James Connolly - Trivia

Irish political leader and insurgent, born in Edinburgh, EC Scotland, UK. He joined the British army at the age of 14, and was stationed in the Curragh and Dublin, but deserted to get married to an Irish girl in Scotland. Returning to Ireland in 1896, he organized the Irish Socialist Republican Party and founded The Workers' Republic, the first Irish Socialist paper. He toured the USA as a lecturer (1902–10), and helped found the Industrial Workers of the World (‘Wobblies’). Back in Ireland, he organized Socialist ‘citizen armies’, and after taking part in the Easter rebellion (1916) he was arrested and executed.

For the Olympic athlete, see James Connolly (athlete).

James Connolly (Irish name: Séamas Ó Conghaile or Ó Conghalaigh; June 5, 1868 – May 12, 1916) was an Irish socialist leader. Though proud of his Irish background he also took a role in Scottish politics.

He is believed to have joined the British Army at the age of 14, and was stationed in Dublin where he would later meet his wife.

In 1889 while living in Dundee James first got involved in socialist politics joining the Socialist League while his older brother John was involved in a free speech campaign along side the Social Democratic Federation and the local Trades Council

By 1892 he was involved in the Scottish Socialist Federation, acting as its secretary from 1895, but by 1896 he had gone to Dublin to take up the full time job of secretary of the Dublin Socialist Society which at his instigation quickly evolved into the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP). While active as a socialist in Great Britain Connolly was among the founders of the Socialist Labour Party which split from the Social Democratic Federation in 1903. He was right hand man to James Larkin in the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. In 1913, in response to the Lockout, he, along with an ex-British officer Jack White, founded the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), an armed and well-trained body of labour men whose aim was to defend workers and strikers, particularly from the frequent brutality of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Though they only numbered about 250 at most, their goal soon became the establishment of an independent and socialist Irish nation. He founded the Irish Labour Party in 1912 and was a member of the National Executive of the Irish Labour Party when he was executed in 1916.

Connolly stood aloof from the leadership of the Irish Volunteers. This alarmed the members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who had already infiltrated the Volunteers and had plans for an insurrection that very year. In order to talk Connolly out of any such rash action, the IRB leaders, including Tom Clarke and Patrick Pearse, met with Connolly to see if an agreement could be reached.

When the Easter Rising occurred on April 24, 1916, Connolly was Commandant of the Dublin Brigade, and as the Dublin brigade had the most substantial role in the rising, he was de facto Commander in Chief.

His legacy in Ireland is mainly due to his contribution to the republican cause and his Marxism has been largely overlooked by mainstream histories (although his legacy as a socialist has been claimed by the Communist Party of Ireland, the IRSP, the Labour Party, Sinn Féin, the Socialist Party, the SWP, and a variety of other left-wing and left-republican groups). In several of his works he rails against what he calls the bourgeois nationalism of those who claimed to be Irish patriots.

Connolly was among the few left-wingers of the Second International who opposed, outright, the Great War.

Apparently Lenin was a great admirer of Connolly, although the two never met.

In Scotland his thinking was hugely influential to socialists such as John Maclean, who would similarly combine his leftist thinking with nationalist ideas when he formed his Scottish Workers Republican Party.

There is a statue of James Connolly in Dublin, outside Liberty Hall, the offices of the SIPTU Trade Union. Dublin Connolly railway station, one of the two main railway stations in Dublin, is named in his honour.

Despite Connolly's role in the Easter Rising and subsequent execution by the British authorities, in a 2002 poll conducted by the BBC of the 100 Greatest Britons, Connolly was voted the 64th greatest Briton of all time, ahead of other notable Britons such as David Lloyd George and Sir Walter Raleigh.

Trivia

A film about the life of James Connolly is planned for 2007, with Peter Mullan in the lead role and Adrian Dunbar as director. James Connolly and the Irish Left. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Radical Politics in Modern Ireland: A History of the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP) 1896-1904. Dublin: Irish Academic Press.