James Connolly (1868-1916)

[var. c.1879; Gl.  Séamas Ó Conghaile]; b. 5 June 1869, Cowgate (“Little Ireland”), Edinburgh, of Irish immigrant parents from Co. Monaghan, John Connolly and Mary [née] McGinn; left school at eleven; began employment at printing works, 1882; enlisted under false name of Reid in Second Battalion of the Royal Scots Regiment (British Army) to escape poverty at 14, serving for 7 years, partly at Cork, later in Dublin; deserted from Curragh before his regiment was sent to India; fled to Perth, Scotland, 1889 [aetat. 21], accompanied by Lillie Reynold, a Scottish girl, whom he married, 20 April, 1890 - with whom three daughters [incl. 2nd child Nora, b.1893; Roddy b. 1901]; failed in business as a cobbler; became a carter in Edinburgh; encountered John Leslie, Labour politician (1873-1955?); became a trade unionist taking over from his brother John as Secretary of the Scottish Socialist Federation [var. Socialist Democratic Federation], May, 1895; become involved in Keir Hardie's Independent Labour Party, fnd. 1893; learned and promoted Esperanto;
travelled to Ireland with his family as paid organiser of the Dublin Socialist Club, May 1896, becomeing founding member of the Irish Socialist Republican Party [ISRP], May 1896, with the stated aim of securing ‘national and economic freedom of the Irish people’; published ‘Erin’s Hope’ (1897); arrested in course of 1798 commemoration, June 21, 1897, Maud Gonne paying the fine for his release; published The New Evangel (1901); also Father Finlay, S.J., and Socialism: An Exposition of Social Evolution (1901); became fnd. ed. of Workers’ Republic, 1898-99; toured Scotland and England on behalf of the Socialist Labour Party in 1903 - a splinter from the SDF formed by Connolly with Neil Maclean and others impressed by Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party in America; joined protests by Maud Gonne and Arthur Griffith against Boer War;
sailed for USA, without his family, September 18, 1903, remaining until 1910; worked with The Socialist Labor Party on the east coast; joined by family, 1904 - and learns that his eldest dg. Mona has burnt to death in an accident; became Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organiser, 1908; issued Socialism Made Easy (1909) and Labour, Nationality and Religion (1910), in reply to Father Kane, S.J., who delivered anti-socialist Lenten pastorals at Gardiner Street, 1909; fnd. Irish Socialist Federation in New York, attracting notice of William O’Brien;toured USA for 11 months, 1909-1910; issued Labor in Irish History in America (1910); returned to Ireland, arriving 26 July, 1910
assured of post in Socialist Party by O’Brien; given secretarial work under James Larkin of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ [ITGWU]; wrote Under Which Flag?, unprinted play; ed. The Harp; co-founded the Industrial workers of the World (“Wobblies”); was sent to Belfast on behalf of ITGWU, 1911, living at Glenalina Tce., off Falls Rd.; proposed foundation of Irish Labour Party at TUC meeting in Clonmel, 1912; led Irish Workers in Dublin when Larkin was imprisoned in 1913; responded to state brutally against strikers and demonstrators in Dublin Lock Out Strikg of 1912-13 approximately 250 strong Irish Citizen Army to defend the strikers; strikes end in defeat but set a precedent that would create better conditions and secure the rights of workers in Ireland; by forming the 250-strong Irish Citizen Army at Liberty Hall, with drillmaster Capt. J. R. [’Jack”] White - son of Field Marshal Sir George White, of Broughshane, co. Antrim;
warns British against a ‘carnival of reaction’ if compulsory recruitment was introduced in Ireland; fnd. the Irish labour Party, as political wing of the Irish Trade Union Council, 1912; met Winifred Carney who would become his secretary and accompanied him during the 1916 Rising;revived the Workers’ Republic on suppression of Irish Worker, Dec. 1914; formed Anti-War Committee after Redmond’s speech at Woodenbridge, Sept. 20, 1914, committing Labour movement to oppose recruitment and conscription, flying the banner, “We Serve Neither King Nor Kaiser, but Ireland” at Liberty Hall; attacked the remaining Irish Volunteers for inactivity; Workers’ Republic suppressed, 1915; Re-Conquest of Ireland (1915); became Acting General Secretary of Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU), 1915; Worker’s Republic asks, ‘Are we not waiting too long?’, Jan. 1916;
disappears for three days in Jan. 1916 (kidnapped by the IRB?], and shared in secret meeting with the Irish Republican Brotherhood which resulted in the decision to embark on the 1916 Rising with joint forces of the Irish Volunteers - controlled by the IRB - and the Irish Citizen Army; appointed military commander of Republican forces in Dublin [Dublin Brigade] by IRB Council, 1916; argued against occupation of Dublin Castle, as too straggling to defend and as containing Red Cross Hospital; appt. Commandant in GPO, Easter 1916; received multiple wounds and considered likely to live two days after arrest; held in a room of the State Apartments in Dublin Castle used for war-wounded [WWI]; sentence to death by court-martial; accepted Catholic last rites from Fr. Aloysius Travers of the Capuchin Order; urged his wife to convert to Catholicism at their last meeting (‘Hasn’t it been a full life, Lillie? And isn’t this a good end?’), asking his family to leave Ireland afterwards and seek friends abroad; executed by firing-squad tied to a chair at Kilmainham, 12 May 1916 [err. 9 May, DIH]; purportedly said of his executioners, ‘I will say a prayer for all men who do their duty according to their lights’; buried in a mass grave with other leaders, uncoffined and in quick-lime.
the Connolly Association was founded in Britain in 1938; The Testimony of James Connolly, was written and dir. by Eoghan Harris (RTE 1968); the National Library of Ireland holds his papers; a portrait-bust of him was erected in Troy, New York, 1988; a Dublin memorial by the sculptor Eamonn O’Doherty was planned for Beresford Place, Dublin, after a competition for the contract; “Labor & Dignity - James Connolly in America” an exhibition curated by Marion C. Casey, was mounted at Glucksman House (NYU) as part of Ireland’s Decade of Commemorations and its own 20th anniversary was toured to the TCD Library Long Room in Dec. 2013-Feb. 2014; a statue of Connolly by Steve Finney, cast in the Dublin Foundry, was unveiled by his grandson James Connolly Heron with the Minister of Culture, Caral Ni Chuilin, on the Falls Road, Belfast, in March 2016; Connolly is the subject of two commemorative poems by Sorley Maclean/Somhairle MacGill-Eain - one called ‘The Shirt of James Connolly’ based on the relic in the National Museum of Ireland. DIB DIH OCIL FDA

Monument to James Connolly at Beresford Place, Dublin sculpt. Eamon O’Doherty (1939-2011)
“The Cause of Labour is the Cause of Ireland. The Cause of Ireland is the Cause of Labour.” (Inscription.)	Photo by Colm O’Callaghan, post on Facebook by Frank Allan [19.01.2017.]

[ top ]

[ top ]

Bibliographical details
Collected Writings [3 vols], Vol. 1: William O’Brien, ed. & intro., Labour and Easter Week (Dublin: Sign of the Three Candles 1946); Vol. 2: Desmond Ryan, ed. & intro., Socialism and Nationalism: A Selection from the Writings of James Connolly (Dublin: Sign of the Three Candles 1948); Vol. 3: W. McMullen, intro., The Workers’ Republic (Dublin: Sign of the Three Candles 1951).

Labour in Irish History (1910)

Labour in Irish History (Dublin: Maunsel & Co. 1910) - signed and dedicated to W. Stewart, a Belfast socialist; copy offered for auction at Adam’s [19 June 2016; estimated price €2-3,500.

[ top ]

Labour in Irish History [1910] (NY Donnelly Press 1919) —Available at Archive.org - online

[ top ]

Peter Beresford Ellis, ed., James Connolly: Selected Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin; NY: New Monthly 1973; London: Pluto 1997)
Pluto edition available at Google Books - online [accessed 01.05.2017 7 03.03.2023].

[ top ]

[ top ]

Bibiliographical details

Plays about Connolly: John Arden & Margaret D’Arcy, The Non-Stop Connolly Show, 5 vols.(Pluto Press 1977-78); Eoghan Harris, auth. & dir., The Testimony of James Connolly (RTE 1968); Terry Eagleton The White, the Gold, and the Gangrene, in Saint Oscar and Other Plays (Oxford: Blackwell 1997); Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh, James Connolly: A Working Class Hero, dir. by Brian O’Flaherty for Bruno Dog Productions (2013). Note: Connolly is a character in Gerry Hunt’s graphic novel [i.e., comic] about the 1916 Rising, Blood Upon the Rose (O’Brien Press 2009).

[ top ]

Commentary
P. Ó Cathasaigh [Seán O’Casey], The Story of the Citizen Army (1919). Chp. X: ‘Connolly Assumes Leadership’, incls. remarks: ‘Under Connolly’s leadership ... The [Volunteer’s] attitude of passive sympathy began to be gradually replaced by an attitude of active unity and co-operation. In their break-away from the Parliamentarian Party ...’ [51] ‘A well-known author has declared that Connolly was the first martyr for Irish Socialism; but Connolly was no more an Irish Socialist martyr than Robert Emmett [sic], P. H. Pearse, or Theobald Wolfe Tone.’ [52; see also under Sheehy-Skeffington, q.v.]. O’Casey was replaced as Secretary by J. Connolly [47]. Note that O’Casey wrote of a play by Connolly performed in Liberty Hall (26 March 1916), the script of which has been lost: ‘A play of his called Under Which Flag? blundered a sentimental way over a stage in the Hall in a green limelight, shot with tinsel stars.’ (Drums Under the Window [q.p.]; cited in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1991.)

W. B. Yeats: On 1913: ’Later that night Connolly carries in procession a coffin with the words “British Empire” upon it, and police and mob fight for its ownership, and at last, that the police may not capture it, it is thrown into the Liffey. And there are fights between police and windowbreakers, and I read in the morning papers that many have been wounded; some two hundred heads have been dressed at the hospitals; an old woman killed by batons blows, and or perhaps trampled under the feet of the crowd; and that two thousand pounds’ worth of decorated plate-glass windows have been broken. I count the links in the chain of responsibility, run them across my fingers, and wonder if any link there is from my own workshop.’ (Autobiographies, 195, p.368.)

Samuel Levenson, ‘James Connolly, Unquiet Spirit’, in Éire-Ireland, 6, 4 (Winter 1971), pp.110-17; Notes that Connolly was born in Edinburgh, his father working there as a garbage collector. Forced to leave school at age 10, Connolly worked in a tile shop, a bakery and a printing shop before becoming “too old” for such employment at age 14, whereupon he joined the British army. First saw Ireland as a member of the Second Battalion of the Royal Scots Regiment, stationed for two years at Cork, then 30 miles from Dublin, then in Dublin itself. In Dublin he met Lillie Reynolds, a domestic worker and an Anglican, and deserted, aged 21, to marry her. Settled in Irish slums of Edinburgh, working first as garbage collector, then opening a shoe repair shop to support an increasing family. Left Scotland for Ireland, 1896, spending seven years there working to establish an Irish Socialist Republican Party. Participated (with ISRP and Maud Gonne) in demonstrations against the 60th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s reign, and also the Boer War. Founded Workers’ Republic, the first of many radical publications, and ran for public office, prompting his opponents to pay for votes and threaten electorate with raised rents should he be elected. (p.112-113) Went to America in 1903 following disputes with his political comrades, writing bitterly, ‘Men have been driven out of Ireland by the British Government, and by the landlords, but I am the first to be driven out by The Socialists’. (p.114) Did not settle well, disliking the climate and much about American culture. Engaged in lengthy feud with De Leon (sometimes called the “’Marxist Pope’’), and had difficulty finding steady employment. Worked in Troy, NY, as an insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life, as a machinist in a Singer sewing machine plant in New Jersey and as a paid organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World and The Socialist Party. Established group of American Socialists of Irish origin and edited its publication, The Harp, later transferring its publication to Dublin. Returned to Dublin carrying texts for Labour in Irish History and Labour, Nationality and Religion. Became Belfast organiser of Irish Transport and General Worker’s Union, 1911, and helped found Irish Labour Party, 1912. Worked to combat the great Dublin Lockout, 1913, and stayed to rebuild the union when Jim Larkin left for America. Never spoke publicly against Larkin, despite their differences. (pp.115-16.) Built Irish Citizen Army in response to postponement of Home Rule Bill. (See descriptions of Connolly by sundry hands, quoted in idem.)

Francis Shaw, S.J., ‘The Canon of Irish History: A Challenge’, in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, LXI, 242 (Dublin 1972): ‘In Labour in Ireland, Connolly strove to show that all Irish revolutionary efforts had been socialist, and he was satisfied that the Gaelic mode of life was democratic; he apparently believed that the capitalist system had been introduced to Ireland by the [119] British, and that before that disaster there had been no private ownership of the land in Ireland.His book shows that some curious blooms can be grown most successfully in a vacuum.’ (pp.119-20.)

[ top ]

Tom Garvin, Irish Revolutionaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1987): ‘James Connolly, a somewhat isolated and unrepresentative figure among the revolutionaries, has had the effect of making the ideologies of the revolution appear retrospectively more egalitarian than they actually were. The fluence and occasional brilliancy of Connolly’s writings, combined with the new fashion for socialist ideas that emerged in the 1960s, have intensified this effect, as has the refraction of his ideas in Pearse’s later writings. Because both men became martyrs, they have been held to be representative’; in fact, both were to the left of the movement, and it would be difficult to say which was the further away from its centre of gravity [135] although in very different directions. Their prestige was so great that a mildly socialist flavour was given to the Democratic Programme of the first Dáil in 1919.’ (pp.135-56.)

David Cairns & Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester UP 1988), remark: ‘Writing in the Irish socialists’ organ Forward, some months before the great Dublin lock-out of 1913, Connolly took up Marx’s fundamental statement that ‘[the] proletarian movement is the ... movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority’ and redefined it for contemporary Irish conditions. “Just as The Socialist knows that the working class, being the lowest in the social system, cannot emancipate itself without emancipating all other classes, so the Irish Catholic has to realise that he, being the most oppressed and disfranchised, could not win any modicum of political freedom or social recognition for himself without winning it for all others in Ireland” (quoted in Bernard Ransom, Connolly’s Marxism, Pluto Press 1980, p.24). ‘[...] The compulsion that would-be leaders were under to conform to certain unyielding requirements - Catholicism, familism and parliamentarism - ensured that just as in metropolitan-colonial relations the rules of discourse favoured the colonial power, within the people-nation the rules of discourse ensured the dominance of the parliamentarism of the UIL. / Connolly’s attempt to align socialist and Catholicism were augmented by his supportive gestures towards the members of the Gaelic League. In particular, in Labour in Irish History, he sought to produce a perspective in which, in keeping with the League’s enthusiasm, the ancient Gaels were seen as socially co-operative, holding property communally with democratically elected chiefs [of] society ideal in its time and only gradually destroyed by the Norman invaders.’ The authors further remark that Connolly’s view of Larkin’s experience convinced him that his approach was more likely to bear fruit. [96-7]. Of Connolly in 1900: ‘the man who is bubbling over with love and enthusiasm for “Ireland” and can yet pass unmoved through our streets and witness all the wrong and suffering, the shame and degradation wrought upon the people of Ireland, aye, wrought by Irishmen upon Irish men and women, without burning to end it, is ... a draud and a liar in his heart, no matter how he loves that combination of chemical elements which he is pleased to call “Ireland”’ (Selected Writings, ed. Peter Beresford-Ellis, 1973, p.38; here p.97.)

David S. Johnson & Liam Kennedy, ‘Nationalist Historiography and the Decline of the Irish Economy: George O’Brien revisited’, in Sean Hutton & Paul Stewart, eds., Ireland’s Histories: Aspects of State, Society and Ideology (1991): ‘[T]here was striking economic progress under Grattan’s Parliament was virtually an article of faith among nationalist writers [...] This belief has strong political resonance since it dovetailed neatly with contemporary economic arguments for Home Rule. Prevailing ideas on the subject were seriously questioned for the first time by Scottish-born socialist, James Connolly, in the course of a blistering attack on “parliamentarian historians”. In his highly original Labour in Irish History, published in 1910, he exclaimed, “The prosperity of Ireland under Grattan’s Parliament was almost as little due to that Parliament as the dust caused by the revolution of the coach-wheel was due to the presence of the fly who, sitting on the coach, viewed the dust, and fancied himself the author thereof.” (Three Candles ed., 1951, p.42). Connolly was sceptical of any gains in the living standards of the poor [...]. Not surprisingly, George O’Brien took issue with Connolly’s attempt to revise nationalist orthodoxy [in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, p.406]. Connolly returned from American in 1910 with his pamphlet Socialism Made Easy. Connolly was at pains to oppose the total hostility to political (ie non-industrial) action that he had found among American syndicalists. He fought elections, supporting women’s right to the vote and Ireland’s right to independence. [...] Connolly and Frederick Ryan in the Independent Labour party of Ireland.’ (p.13-14.)

[ top ]

Emmet O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland 1824-1960 (Gill & Macmillan 1992), remarks that the originality lies not solely in his conceptual framework but in specific points of interpretation as well, from his strictures on Connolly’s lack of views on the Irish Land question to those on the ITUC of 1894-1907 as nothing but a treacherous illusion. [thus quoted in The Irish Times, Jan. 1992.]

R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London: Allen Lane 1993), writes: ‘Connolly was a Marxist, but rather than completing capitalism’s contradictions, he wanted Ireland to revert t the purity of a pre-capitalist order and to rediscover the potential communal organisation which was, in his opinion, part of the Irish national psyche. A rupture with Britain would entail the rediscovery of social and economic innocence. Thus Connolly’s socialism is very closely linked to Gaelic Revivalism enabling him to see the peasants of the west as future soldiers in an economic class war –an unlikely prospect, looked at from any other angle.’ (p.90.)

Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Dublin: Poolbeg 1994), writes of Connolly’s slipping under the influence of Patrick Pearse of whom he formerly called ‘nothing so new-fangled as a socialist or syndicalist [but] old-fashioned enough to be both a Catholic and a Nationalist’ in Oct. 1913. (p.113.)

Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape 1995), arguing that Connolly was right in seeing nationalism as a necessary preface to socialism in Ireland (along with Marx and Engels), and regards the delay of socialism as a consequence of the continuance of the national agenda under conditions of all-Ireland partition: ‘social revolution was prevented by a fixation upon the politics of partition’ (p.230).

[ top ]

Liam Kennedy, ‘The Union of Ireland and Britain, 1801-1921’, in Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (IIS/QUB 1996): ‘Connolly continues [in Labour in Irish History] his analysis by pouring scorn on the views of the ‘Parliamentary historians’ with respect to the supposed effects of increased absenteeism after the Union. The decline of the woollen and leather industries, for example, had far deeper causes. ‘Were the members of the Irish parliament and the Irish landlords the only wearers of shoes in Ireland?’ Why did British manufacturers continue to supply the Irish market, whereas the Irish manufacturers did not? Did the latter really have to ‘shut up shop and go to the poor house because My Lord Rackrent, and his immediate personal following had moved to London?’ (Collected Works, 1987, I, p.62.)

Liam Kennedy, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (1996) - cont.: Connolly proceeds to argue the paradox that the weakness of Irish manufacturers was a cause, not a consequence, of the Union on the Marxist grounds that a strong capitalist class would have reformed the parliamentary system and extended the franchise. This would have produced an electorate and parliament that would never have agreed to the Act of Union; an interesting counterfactual hypothesis, though one begging a large number of questions. (&c.; p.57.) [Cont.]

Cont. (Kennedy, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland, 1996): Kennedy further notices that Connolly rejected Griffith’s protectionism (in ‘Sinn Féin, socialism and the nation’, Coll. Works, i, p.369), and quotes his ‘insufficient’ [Kennedy] explanation for Irish industrial decline in the nineteenth century that ‘Lots of important industries have disappeared from Ireland because Irish employers were encouraged’ by whom he does not say - ‘to refuse to treat their workers in a humane and reasonable fashion and so lost their trade to British competitors’. British capital had ‘grown up and had assumed the responsibility of the adult, but Irish capital is still immature and has all the defects of the “hobble-de-hoy”, not big enough to be a man and too big to be a boy.’ (‘Dublin Trade and Dublin Strikes’, in Coll. Works, ii, p.364-65.)

[ top ]

Quotations

End of Empire: ‘ [...] And what about the war? Well, I think it is the beginning of the end. This great, blustering British Empire; this Empire of truculent bullies, is rushing headlong to its doom. Whether they ultimately win or lose, the Boers have pricked the bubble of England’s fighting reputation. The world knows her weakness now. Have at her, then everywhere and always and in every manner. And before the first decade of the coming century will close, you and I, if we survive, will be able to repeat to our children the tale of how this monstrous tyranny sank in dishonour and disaster.’ (‘ The South African War, II’, in Workers’ Republic, 18 Nov. 1899 [link].)

World War I: ‘The war for civilization is waged by a nation like Britain which holds in thrall a sixth of the human race, and holds as a cardinal doctrine of its faith that none of its subject races may, under penalty of imprisonment and death, dream of ruling their own territories. A nation which believes that all races are subject to purchase, and which brands as perfidy the act of any nation which, like Bulgaria, chooses to carry its wares and its arms to any other than a British market. [...] Civilization cannot be built upon slaves; civilization cannot be secured if the producers are sinking into misery; civilization is lost if they whose labour makes it possible share so little of its fruits that its fall can leave them no worse than its security. [...] Truly, labour alone in these days is fighting the real war for civilization.’ (‘A War for Civilisation’, Workers’ Republic 30 Oct. 1915 [link].)

Pro-German: ‘The German nation is fighting a necessary fight for the saving of civilisation in Europe.’ (Quoted in Maurice Headlam, Irish Reminiscences (London: Robert Hale 1947), p.153 [see further - infra].

Bourgeois-nationalism: ‘If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of The Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain.’ (Selected Writings, ed. Peter Berrisford Ellis, NY & London: Monthly Review, 1973, p124.)