Ireland without acknowledging that, as a force that "irresistibly destroys all national or racial characteristics", capitalism was the Celtic Revival's "chief enemy".^{[18][15]: 17}

Milligan, who deferred to the Irish Republican Brotherhood (in 1899 they had her pass her subscription list to Griffith and his new weekly, the United Irishman, the forerunner of Sinn Féin),^[19] confined her response to Connolly's ambition to contest Westminster elections. Were the ISRP successful, she predicted "an alliance with the English Labour" no less debilitating than the courtship of English Liberals had proved for the Irish Parliamentary Party.^[20] In the event, Ireland's first socialist party failed (with just 300 votes)^[21]: 186 to elect Connolly to Dublin City Council and never exceeded more than 80 active members.^[22]

Connolly was dispirited and at odds with the ISRP's other leading light, E. W. Stewart, manager of the party's paper, The Worker's Republic, whom he accused of "reformism".^{[3]: 209–212} "The election of a socialist to any public body", Connolly insisted, "is only valuable insofar as it is the return of a disturber of the public peace”.^[7]: 63 In September 1902, he departed for a four-month lecture tour of the United States. It was organised by the American Marxist theoretician, Daniel De Leon, who had Connolly address largely Irish-American audiences on behalf of his Socialist Labor Party.^[6] On his return, Connolly had his resignation from the IRSP accepted without demur,^[2]: 99 and with De Leon's inducement, he decided to emigrate.^{[7]: 166–167}

Union and party organiser

America: Industrial Workers of the World

On arrival in the United States, and before he could call on his family to join him, Connolly lived with cousins in Troy, New York, and found work as a salesman for insurance companies. But by 1905, and after being elected to the national executive of De Leon's Socialist Labor Party, he had returned to political work. With De Leon's endorsement, he was an organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the "One Big Union".

Finding employment with the Singer Sewing Machine Company in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and living in The Bronx, he befriended the young Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (daughter of a neighbouring couple from Galway),^[23] who was to become the "Wobblies" chief agitator among the largely immigrant women of the east-coast textile industry.^[24] Together they were supported by Mother Jones, "America’s Most Dangerous Woman”,^[25] the Wobblies' co-founder and a veteran organiser for the United Mine Workers whom Connolly had learnt to admire from Ireland.^[23]

With Flynn, and with ex-ISRP members Jack Mulray and John Lyng, and Patrick L. Quinlan, in 1907 Connolly formed the Irish Socialist Federation (ISF) to promote the SLP's message among Irish immigrants. It had branches in New York City and Chicago, and Connolly edited its weekly the Harp.^{[25][4]: 67–70}

Under the influence of the IWW, a "mass movement, whose militancy was unequalled", Connolly began to turn away from what was an "unashamedly vanguard party.^[26] Precipitating a final break with De Leon, was a dispute over his party leader's invocation of the "iron law of wages". Often associated with Ferdinand Lassalle, this proposed that, in general, wages could not be sustained much above the level of subsistence, and that nominal gains are readily offset by their upward pressure on prices. The implication is that, short of engaging in direct revolutionary action, there was little that mass unionism can practically achieve for the working class.^[27][28] Citing Marx as his authority, Connolly defended of the collective pursuit of wage, workplace and legislative gains in Socialism Made Easy (1909). It was to become a reference for the English syndicalist, Tom Mann, who played a leading role in the eve-of-war industrial unrest in Britain, and for Shop Stewards’ Movement that roused Clydeside, Manchester and Sheffield in defiance of the wartime labour regime.^[15]: 58

Connolly also took issue with De Leon's insistence that a socialist party be as "intolerant as science" of deviations from strict materialism In 1907, he confessed that while he "usually posed as a Catholic", he had not done his "duty" for fifteen years, and had "not the slightest tincture of faith left".^[3]: 679 Yet Connolly would not accept that religious faith and observance was, in itself, incompatible with the struggle for social justice.^[28][29]

In April 1908, Connolly left the SLP, and at its Chicago conference, the IWW expelled the party.^[4]: 67 In the new year, together with Mother Jones,^[23] Connolly and the ISF affiliated with the Socialist Party of America,^[30] a broader coalition more tolerant of the syndicalism that Connolly was to carry over Into a last statement of his socialist credo. In The Re-conquest of Ireland (1915), the Workers' Republic is not De Leon's party-controlled directive state, but an industrial commonwealth: "the workshops, factories, docks, railways, shipyards, &c., shall be owned by the nation, but administered by the Industrial Unions of the respective industries".^[31]

ITGWU leader in Belfast

Through the ISF Connolly re-established links with socialists in Ireland, and in 1909 he transferred the production of the Harp to Dublin. The following year, James Larkin persuaded the Socialist Party of Ireland (SPI) to raise the funds that would enable Connolly and his family to return.^[6] In January 1909, Larkin had established the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, his own model of the One Big Union.^[4]: 112 The same year, 1911, in which Connolly's occupation was listed on the census return as "National Organiser Socialist Party,^[32] Larkin sent him north to Belfast to organise for the ITGWU in Ulster.

In a city in which the Protestant-dominated apprenticed trades were organised in British-aligned craft unions, Larkin in 1907 had organised dock labourers. A strike, joined by carters, shipyard workers, sailors, firemen, boilermakers, coal heavers, transport workers, and women from the city's largest tobacco factory, was broken following the government's deployment of troops. Four years later, Connolly did manage to bring dockers out in sympathy with striking cross-channel seamen, and in the process to secure a pay increase.^[33] ITGWU membership increased, and Connolly was approached by women toiling in Belfast's largest industry, linen.^{[15]: 109–113}

The sweated trade engaged thousands of women and girls both in mills and, unprotected by the Factory Acts, as outworkers. A Belfast Trades Council sponsored Textile Operatives Society, led by Mary Galway,^[34] concentrated only on the better-paid Protestant women in the making-up sections. In response to the speeding up of production in the mills and, relatedly, the fining of workers for such new offences as laughing, whispering and bringing in sweets (the creation, in Connolly words, of "an atmosphere of slavery"),^[21]: 152 thousands of spinners went out on strike.

As they did not yet have the union organisation and the strike funds to sustain the action, Connolly persuaded the women to return to work and apply tactics he had learned as an organizer for the IWW.^{[21]: 152 [15]: 112}

If a girl is checked for singing, let the whole room start singing at once; if you are checked for laughing, let the whole room laugh at once; and if anyone is dismissed, all put on your shawls and come out in a body. And when you are returning, don’t return as you generally do, but gather in a body outside the gate, and march in singing and cheering.

He then sought to capitalise on the relative success of the tactic by building up, first with Marie Johnson and then Winifred Carney as its secretary, a new--effectively women's--section of the ITGWU, the Irish Textile Workers' Union (ITWU).^[35] In June 1913, while claiming that "the ranks of the Irish Textile Workers’ Union are being recruited by hundreds",^[36] with Carney, Connolly produced a Manifesto to the Linen Slaves of Belfast (1913)^[37] that revealed their frustration as organisers:^[38]: 29

[M]any Belfast mills are slaughterhouses for the women and penitentiaries for the children. But while all the world is deploring your conditions, they also unite in deploring your slavish and servile nature in submitting to them; they unite in wondering of what material these Belfast women are made, who refuse to unite together and fight to better their conditions.

The ITWU's membership may not have greatly exceeded the 300 subscribed under Johnson in Catholic west Belfast.^[39] To Carney, Connolly conceded that the union's survival was largely a matter of "keeping the Falls Road crowd together".^[35]

"Protestantism" and the appeal for "socialist unity"

Sectarian division within the labour movement in Belfast had been heightened by the return of Home Rule to the political agenda (from 1910, a Liberal government was again dependent on Irish votes). When, in the summer of 1912, a Home Rule Bill was introduced, 8,000 "disloyal" workers were driven from their jobs in the shipyards:^[40] in addition to Catholics, "rotten Prods" – Protestants whose labour politics disregarded sectarian distinctions.^[41] Insisting that "the force of religious bigotry" was now the only "asset" remaining to unionism, and that "some form of self-government seems practically certain of realisation", Connolly issued a "Plea for Socialist Unity in Ireland" on the basis of an independent all-Ireland party.^[42]

Later, after the new Home Rule bill had survived a final reading at Westminster (May 1914), Connolly appeared to concede the objection of William Walker, the leader of the Independent Labour Party in Belfast, who argued for British Labour and British social legislation:^[43] collective bargaining, progressive taxation and social security were principles for which majorities would not be as readily found in an Irish parliament. Connolly cautioned his comrades to expect a "reactionary and anti-democratic assembly" against which they might find themselves relying upon the solidarity and financial support of socialists in Britain and America.^[44]

But in what had been an "ill-tempered and discursive" exchange with Walker,^[45] Connolly had made no allowance for labour unionism.^[46] It was still unionism,^[47] and unionism he understood as a political expression of Irish Protestantism.^[48] As a legacy of settler colonialism, Connolly maintained that in Ireland Protestantism was "synonymous" with what Catholicism represented in much of the rest of Europe; that is, with "Toryism, lickspittle loyalty, servile worship of aristocracy and hatred of all that savours of genuine political independence on the part of the lower classes".^[49][48]

On the eve of his departure from Belfast, Connolly invoked this perversity to explain why in Ireland's industrial capital he had encountered not what socialist theory would have predicted, its most politically-alert working class, but rather those he now disclaimed as the "least rebellious slaves in the industrial world".^[50][51] This was a reverse of a picture he had painted years before for the ISRP. Then he had cited "the Protestant workmen of Belfast so often out on strike against their Protestant employers and their Protestant ancestors of 100 years ago [1798] in active rebellion against the English Protestant Government" as a demonstration of what "little bearing" the question of religious faith has in the struggle for freedom.^[52]

In April 1912, four of the five Belfast branches of the ILP did attend a unity conference called by the SPI in Dublin, and agreed to an Independent Labour Party of Ireland.^[53]: 135 But they remained "very sensitive to the unpopularity of Home Rule" and did not carry their commitment over, when in May, Connolly secured a resolution at the Irish Trades Union Congress in favour of an Irish Labour Party.^{[15]: 120–121} Instead (joined in time by Winifred Carney) they adhered to what in Belfast became, after partition, the Northern Ireland Labour Party.^[54][55]

Dublin lock-out

On 29 August 1913, Larkin recalled Connolly to Dublin. The success of the ITGWU in signing up thousands of unskilled men and women had elicited a particularly aggressive reaction from employers. Beginning with, and led by, the owner of the tramway company, William Murphy, they dismissed those who refused to renounce the union and replaced them with scab labour brought in from elsewhere in the country or from Britain.^[56] By the end of September, the combination of the "lock out", the sympathetic strikes Larkin called for in response, and their knock-on effects, had placed upwards of 100,000 people (workers and their families, a third of the city's residents) in need of assistance.^[57]

In a campaign to raise funds, on 1 November Connolly shared platform at London's Royal Albert Hall with George Lansbury and Sylvia Pankhurst, and with an Irish contingent that included George Russell ("Æ") and George Bernard Shaw.^[58] He took the opportunity to declare that he stood for "opposition to the domination of nation over nation, of class over class, or of sex over sex".^[15]: 145

He had only recently recovered from a week-long hunger strike (a tactic borrowed from the Pankhursts and other suffragettes) that had secured his release from police detention. But Larkin was being held of charges of sedition. In Dublin, this left Connolly to respond to an intercession by the Catholic Church.^[59]: 65

In the hope of replicating a tactic that for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn had turned the tide in the recent, and celebrated, "Bread and Roses" textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts,^[60] Dora Montefiore had devised a children's "holiday scheme".^[61] The poorly nourished children of the locked-out and striking workers were to be billeted with sympathetic families in England and in Belfast.^[62] On the grounds that their hosts were not guaranteed to be Catholic, the Church objected and crowds gathered at the docks and at what-is-now Connolly station to prevent the children's "deportation".^[63][64] Connolly, who had been wary from the first, cancelled the scheme, but nonetheless sought to score a point the against the clericalist opposition by telling his people to ask the archbishop and priests for food and clothing.^[2]: 333

Connolly and Larkin had shown a willingness to negotiate on the basis of an inquiry into the dispute by the Board of Trade. While critical of the ITGWU's employment of the "sympathetic" strike, it concluded that employers were insisting on an anti-union pledge that was "contrary to individual liberty", and that "no workman or body of workmen could reasonably be expected to accept”. The employers were unmoved.^{[15]: 143–143}

The workers began to drift back to work early 1914, after the Trade Union Congress in England rejected Larkin and Connolly's plea for a sympathetic strike and for additional funding. Exhausted, and falling into bouts of depression, Larkin took a declining interest in the beleaguered union, and eventually in October accepted the invitation of "Big Bill" Haywood of the IWW to speak in the United States. He did not return to Ireland until 1923.^[65] His departure left Connolly, in charge not only of the ITGWU (which held together, despite its defeat) with its headquarters at Liberty Hall, but also of a workers' militia.^[2]: 333

Easter Rising

Irish Citizen Army

Floated as an idea by Shaw at the Albert Hall meeting,^[58] the training of union men as force to protect picket lines and rallies was taken up in Dublin by "Citizens Committee" chair, and Boer-War veteran, Jack White, himself the victim of a police baton charge.^{[3]: 552–553} But in accepting White's services, Connolly made reference not to the labour dispute, but to the national question: "why", he asked "should we not train our men in Dublin as they are doing in Ulster".^[2]: 240 In the north, the Unionists, including trade-union men,^[66] were forming the ranks of the Ulster Volunteers. To White's first handful of volunteers, Constance Markievicz contributed her Fianna Éireann nationalist youth, and in November 1913 the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) was born.^[67]

After the return to work, the command of the ICA divided on the militia's future, and in particular on policy toward the Irish Volunteers, the much larger nationalist response to the arming of Ulster Unionism. Secretary to the ICA Council, Seán O'Casey, described the formation of the Irish Volunteers as "one of the most effective blows" that the ICA had received. Men who might have joined the ICA were now drilling—with the blessing of the IRB—under a command that included employers who had locked out men trying to exercise "the first principles of Trade Unionism".^[68] When it became apparent that Connolly was gravitating towards an IRB strategy of cooperation with the Volunteers, O'Casey and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, the Vice President, resigned, leaving Connolly in undisputed command.^[69]

On the eve of the July Crisis of 1914, Connolly had written of a "desire to see an effective force carrying the green flag of an Irish regiment whilst unconditionally under the red flag of the proletarian army".^[70] That this referred to ICA may not have been clear: its constitution contained James Fintan Lalor's assertion of “the ownership of Ireland, moral and material" by its people, but no reference to a republic. However, with Britain's declaration of war against Germany on 4 August, a "qualitatively new situation arose" for Connolly and his supporters.^{[15]: 170–171}

The Home Rule Bill received royal assent, but with a suspensory act delaying implementation for duration of the war (and with the reservation that the question of Ulster's inclusion had still to be resolved). Leader of the IPP, John Redmond, then split the Irish Volunteers by urging them (in the hope of securing Britain's good faith) to rally to the British Army's colours.^[71] The vast majority heeding his call--some 175,000 men--reformed themselves as the National Volunteers. This left 13,500 to reorganise under the nominal command of Eoin MacNeill of Gaelic League but, in key staff positions, directed by undercover members of the IRB's Military Council: Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett.^[72]

Urges "revolutionary action"

It was not as a pacifist that Connolly, in October 1914, became president of the Irish Neutrality League (chairing a committee that included Arthur Griffith, Constance Markievicz and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington).^[73] He was urging active opposition to the war, and acknowledged that this amounted to "more than a transport strike". Stopping the export of foodstuffs from Ireland, for example, might involve "armed battling in the streets".^[15]: 181 In the Irish Worker he had already declared that if, in the course of Britain's "pirate war upon the German nation", the Kaiser landed an army in Ireland "we should be perfectly justified in joining it".^[74] A further editorial in the ITGWU paper betrayed his exasperation with the "jingoism" of the British labour movement:^{[15]: 180–181} It suggested that insurrection in Ireland and throughout the British dominions might be required “to teach the English working class they cannot hope to prosper permanently by arresting the industrial development of others”.^[75]

In December, the Irish Worker was suppressed and in May 1915 Connolly revived his old ISRP title, Workers' Republic. The new weekly continued to display an interest in the international socialist and labour movement: reports on protections for dock labour in the Netherlands; agitation for the eight-hour-day in the US munitions industry; solidarity with striking Welsh miners; and Sylvia Pankhurst's observations on the benefits of state child care in Hungary.^[76] But accompanied by the martial-patriotic poetry of Maeve Cavanagh, Connolly's editorials continued to urge Irish resistance,^[77] and on the express understanding that this could not "be conducted on the lines of dodging the police, or any such high jinks of constitutional agitation".^[78] He cautioned that those who oppose conscription (the prospect that was drawing crowds to the meetings, the marches and parades of the Irish Citizen Army and of the Volunteers) "take their lives in their hands" (and, by implication, that they should organise accordingly). In December 1915, Connolly wrote:“We believe in constitutional action in normal times, we believe in revolutionary action in exceptional times. These are exceptional times".^{[79][15]: 187}

Relations with the IRB

Connolly was aware of, but not privy to, discussions within the IRB on prospects for a national rising. Patrick Pearse cautioned his colleagues on treating with Connolly:

Connolly is most dishonest in his methods. He will never be satisfied until he goads us into action, and then he will think most of us too moderate and want to guillotine half of us.

By the New Year, believing the Irish Volunteers were dithering, Connolly he was threatening to rush Dublin Castle, around which he had already deployed his ICA on nightly manoeuvres. Determined to safeguard their plans for an insurrection at Easter. Seán Ó Faoláin suggests that the IRB had Connolly "kidnapped,^[21]: 205A unit of Volunteers had been mobilised to arrest Connolly had he refused to meet with the IRB Council, but Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke and the other IRB leaders resolved matters by finally taking Connolly into their confidence.^[80]

Although Connolly committed himself and the Citizen Army to the Easter Rising, relations with the IRB and the Volunteers remained fraught. He may not have realised that the author of the declaration to which he was responding was Pearse (the article in The Spark was unsigned), but Connolly referred to the writer as a "blithering idiot". Perhaps inspired by having at last a fixed date for the rising, Pearse had launched into a seemingly indiscriminate glorification of patriotic bloodletting. Of the carnage of the European war he had written: "such homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country". "No", replied Connolly, ""we do not think the old heart of the earth needs to be warmed with the red wine of millions of lives.... We are sick of such teaching and the world is sick of such teaching".^[81]: 245

Connolly was aware that Pearse's poetic visions, and the single-minded pursuit of a republic by the IRB, did not embrace his understanding of labour's cause. The IRB had been silent during the ITGWU's life-and-death struggle with employers in 1913 (the best Sean O'Casey could secure was permission for individual members to help the workers if they so wished).^[82] A week before the Easter Rising, Connolly reportedly told members of the ICA "in the event of victory, hold on to your rifles, as those with whom we are fighting may stop before our goal is reached. We are out for economic as well as political liberty".^[2]: 332

Easter week 1916

On 14 April 1916, Connolly summoned Winifred Carney to Dublin where she prepared his mobilisation orders for the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). Ten days later, on Easter Monday, with Connolly commissioned by the IRB Military Council as Commandant of the Dublin Districts they set out for the General Post Office (GPO) with an initial garrison party from Liberty Hall. Carney (armed with a typewriter and a Webley revolver) served as Connolly's aide de camp with the rank of adjutant.^[83] The ICA had the distinction of giving women "rank and duty just as if they were men".^[21]: 213

From the steps of the GPO, Patrick Pearse (President and Commandant General) read the "Proclamation of the Irish Republic". Connolly had contributed to the final draft, which declared "the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland" and, in a phrase that he had often been used, a "resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts".^[59]: 87 In a further symbolic gesture of labour's stake in the insurrection, Connolly sent the Starry Plough flag, the symbol of Irish labour, to be hoisted by his men over the Imperial Hotel, owned by the man who had organised their defeat in 1913, William Murphy.^[2]: 332

According to Darrell Figgis, who with Roger Casement had run German guns for the Irish Volunteers, the rebel strategy of occupying the GPO and other public buildings in the city centre, had been informed by Connolly's belief that "the capitalist class of one country would never destroy the buildings that were the pride of the capitalist class of another".^[84]: 679Connolly's biographer, Samuel Levenson records a exchange between Volunteers after a British gunboat began shelling their positions from the Liffey.

"General Connolly told us the British would never use artillery against us". "He did,did he? Wouldn't it be great now if General Connolly was making the decisions for the British".^[2]: 308

With Pearse appearing to be out of his depth, Connolly was in effective command.^[81]: 281 Whatever his merits as a strategist, witnesses cast no doubt on his courage under fire. Michael Collins said of Connolly that he "would have followed him through hell".^[85] Leading men on the street and supervising the construction of barricades, he was twice wounded on the Thursday. Carney refused to leave his side,^[83] and was with him the following day, Friday 29 April, when, carried on a stretcher, he was among the last to evacuate the GPO to Moore Street. There Pearse issued the order for the ICA and Irish Volunteer fighters, now under constant British bombardment, to "lay down arms".^{[3]: 408–412, 657}

As he was being returned to a stretcher to be carried toward the British lines, Connolly told those around him not to worry: "Those of us that signed the proclamation will be shot. But the rest of you will be set free."^[2]: 333

Death

Connolly was not actually held in gaol, but in a room (now called the "Connolly Room") at the State Apartments in Dublin Castle, which had been converted to a first-aid station for troops recovering from the war.^[86]

Connolly was sentenced to death by firing squad for his part in the rising. On 12 May 1916, he was taken by military ambulance to Royal Hospital Kilmainham, across the road from Kilmainham Gaol, and from there taken to the gaol, where he was to be executed. He was visited by his wife Lillie and their 8 year old daughter, Fiona whose memory of her father was of him laughing.^[87]

He is said to have returned to the Catholic Church in few days before his execution.^[88][89] A Capuchin, Father Aloysius Travers administered absolution and last rites. Asked to pray for the soldiers about to shoot him, Connolly said: "I will say a prayer for all men who do their duty according to their lights."^[90]

Connolly had been so badly injured from the fighting (a doctor had already said he had no more than a day or two to live, but the execution order was still given) that he was unable to stand before the firing squad; he was carried to a prison courtyard on a stretcher. Instead of being marched to the same spot where the others had been executed, at the far end of the execution yard, he was tied to a chair and then shot.^[91]

His body (along with those of the other leaders) was put in a mass grave without a coffin. The executions of the rebel leaders deeply angered the majority of the Irish population, most of whom had shown no support during the rebellion. It was Connolly's execution that caused the most controversy.^[92] They were not well received, even in Britain, and drew unwanted attention from the United States, which the British Government was seeking to bring into the war in Europe. H. H. Asquith, the Prime Minister, ordered that no more executions were to take place; an exception being that of Roger Casement, who had been charged with, but not yet convicted of, high treason.

Three months after James Connolly's execution his wife was received into the Catholic Church, at Church St. on 15 August, her daughter Fiona the sole witness.^[87]

Legacy

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Socialism and nationalism

The writer Seán Ó Faoláin described Connolly's socialism sympathetically as:

an amalgamation of everything he had read that could, according to his viewpoint, be applied to Irish ills, a synthesis of Marx, Davitt, Lalor, Robert Owen, Tone, Mitchel and the rest, all welded together in his Socialist-Separatist ideal. He favoured Industrial unionism as the method of approach to what he called variously, the Workers' Republic, the Irish Socialist Republic, the Co-operative State, the Democratic Co-operative Commonwealth... [The unions] would be he means of popular representation in the Workers' Parliament; and they would be the power controlling the national wealth ... In a word he believed in vocational representation combined with "all power to the Unions".^[21]: 189

Ó Faoláin proposes that, while he never had the opportunity to apply and test his principles even on a small scale, Connolly "at least [had] a point of view" and a "definite idea of what he meant by such terms as 'a Republic', 'Freedom', 'Emancipation' [and] 'Autonomy'".^[21]: 190 But in a judgement joined by both critics and admirers of Connolly, Ó Faoláin argues that in the end these social-these emancipatory ideas proved to be secondary to Connolly's nationalism. The night before he was shot, Connolly said to his daughter Nora: "The Socialists will not understand why I am here; they forget I am an Irishman"--for Ó Faoláin an admission that "he had, in point of fact, gone over to nationalism and away from socialism".^[21]: 193

That he had "gone over" to nationalism, is the thesis advanced in a major political biography.^[93] Austen Morgan argues that when it became difficult, in the wake of the workers defeat in 1913 and the outbreak of war, to "sustain a belief in proletarian action", Connolly fell back on his nationalism, and that it was as a revolutionary nationalist that he died.^[93]: 122 (He goes on to suggest that the 1918 anti-conscription-campaign driven support for Sinn Féin and the subsequent War of Independence, owed little to the sacrifice that Connolly was to make in that role).^[94]

Some of Connolly's contemporaries took the case against his commitment to socialism a step further. They suggest that his socialism was itself a function of his nationalism; that call his for a Worker's Republic was an expression of his determination to complete the break with England. Its inspiration, moreover, was not the theory and practice of the international socialist and labour movements but rather--seizing on a theme he developed in The Reconquest of Ireland (1915)--his understanding of the communal nature of pre-conquest Gaelic Ireland. Thus for his old comrade Constance Markievicz, Connolly's socialism was to be understood as only the "application of the social principle which underlay the Brehon laws of our ancestors".^[95] At the same time, there were Catholic writers who, celebrating his eve-of-execution return to the Church, confused Connolly's syndicalism with the corporatist doctrines Pope Leo XIII enunciated in his encyclical Rerum novarum (1891).^[96][97]

Connolly left-wing defenders concede that Connolly opened his socialism to interpretations that give it "meanings other than working-class emancipation" by the lengths to which he went to draw nationlists to his cause: his equation of capitalist rule with English rule and thus identification of socialism with "complete" national freedom.^[95] Nonetheless, they insist on connecting his collaboration with nationalism in the Rising to an uncompromised commitment to proletarian internationalism.^[98]

Roddy and Nora Connolly

It is a perspective for which his son Roddy Connolly sought vindication in the United Front strategy of anti-colonial struggle adopted by the Third International. In 1920, and in 1921 as the president of the then Communist Party of Ireland (CPI), he consulted with Lenin in Moscow. Together with his sister Nora Connolly-O'Brien (who in Belfast had helped organise protestant workers into James Connolly Workers' Republican Clubs), in 1934 he participated in a new republican-socialist initiative, the Republican Congress. But this broke up when he and others refused Moscow's directive to seek an "anti-imperialist" accommodation with Éamon de Valera's new Fianna Fáil regime.^[99][100]

Elected as a Labour TD to Dáil Éireann, Roddy Connolly eventually became Labour Party chairman, and in the 1970s was to invoke his father's coalition with national-bourgeois forces in the Rising to defend Labour's entry into government with Fine Gael.^{[101][4]: 44–55}

After serving as Fianna Fáil nominee in the Seanad Éireann, his sister claimed her father's legacy for those who at the end of the 1960s sought a return to physical-force republicanism. In the 1960s, leading figures in the Irish Republican Army (Roy Johnston, Cathal Goulding, Sean Cronin and Tomás Mac Giolla) argued for resumption of the republican-socialist option attempted by Republican Congress.^{[43]: 49–50} They invoked Connolly, and were influenced by the biography published in 1961^[7] by the Marxist historian Desmond Greaves, chief ideologist of the Connolly Association (which had been established as a branch of the Congress) in London.^{[43]: 66–68 [102]}

Characterising the "fight in the North of Ireland" as the "continuation of the battle" for which her father had died,^[103] Connolly O'Brien lent support to those who, if not repudiating this "new line" in its entirely, nonetheless gave priority to the "armed struggle":^[104] These included the Provisional IRA. Shortly before her death in 1981, she spoke at the Ardfheis of their Sinn Féin political wing in praise of the 1980 hunger strike.^[105] She had, however, expressed a closer affinity for a later split from the Official IRA, the Irish National Liberation Army.

Finding parallels in Third World national liberation struggles, the INLA sought their own synthesis of physical-force republicanism and revolutionary socialism.^[106] In 1977, Connolly-O'Brien gave the funeral oration for INLA's assassinated chief of staff, Seamus Costello, identifying him as "the only one", among all the all people she had met calling themselves followers of Connolly, "that truly understood what James Connolly meant when he spoke of his vision of the freedom of the Irish people."^[107]

Feminism

Belatedly, Connolly has been recognised as a "feminist firebrand,^[108] and for his willingness, beginning with Mother Jones, to learn from women activists.^[109] He views on marriage may have appeared relatively orthodox (he was not prepared to entertain De Leon's ideas on polyamorous unions),^[6][110] but devoting a chapter of The Reconquest of Ireland (1915) to "Women's Rights", Connolly suggested that if "the worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave" and that there could be little use in establishing an Irish state "if it does not embody the emancipation of womanhood?".^[111]

He supported the Suffragette movement, and opened his Irish Citizen Army, at all ranks, to women. Most of the women in the Rising came from the ranks of Cumann na mBan, but the highest-ranking female officers were from the Irish Citizen Army.^[112]

Francis Sheehy-Skeffington opined that Connolly was "the soundest and most thorough-going feminist among all the Irish labour men".^[110][111] While ultimately tying women's oppression to the institution of private capital,^[111] Connolly argued that women would direct the struggle for their own liberation.^[110][111]

Children

James Connolly and his wife Lillie had seven children.^[113] Both Nora and Roddy laid claim to their father's political legacy, became influential figures within the broader Irish-republican movement and, in their later years, served in the Seanad Éireann (Irish senate). Moira became a doctor and married Richard Beech^[114] (an English syndicalist who, like Roddy, in 1920 attended World Congress of the Comintern).^[115] Connolly's youngest daughter, Fiona Connolly Edwards also married in England, was active in the trade-union, and anti-partition, movements and assisted Desmond Greaves in his biography of her father.^[116] A Connolly child was lost at the age of 13: Mona died as a result of burns received in a laundry accident in 1904.^[117]

Tributes

• In 1928, Follonsby miners' lodge in the Durham coalfield unfurled a newly designed banner that included a portrait of Connolly on it. The banner was burned in 1938, replaced but then painted over in 1940. A reproduction of the 1938 Connolly banner was commissioned in 2011 by the Follonsby Miners' Lodge Banner Association and it is regularly paraded at various events in County Durham ('Old King Coal' at Beamish Open Air museum, 'The Seven men of Jarrow' commemoration every June, the Durham Miners' Gala every second Saturday in July, the Tommy Hepburn annual memorial every October), in the wider UK and Ireland.^[118][119]
• Connolly Books, a leftist bookstore in Dublin which was established in 1932, is named after Connolly.^[120]
• The Connolly Association, a British organisation which formed in 1938 and campaigns for Irish unity and independence, is named after Connolly.^[121]
• Connolly and the events of his death are mentioned in the fourth verse of the 1958 song "The Patriot Game" by Irish songwriter Dominic Behan (this verse is sometimes omitted from renditions of the song).^[122]
• In 1968, Irish group The Wolfe Tones released a single named "James Connolly", which reached number 15 in the Irish charts.^[123] The band Black 47 wrote and performed a song about Connolly that appears on their album Fire of Freedom. Irish singer-songwriter Niall Connolly has a song "May 12th, 1916 – A Song for James Connolly" on his album Dream Your Way Out of This One (2017). The song "Connolly Was There" is a popular Irish folk song celebrating Connolly's contributions to Unions in Ireland. A well known rendition was sung by Derek Warfield.^[124]
• In a 1972 interview on The Dick Cavett Show, John Lennon stated that James Connolly was an inspiration for his song, "Woman Is the Nigger of the World". Lennon quoted Connolly's 'the female is the slave of the slave' in explaining the feminist inspiration for the song.^[125]
• The Non-Stop Connolly show (1975),^[126] a 12-hour play on the life and politics of James Connolly written by John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy. It was sometimes presented as a daily series and complete script reading, as in London in 1976 at the Almost Free Theatre Soho.
• Dunedin Connollys GFC, a Edinburgh, Scotland Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) club founded in 1988, takes its name from his.^[127]
• The song "James Connolly" appears on the 1991 album Black 47 by the band Black 47. It celebrates his career as a socialist and Republican.^[128]
• In a 2002 BBC television production, 100 Greatest Britons where the British public were asked to register their vote, Connolly was voted in 64th place.
• The Connolly Youth Movement is named after him.^[129]

Memorials

There is a statue of James Connolly in Dublin, outside Liberty Hall, the offices of the SIPTU trade union. Another statue of Connolly stands in Union Park, Chicago near the offices of the UE union.

In 1986 a bust of Connolly was erected in Riverfront Park in Troy, New York.^[130]

In March 2016 a statue of Connolly was unveiled by Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure minister Carál Ní Chuilín, and Connolly's great-grandson, James Connolly Heron, on Falls Road in Belfast.^[131]

Connolly Station, one of the two main railway stations in Dublin, and Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown, are named in his honour.

In the Cowgate area of Edinburgh where Connolly grew up there is a likeness of Connolly and a gold-coloured plaque dedicated to him under the George IV bridge.^[132]

In July 2023 a plaque was unveiled by the Dublin City Council at Connolly's former residence on South Lotts Road in Ringsend.^[133]

Writings

• Connolly, James. 1897. "Socialism and Nationalism". The Shan van Vocht. 1 (1).
• Connolly, James. 1897. Erin's Hope: The Ends and the Means (republished as The Irish Revolution, c. 1924)
• Connolly, James. 1898. "The Fighting Race". Workers' Republic, 13 August.
• Connolly, James. 1901. The New Evangel, Preached to Irish Toilers, (first appeared in Workers’ Republic, June-August 1899).
• Connolly, James. 1909. Socialism Made Easy, Chicago.
• Connolly, James. 1910. Labour in Irish history (republished 1914)
• Connolly, James. 1910. Labour, Nationality, and Religion (republished 1920)
• Connolly, James. 1911. "Plea For Socialist Unity in Ireland". Forward, 27 May
• Connolly, James. 1913. "British Labour and Irish Politicians". Forward, 3 May.
• Connolly, James. 1913. "The Awakening of Ulster's Democracy". Forward, 7 June
• Connolly, James. 1913. "North East Ulster". Forward, 2 August.
• Connolly, James. 1914. "Labour in the new Irish Parliament". Forward , 14 July
• Connolly, James . 1914. "The hope of Ireland". Irish Worker, 31 October.
• Connolly, James. 1914. The Axe to the Root, and, Old Wine in New Bottles (republished 1921)
• Connolly, James. 1915. The Re-Conquest of Ireland (republished 1917)
• Ryan, Desmond (ed.). 1949. Labour and Easter Week: A Selection from the Writings of James Connolly. Dublin: Sign of the Three Candles
• Edwards, Owen Dudley & Ransom, Bernard (eds.). 1973. Selected Political Writings: James Connolly, London: Jonathan Cape
• Anon. (ed.). 1987. James Connolly: Collected Works (Two volumes). Dublin: New Books
• Ó Cathasaigh, Aindrias (ed.). 1997. The Lost Writings: James Connolly, London: Pluto Press ISBN 0-7453-1296-9

See also

• James Connolly bibliography

Notes

References

Biographies

• Allen, Kieran. 1990. The Politics of James Connolly, London: Pluto Press ISBN 0-7453-0473-7
• Anderson, W.K. 1994. James Connolly and the Irish Left. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. ISBN 0-7165-2522-4.
• Collins, Lorcan. 2012. James Connolly. Dublin: O'Brien Press. ISBN 1-8471-7160-5.
• Edwards, Ruth Dudley. 1981. James Connolly. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-7171-1112-1
• Fox, R.M. 1946. James Connolly: the Forerunner. Tralee: The Kerryman.
• Greaves, C. Desmond. 1972. The Life and Times of James Connolly (2nd ed.). London: Lawrence and Wishart. ISBN 978-0853152347
• Levenson, Samuel. 1973. James Connolly, a Biography. London: Martin Brian and O'Keefe. ISBN 978085616-130-8
• Metscher, Priscilla. 2002. James Connolly and the Reconquest of Ireland. Minneapolis: MEP Publications, Univ. of Minnesota. ISBN 0-930656-74-1
• Morgan, Austen. 1990. James Connolly. a Political Biography. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan. ISBN 0-7171-3911-5
• McNulty, Liam. 2022. James Connolly: Socialist, Nationalist and Internationalist. London: Merlin Press. ISBN 0-8503-6783-2.
• Nevin, Donal. 2005. James Connolly: A Full Life. Dublin: Gill & MacMillan. ISBN 0-7171-3911-5.
• O'Callaghan, Sean. 2015. James Connolly: My search for the Man, the Myth and his Legacy. ISBN 9781780894348
• Ransom, Bernard. 1980. Connolly's Marxism, London: Pluto Press. ISBN 0-86104-308-1.

External links

• James Connolly archive at Marxists.org
• The Real Ideas of James Connolly
• James Connolly's grave, Arbour Hill, Irish Graves website
• IWW's Memorial Page for James Connolly
• 1916 Walking Tour Site
• "The Relevance Of James Connolly in Ireland Today" Archived 9 August 2002 at the Wayback Machine by George Gilmore
• "James Connolly & Irish Freedom: A Marxist Analysis" by G. Schuller
• "BBC online poll: James Connolly voted onto 100 'Greatest' people" at the Wayback Machine (archived 28 October 2009) by Niall Mulholland (CWI), 31 August 2002
• Film biopic of Connolly underway
• "James Connolly – A Marxist appreciation" (Spartacist League Dayschool)
• "Connolly is set for a heroic makeover on silver screen" by Kevin Myers
• Connolly family from the 1911 Irish Census
• Connolly images collated on the online Multitext pages of University College Cork