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James Connolly

1868–1916

 

Though his career was brutally cut short, James Connolly remains the most influential personality in Irish left-wing politics, and his many writings have remained widely read and influential to this day, even in an Ireland that heartily embraces the market economy.  All cultures need such a critic.

      He was born of Irish parents living in Scotland, in the Cowgate district of Edinburgh, then a slum, on 5th June 1868.  Like so many working-class children, he was sent to work at the early age of eleven.  At fourteen, however, he joined the British army, then, as now, a resort for those with ambitions to escape a background of poverty.  For a time he was stationed in Ireland.  He was determined, however, to marry a Wicklow girl he had met in Scotland.  To support his family he left the army to work as a carter.

      At this time he began to take an interest in socialist and trade union matters.  In 1896 he was sent to Ireland as a paid organizer for the Dublin Socialist Club, one of the first organizations of its kind in Ireland.  He founded the Workers' Republic, the very first Irish socialist paper.

      From these first tentative beginnings grew the Irish Socialist Republican party, whose main aim was to secure 'the national and economic freedom of the Irish people'.  These activities soon brought him to the attention of the British authorities, and the secret police in Dublin began to make regular reports on his activities.

      Life was hard for his family.  Having made a tour of Britain and the United States in 1902, he eventually returned to America with his family in 1903.  He stayed in the United States for seven years, working under the auspices of the Socialist Labour party.  He established the Irish Socialist Federation in New York and published a monthly journal of Irish interest called the Harp.  He was one of those who helped to found the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), whose aim was the creation of 'one big union' which all working men could join to defend their interests in the era of the great trusts.

      But as an almost unknown figure from Ireland, Connolly was an outsider in the Irish-American communities with their Catholic, conservative leadership.  His espousal of trades unionism and women's rights, when added to a raising of class consciousness, was not popular among the established nationalist groups.  Though admired by many, he could not break through the parochial and racial prejudices of the Irish Americans, to many of whom socialism, in any shape or form, was anathema.

      Even among American socialists he had difficulties.  His Irish nationalism, religious and spiritual ideas, and Catholic-inspired opposition to divorce were intolerable to many other socialists, largely of European, and especially German, background.  He received little support among American socialists for the Harp, which soon failed.

      He then turned to the Industrial Workers of the World, and in 1910 became editor of the Newcastle Free Press, a Wobbly-supported paper published for workers in the heartlands of the industrial district dominated by the steel trust.

      Convinced that his American venture had been a regrettable mistake, he went back to Ireland in 1910 and worked as the Ulster organizer of the Transport and General Workers Union.  It was at this time he wrote his most extended work, Labour in Irish History.  This was an attempt to discover, or perhaps create, a legitimate role for the left in the course of Irish history - to justify his claim on the future by calling on the country's past struggles against oppression.

      Among employers there was widespread resistance to accepting trade unions, and this led to the great lockout in Dublin in 1913, in which the workers were led by JAMES LARKIN [37].  When Larkin was eventually jailed, Connolly took over the union leadership.

      The families of the Dublin workers suffered greatly at this time, as did the protesting workers themselves when they were attacked by the police in the city centre.  Along with Capt. Jack White, Connolly set about organizing the Irish Citizen army, based in the union's headquarters in Liberty Hall.

      Afterwards Larkin went to America.  Connolly, on the outbreak of the First World War, opposed it.  He saw capitalism, whether in Britain, America, or Germany, as the real enemy of peace and social justice.  Working people were being led away from their true interests by the siren call of nationalism.

      But Irish nationalism would be Connolly's own nemesis.  In 1916 he was inveigled into taking part in the Easter Rising by PATRICK HENRY PEARSE [7] and Thomas MacDonagh, even though the aims of his organization were very different from those of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which they led.  He was appointed military commander of the Dublin district, and the members of the Irish Citizen army that could be mobilized fought alongside the Irish Volunteers in the city garrisons.  While in command at the General Post Office he was badly wounded in the leg, but still gave orders from a mattress laid out on the floor of the building.

      After the rebels surrendered he was detained in Dublin Castle, but after a court-martial he was executed by shooting, sitting in a chair in Kilmainham Gaol, on 12th May 1916.

      Like the other leaders of the uprising, Connolly took on even greater significance in death.  His ideas remain influential not only among members of the general trade-union movement in Ireland, but also among more radical republicans, in both Northern Ireland and the south.  His son and daughter carried on his work in radical politics into the middle decades of the century.

      To the Irish left, Connolly remains a hero.  To Irish people in general, many of whom would not share all his views, his life is a constant reminder that social justice, rather than the pursuit of wealth, must remain the ultimate aim of all social organization.  In recognition of his role in Irish history, a statue of him now stands in Beresford Place in Dublin, facing the new Liberty Hall, one of Dublin's first high-rise buildings, erected in the 1960s.  Times change, and even trade unions change with them.