Connolly James - James Connolly: a full life

JAMES CONNOLLY

A Full Life

DONAL NEVIN

Gill & Macmillan

CONTENTS

Personally I have no fears or regrets. I have had a full life and wouldnt ask for a better end to it.

JAMES CONNOLLY TO WILLIAM OBRIEN, LIBERTY HALL, DUBLIN, 24 APRIL 1916.

Hasnt it been a full life, Lillie, and isnt this a good end?

JAMES CONNOLLY TO LILLIE CONNOLLY, DUBLIN CASTLE, 12 MAY 1916.

James Connolly

Born 107 Cowgate, Edinburgh, 5 June 1868

Kings Liverpool Regiment, Ireland, 18829

Socialist League, Social Democratic Federation, Scottish Labour Party, Scottish Socialist Federation, Independent Labour Party, Edinburgh, 188996

Founded Irish Socialist Republican Party, Dublin, 1896

Editor, The Workers Republic 18981903

Socialist Labour Party of Great Britain, 1903

Socialist Labor Party of America, 19038

New York Organiser, Industrial Workers of the World, 1907

Founded Irish Socialist Federation, New York, 1907

National Organiser, Socialist Party of America, 190810

Editor, The Harp, New York, 190810

Organiser, Socialist Party of Ireland, 191011

Founded Independent Labour Party (Ireland), 1912

Ulster organiser, Irish Transport and General Workers Union, 191114

Acting general secretary, ITGWU, October 1914April 1916

Commander, Irish Citizen Army, 1914

Editor, The Workers Republic, 191516

Military Council, Irish Republican Brotherhood, January 1916

Vice-President, Provisional Government of Irish Republic, April 1916

Commandant General, Dublin Division, Army of the Republic, April 1916

Court-martialled in Dublin Castle, 9 May 1916

Executed, Kilmainham Jail, Dublin, 12 May 1916

PREFACE

James Connolly has a special place in the hearts and minds of the Irish people. Though physically small, Connolly remains a titanic figure in the history of modern Ireland. As an effective labour leader, he helped to shape the modern Irish trade union movement. In a lifetime of struggle he managed to combine a visionary socialism with a hard-headed and practical realism about what it was possible to achieve in any engagement. His insightful understanding of Irish history in Labour in Irish History helped to dispel much of the mythology surrounding the prevailing concerns for kings, lords and ladies and replaced it with the assertion that the Irish Question was fundamentally a social question.

During a life of virtually unrelenting hardship and struggle he demonstrated remarkable ability to analyse and debate the major issues of the day with all-comers. His controversial views regularly evoked responses from friend and foe alike but Connolly continued to use public discourse to raise the consciousness of workers about the issues of the day. Many of his views on Labour, Nationality and Religion, on the Workers Republic, on the Co-operative Commonwealth, or War and Peace have echoes in todays world and continue to be debated vigorously across the globe.

Although best remembered as an Irish patriot and martyr for the cause, after his execution by a British firing squad on 12 May 1916, Connolly deserves to be remembered more for his life than for his death. At different stages in his development he demonstrated a commitment to a variety of tendencies, for example socialist agitator, militant syndicalist, radical republican or anti-war activist, yet he displayed a remarkable consistency in favour of the poor and oppressed of all nations.

His views cannot be readily transposed into todays world or used as an unerring guide to modern struggles but his vision and his values remain remarkably relevant to our society. They are particularly important for the labour movement. I hope the availability of his writings now will stimulate even greater debate about Connollys vision and assist a thoroughly informed, critical and constructive appraisal of the present Republic and the people who inhabit it.

In Connollys words:

Ireland without its people is nothing to me, and the man who is bubbling over with love and enthusiasm for Ireland and can 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 in my opinion a fraud and a liar in his heart.

That is the challenge for our generation.

Des Geraghty
General President SIPTU 19992003

INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Coming to this biography of James Connolly the reader may well ask why another biography, given that there have been eight over the past eighty years: Desmond Ryan (1924), R.M. Fox (1946), C. Desmond Greaves (1961), Proinsias Mac An Bheatha (1963), Samuel Levenson (1978), Carl Reeve and Ann Barton Reeve (1978), Sen Cronin (1978) and Austen Morgan (1988). There have also been a number of monographs notably by Owen Dudley Edwards (1971), Ruth Dudley Edwards (1981) and J.C. Hyland (1997) not to mention numerous political commentaries.

This biography has been constructed on three pillars the first being Connollys letters, the second, his writings and the third, Greavess masterly work, The Life and Times of James Connolly, one of the great Irish biographies of the second half of the twentieth century.

In using Connollys writings and the more than 200 letters of his that survive, in the writing of this biography, it is hoped that the work might be seen to resemble an autobiography. Connollys letters throw much light on aspects of his personality and temperament. In them he is frank about his relationships with his colleagues, caustically critical of their shortcomings and inactivity and ever ready to dispute opinions contrary to his own.

Connollys unshakeable faith in the ability of the working class to rise up, shake off the shackles of capitalist oppression and build a new society based on co-operation and community action emerges vividly from the letters. Likewise his firm belief that the international solidarity of the workers would prevail and that the workers of the world would indeed unite under the banner of socialism. These convictions, manifest in his letters, Connolly maintained throughout his life.

The second pillar of this biography, Connollys writings, have led to him being described by Professor John A. Murphy as a brilliant polemicist, by Professor R.F. Foster as a gifted writer and by George Dangerfield as a master of polemical prose.

Throughout an active political life spanning a quarter of a century, Connolly was a prolific writer and journalist contributing an editorial and other articles to almost every one of the more than one hundred issues of the Workers Republic which he edited between 1898 and 1903. It was the same with The Harp, published in America between 1908 and 1910, and the second series of the Workers Republic in 191516. He also contributed to some twenty-four other journals in Ireland, Scotland, England, France and America. These extensive writings are a major resource, demonstrating the evolution of his industrial and political ideas over two decades. Extracts from them constitute a major part of this biography and help to establish that Connolly was, in Professor J.J. Lees words, probably the most remarkable thinker produced in twentieth-century Ireland.

Greavess pioneering research over ten years, his tracking down and recording the recollections of so many of Connollys colleagues from Scotland, England, Ireland and America, and his unearthing of an abundance of valuable material from contemporary papers and journals, puts in his debt anyone who writes of Connolly and his lifes work. This writer freely acknowledges his debt to Greavess work.