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.
James Connolly | |
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Born | |
Died | 12 May 1916 Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, Ireland | (aged 47)
Cause of death | Execution by firing squad |
Political party |
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Spouse | |
Children | 7, including Nora and Roddy |
Military service | |
Buried | Arbour Hill Prison, Dublin |
Service/ | |
Years of service |
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Rank | Commandant General |
Unit |
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Battles/wars | Easter Rising |
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.
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
After Ireland is free, says the patriot who won't touch Socialism, we will protect all classes, and if you won't pay your rent you will be evicted same as now. But the evicting party, under command of the sheriff, will wear green uniforms and the Harp without the Crown, and the warrant turning you out on the roadside will be stamped with the arms of the Irish Republic.
James Connolly, in Workers' Republic, 1899
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]
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
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 the 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]
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]
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]
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
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]
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
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 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]: 205 A 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 launched into praise for the concept of a "blood sacrifice". Pearse described World War I as "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 [note 1].[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
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] She was seconded in that role, for the first two days, by Connolly's 15 year-old son Roddy.[84]
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".[85]: 679 Connolly'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 Michael Collins said of Connolly that he "would have followed him through hell".[86] 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
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.[87]
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.[88]
He is said to have returned to the Catholic Church in few days before his execution.[89][90] 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."[91]
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.[92]
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.[93] 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.
Connolly was not simply a socialist, but specifically was a Syndicalist.[94][95] Syndicalism is a form of socialism which espouses the idea that socialism will come about through the mass action of trade unions, and that in a socialist society the unions will control the means of production. Connolly's syndicalism was developed through his interactions with Daniel DeLeon, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Jim Larkin. Although Connolly himself dabbled in electoral politics, he came to lean towards the syndicalist viewpoint that the most effective way for workers to gain power was through strikes. Connolly was also a supporter of the syndicalist and IWW view that workers should organise themselves into "One Big Union".[94][95]
Connolly and DeLeon often clashed on a number of points; one point, in particular, was that Connolly rejected DeLeon's contention that every nominal wage increase gained by workers would be quickly and exactly offset by a corresponding increase in prices, with Connolly arguing that Karl Marx himself had rejected this notion. Connolly suggested that endorsing the idea that wage increases were meaningless would result in socialists never fighting to improve the conditions of workers.[94][95]
In 1910, Connolly published the book Labour in Irish History in which he analysed Irish history from a Marxist perspective. In the book, Connolly argues that prior to the British colonisation of Ireland, the Irish lived in a form of stateless communism. The book also criticised Daniel O'Connell and his work towards Catholic emancipation on the grounds that the result only uplifted the Catholic bourgeoisie and not Catholics as a whole.[94][95]
Connolly envisioned the Industrial Workers of the World forming their own political party which would bring together the feuding socialist groups such as the Socialist Labor Party of America and the Socialist Party of America.[96] Likewise, he envisaged independent Ireland as a socialist republic. His connection and views on Revolutionary Unionism and Syndicalism have raised debate on if his image for a workers' republic would be one of State or Grassroots socialism.[97][98][99] For a time he was involved with De Leonism and the Second International until he later broke with both.[100]
The writer Seán Ó Faoláin described Connolly's ideology 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
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".[101] 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).[102][103]
The historian Fergus D'arcy has argued that prior to his return to Ireland in 1910, Connolly was not particularly concerned with the ideological idea of nationalism, but living in Ireland forced Connolly to grapple with the "national question".[94] In 1911, Connolly entered into a public debate with Belfast socialist William Walker. Walker argued that socialism in Ireland would only come about if Ireland remained a part of the United Kingdom, and stated he was an "Internationalist", not a nationalist. Connolly rebutted with his belief that "the only true socialist internationalism lay in a free federation of free peoples".[94]
Although Connolly committed himself and his Irish Citizen Army to the Easter Rising, he remained wary of the Irish nationalists he was aligning himself with. A week before the Easter Rising, he 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".[104]
In Scotland, Connolly's thinking influenced socialists such as John Maclean, who would, like him, combine his leftist thinking with nationalist ideas when he formed the Scottish Workers Republican Party.[105]
The historian 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.[106][106]: 122 [note 2]
Connolly was an advocate of a universal language, stating "I do believe in the necessity, and indeed in the inevitability of an universal language; but I do not believe it will be brought about, or even hastened, by smaller races or nations consenting to the extinction of their language."[108] As such he learned and advocated Esperanto.[109]
Connolly spoke positively about Bundist activism in the Russian Empire.[110] During his 1902 election campaign in the Wood Quay Ward his campaign became the first in Irish history to distribute leaflets in Yiddish to Jewish residents. The leaflet condemned antisemitism as a tool of the capitalist class.[111] Connolly sharply criticised the overtly antisemitic tone of the British SDF's publications during the War, arguing that they had attempted to "divert the wrath of the advanced workers from the capitalists to the Jews".[110]
At other times, however, Connolly's publication reprinted antisemitic articles, such as one during the Boer War which posed the question: "What would you do in the same position as the Boers? Supposing your country was invaded by a mob of Jew and foreign exploiters ... What would you do?".[112] Connolly's Harp (the journal of the Irish Socialist Federation) also featured an article in 1909 that stated that "the patriotic Irish capitalists imported wholesale scab Jews to break the strike of Irish workers".[113]
Over the course of his political lifetime, Connolly maintained that there was no inherent conflict between religion and socialism, holding that socialists should campaign on economic and political issues alone, and completely avoid debating spirituality, particularly with clergy. Connolly saw attacking religion as a strategic and tactical mistake for socialists, bogging them down in an unnecessary conflict. He also believed that any religion that promoted egalitarianism and humanitarianism could, in fact, aid the introduction of socialism.[94][95] In 1910 Connolly wrote the pamphlet Labour, nationality and religion in which he specifically outlined his view that Socialism and Catholicism were not incompatible.[94][95]
Another point Connolly and DeLeon differed on was marriage; Connolly believed strictly in monogamy while DeLeon was willing to entertain the notion of polyamorous marriages.[94][95]
Connolly had a particular concern with the role of women in society. In 1915, Connolly wrote in the Reconquest of Ireland that "The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave" and "of what use...can be the re-establishment of any form of Irish state if it does not embody the emancipation of womanhood?".[114] Connolly supported the Suffragette movement, and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington opined that Connolly was "the soundest and most thorough-going feminist among all the Irish labour men".[95][114] Connolly suggested the oppression of women was a consequence of private property.[114] Connolly held the view that it was not the role of men to liberate women, but for women to liberate themselves with the help of supporting men.[95][114]
Connolly's Irish Citizen Army had the distinction of giving women "rank and duty just as if they were men".[21]: 213 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.[115]
James Connolly and his wife Lillie had seven children.[116] The eldest, Mona, died in 1904 at the age of 13, the result of an accident with scalding laundry water, on the eve of the family's departure to join Connolly in America.[117]
In Belfast, Nora and Ina (1896–1980) were active, under the direction of Winifred Carney, in Cumann na mBan and carried reports from the north to Pearse and their father the week before the rising in Dublin. Later (as noted above), Nora was involved with her younger brother Roddy in efforts to promote a republican-socialist movement, but after the splintering of the Republican Congress in 1934 they went their separate ways. Roddy ended his political life as chairman of the Irish Labour Party and, the year before her death, Nora made her appearance at the Ardfheis of (Provisional) Sinn Féin.
In Belfast, Aideen (1895–1966) was also in Cumann na mBan.[118] She married a Hugh Ward in Naas and had five children.[119] Moira (1899–1958) became a doctor and married Richard Beech[120] (an English syndicalist who, like Roddy, in 1920 attended World Congress of the Comintern).[121] Connolly's youngest daughter, Fiona Connolly Edwards (1907–1976) also married in England, was active in the trade-union, and anti-partition, movements and assisted Desmond Greaves in his biographies both of her father and of the executed anti-Treaty republican, Liam Mellowes.[122]
In their last interview, Connolly urged his wife to return with the younger children to the United States, but she failed to secure the necessary passport. This was despite the assurance of General Sir John Maxwell that she was "a decent humble woman who would be incapable of platform oratory in America".[123]
Remaining in Dublin, in August 1916 Lillie Connolly was received into the Catholic Church, Fiona her sole witness.[88] She did not make public appearances but when she died in 1938 she was accorded a state funeral.[124]
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.[137]
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.[138]
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.[139]
In July 2023 a plaque was unveiled by the Dublin City Council at Connolly's former residence on South Lotts Road in Ringsend.[140]
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