James Connolly, Irish Patriot

James Connolly was born on June 5, 1868, at 107, the Cowgate, Edinburgh. His parents, John and Mary Connolly, had emigrated to Edinburgh from County Monaghan in the 1850s. His father worked as a manure carter, removing dung from the streets at night, and his mother was a domestic servant who suffered from chronic bronchitis and was to die young from that ailment. Anti-Irish feeling at the time was so bad that Irish people were forced to live in the slums of the Cowgate and the Grassmarket which became known as ‘Little Ireland’. Overcrowding, poverty, disease, drunkenness and unemployment were rife — the only jobs available was selling second-hand clothes and working as a porter or a carter.

James Connolly went to St Patricks School in the Cowgate, as did his two older brothers, Thomas and John. At ten years of age, James left school and got a job with Edinburgh’s Evening News newspaper, where he worked as a ‘Devil’, cleaning inky rollers and fetching beer and food for the adult workers. His brother Thomas also worked with the same newspaper. In 1882, aged 14, he joined the British Army in which he was to remain for nearly seven years, all of it in Ireland, where he witnessed first hand the terrible treatment of the Irish people at the hands of the British. The mistreatment of the Irish by the British and the landlords led to Connolly forming an intense hatred of the British Army.

While serving in Ireland, he met his future wife, a Protestant named Lillie Reynolds. They were engaged in 1888 and the following years Connolly discharged himself from the British Army and went back to Scotland. In 1890, he and Lillie Reynolds were wed in Perth. In the Spring of 1890, James and Lillie moved to Edinburgh and lived at 22 West Port, and joined his father and brother working as labourers and then as a manure carter with Edinburgh Corporation, on a strictly temporary and casual basis.

He became active in Socialist and trade union circles and became secretary of the Scottish Socialist Federation, almost by mistake. At the time his brother John was secretary; however, after John spoke at a rally in favour of the eight-hour day he was fired from his job with the corporation, so while he looked for work, James took over as secretary. During this time, Connolly became involved with the Independent Labour Party which Kerr Hardie formed in 1893.

Cobbler’s Shop In late 1894, Connolly lost his job with the corporation. He opened a cobblers shop in February 1895 at number 73 Bucclevch Street, a business venture which was not successful. At the invitation of the Scottish Socialist, John Leslie, he came to Dublin in May 1896 as paid organiser of the Dublin Socialist Society for £1 a week. James and Lillie Connolly and their three daughters, Nora, Mona and Aideen set sail for Dublin in 1896, where he founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party in May of 1896.

In 1898, Connolly had to return to Scotland on a lecture and fund-raising tour. Before he left Ireland, he had founded The Workers’ Republic newspaper, the first Irish Socialist paper, from his house at number 54 Pimlico, where he lived with his wife and three daughters. Six other families, a total of 30 people, also lived in number 54 Pimlico, at the same time!

In 1902, he went on a five month lecture tour of the USA and, on returning to Dublin he found the ISRP existed in name only. He returned to Edinburgh where he worked for the Scottish District of the Social Democratic federation.

He then chaired the inaugural meeting of the Socialist Labour Party in 1903 but, when his party failed to make any headway, Connolly became disillusioned and in September 1903, he emigrated to the US and did not return until July 1910. In the US, he founded the Irish Socialist Federation in New York, and another newspaper, The Harp.

In 1910, he returned to Ireland and in June of the following year he became Belfast organiser for James Larkin’s Irish Transport and General Workers Union. In 1913 he co-founded the Labour Party and in 1914 he organied, with James Larkin, opposition to the Employers Federation in the Great Lock-Out of workers that August. |Larkin travelled to the USA for a lecture tour in late 1914 and James Connolly became the key figure in the Irish Labour movement.

Irish Citizen Army The previous year, 1913, had also seen Connolly co-found the Irish Citizen Army, at Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the ITGWU, — this organisation, the ICA, was established to defend the rights of the working people. In October 1914, Connolly returned permanently to Dublin and revived the newspaper The Workers’ Republic that December following the suppression of his other newspaper, The Irish Worker.
In The Workers’ Republic newspaper, Connolly published articles on guerrilla warfare and continuously attacked the group known as The Irish Volunteers for their inactivity. This group refused to allow the Irish Citizen Army to have any in-put on its Provisional Committee and had no plans in motion for armed action.

The Irish Volunteers were by this time approximately 180,000 strong and were urged by their leadership to support England in the war against Germany. It should be noted that half of the Provisional Committee of the Irish Volunteers were John Redmonds people, who was the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party. The Irish Volunteers split, with the majority siding with Redmond and becoming known as the National Volunteers — approximately 11,000 of the membership refused to join Redmond and his people.

However, in February 1915, The Workers’ Republic newspaper was suppressed by the Dublin Castle authorities. Even still, Connolly grew more militant. In January 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood had became alarmed by Connollys ICA manoeuvres in Dublin and at Connollys impatience at the apparent lack of preparations for a rising, and the IRB decided to take James Connolly into their confidence. During the following months, he took part in the preparation for a rising and was appointed Military Commander of the Republican Forces in Dublin, including his own Irish Citizen Army.

He was in command of the Republican HQ at the GPO during Easter Week, and was severely wounded. He was arrested and court-martialled following the surrender. On May 9, 1916, James Connolly was propped up in bed before a court-martial and sentenced to die by firing squad — he was at that time being held in the military hospital in Dublin Castle. In a leading article in the Irish Independent on May 10, William Martin Murphy, who had led the employers in the Great Lock-out of workers in 1913, urged the British Government to execute Connolly.

At dawn on May 12, James Connolly was taken by ambulance from Dublin Castle to Kilmainham Jail, carried on a stretcher into the prison yard, strapped into a chair in a corner of the yard and executed by firing- squad. Connollys body, like that of the other 14 executed leaders, was taken to the British military cemetery adjoining Arbour Hill Prison and buried, without coffin in a mass quicklime grave.

The fact that he was one of the seven signatories of the 1916 Proclamation bears evidence of his influence. As a post script, and on a personal level, I will quote James Connollys words to the Irish Citizen Army on 16 April, 1916.

“The odds are a thousand to one against us, but in the event of victory, hold onto your rifles, as those with whom we are fighting may stop before our goal is reached.”

Connolly was proud to declare himself a Marxist. He makes frequent reference to Marx in his book, Labour in Irish History, which in itself represents an attempt to apply Marxist method to Irish history. He speaks of Marx as “the greatest of modern thinkers and the first scientific Socialist.”

Connolly was enabled to follow a real Marxist tactic by the fact of his profound understanding of Marxism. He pursued a real Marxist policy, between the open reformists on the one hand and the pure military revolutionaries (no rarity in Ireland), the rigid trade unionists and the sectarian pseudo-Marxist Socialists on the other.

Constitutional Fabianism earned his contempt. He was fully aware of the advantage of utilizing all legal possibilities and of the necessity of spending years in organizing, agitating for the daily struggle on behalf of partial demands. But he would countenance no infringements of the recognition that the final issue of all great political and social questions could only be decided by force, and that Ireland’s liberation from the British imperialist yoke and the social emancipation of its workers was only possible through revolutionary channels. He, the organizer of industrial trade unions, fought political sectarianism at the same time. He invited his comrades of the Scottish Social Democratic Federation to drop their sectarian scruples (amongst which was the oath of allegiance to king and constitution) and to enter Parliament as a political party.

Connolly was a revolutionary to the core. McManus once wrote (1919) that Connolly was the only Socialist he had met who judged the social position or political crisis from the standpoint of its revolutionary possibilities. As was worthy of a revolutionary, he occupied himself seriously with political, tactical, and military questions of a rising in Ireland. He understood very well the Leninist conception that a rising is an “art” which has got to be “studied.”

During the war his journal, The Workers’ Republic, gave the place of honour to studies about risings, street fights in Moscow in 1905, Paris in 1830 and in 1848, the rising in the Tyrol in 1905, and guerilla warfare in India, revolutionary struggles in Mexico, and similar happenings. At a meeting of the officers of the revolutionary Irish Volunteer Army, Connolly was asked during his lecture on street fights how it happened that he understood so much about revolutionary and military questions. He smilingly replied “You forget that revolution is my business.” (Ryan, J. Connolly. )

It is very worthy of note that Connolly grasped the conception of the Soviet idea. Daniel De Leon influenced him very much in this, he had worked jointly with him in America. Just as he, so too did Connolly declare that the future government and the future division of the country would be based not on territory but on production and its component parts and branches.