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JAMES CONNOLLY'S INTEGRATION OF SOCIALISM, NATIONALISM,
AND CHRISTIANITY IN THE CONTEXT OF IRISH HISTORY

presented by

Christopher Andrew Lubienski

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JAMES CONNOLLY’S INTEGRATION OF SOCIALISM, NATIONALISM,
AND CHRISTIANITY IN THE CONTEXT OF IRISH HISTORY

By
Christopher Andrew Lubienski

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of History

1992

ABSTRACT

JAMES CONNOLLY’S INTEGRATION OF SOCIALISM, NATIONALISM,
AND CHRISTIANITY IN THE CONTEXT OF IRISH HISTORY

By

Christopher Andrew Lubienski

This study of the ideas of James Connolly (1868-1916) places his integration of
his socialism to Catholicism and Irish nationalism within the framework of Irish
history, from the late 18th century to the present. Connolly’s execution after the
Easter Rising posed the question as to his prioritization of these three values in
his thinking Since his death, his nationalism has been stressed at the expense of '
his socialism and Catholicism. In the ﬁrst two chapters, this study examines the
roots of his ideas by reviewing secondary literature covering 1770 through 1900,
and, concurrently, Connolly’s interpretations of the period Chapter 3 focuses on
Connolly’s attempts to synthesize socialism, Catholicism, and nationalism in his
writings This is followed by an evaluation of the legacy of this synthesis, and an
assessment. It concludes that, unlike his ethically-based socialism and
Catholicism, his nationalism was merely a secondary concern, and is overly

emphasized.

Copyn'ght by
Christopher Andrew Lubienski
1992

To Sarah

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My many thanks to: Professors Stewart, Schoenl, and Sweeney for their ideas,
feedback, and guidance; the readers, for suffering for my verbosity; any
manufacturer of caffeine-laden beverages; and to my wife, Sarah, for her help,

patience, and generous sacriﬁce of valuable computer time.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

EARIJ: JAMES CONNOLLY’S INHERITANCE AND HIS CAREER
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE
Irish Nationalism, And Its Relationship To Socialism
And Sectarianism In The Century Preceding Connolly:
From The Volunteers To O’Connell
The Era of the Volunteers
The United Irishmen
Irish Nationalist Sentiments At The Time Of
The Act Of Union
Daniel O’Connell: The Emancipation And Repeal
Movements

CHAPTER TWO
Irish Nationalism, And Its Relationship To Socialism
And Sectarianism In The Century Preceding Connolly:
From Young Ireland to Connolly
Young Ireland And The Great Famine
Fenianism And Cultural Nationalism
Michael Davitt And The Land League
Connolly’s Life And Career: A Summary

BARIJII JAMES CONNOLLY’S INTEGRATION AND LEGACY

CHAPTER THREE
Connolly’s Synthesis Of Socialism, Nationalism, And
Religion
'StmgglingTowards The Light"
a Connolly, Socialism And Nationalism
Connolly, Socialism And Christianity

11
19

74
l 10

116

116
116
119
138

CHAPTER FOUR
Connolly’s Legacy
. Early Inﬂuence
Connolly And Pearse
. The Labor Movement And Politics
. Connolly And The Irish Republican Army

CONCLUSION
Summary
Assessment
APPENDIX

BIBLIOGRAPHY

vii

154
154
156
164
176
186 '

199
199
202
214

220

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

References

Harp The Harp, New York.

L1H Labour In Irish History,(Dublin 1910).

LNR Labour, NationalityAnd Religion, (Dublin, 1910).
WR Workers’Republic / The Workers’Republic, Dublin.
Organizations

CPI Communist Party of Ireland

ICA Irish Citizen Army

IRA Irish Republican Army

IRB Irish Republican Brotherhood

IRSP Irish Republican Socialist Party

ISF Irish Socialist Federation

ISRP Irish Socialist Republican Party

ITGWU Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union
ITUC Irish Trade Union Congress

OIRA Ofﬁcial IRA

PIRA Provisional IRA

SP1 Socialist Party of Ireland

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INTRODUCTION

It seems rather pretentious to evaluate, or even approach a complex national-
historical ﬁgure from someone else’s country. The fact that James Connolly’s
ideas are still very much involved in the intricate problems that have re—ignited in
Northern Ireland over the last quarter century only reafﬁrms my hesitations
However, in studying the principles for which Connolly lived and eventually died,
I have come to the conclusion that his life and beliefs are relevant not only for
the people who live on the small group of islands off the northwest coast of
Europe, or for the people who lived there around the turn of the century.
Indeed, the principles that he espoused have important implications wherever and
whenever people live together in social situations, particularly when such
situations involve the oppression and exploitation of one group of people by
another. Therefore, Connolly’s ideas are still very applicable in many areas
around the globe today. I think that Connolly would agree.

As evidenced by Connolly’s many writings and his important actions in his
career, three main philosophical centers are discernible: nationalism, socialism,
and Christianity. Born and raised in an Irish Catholic family, Connolly took up
socialism at an early age. The rest of his life was spent explaining, combining,
deﬁning, shaping, and acting on these three guiding concepts. The question then

arises as to what Connolly was, ﬁrst and foremost: a nationalist? a socialist? or a

2
Catholic? In spite of the fact that many have tried to oversimplify it, his death,
which many would call a martyrdom, does not decide the issue, but in fact
restates the question in even stronger terms.

But obviously nationalism, socialism, and Christianity did not just suddenly
manifest themselves in Ireland in the person of James Connolly. These three
forces have been present throughout much of the history of modern Ireland,
sometimes challenging, and sometimes complementing, but always co-existing with
each other in the modern era. This paper is an attempt to explore the dynamic
relationships of these three often incompatible elements in Irish history, but more

notably in Connolly’s theories, his actions, and his legacy.

CHAPTER ONE

In the last few years, the decline of Leninism and Stalinism as ruling ideologies
has attracted world-wide attention. After over 70 years of existence, the Soviet
Empire collapsed, to a large degree due to the failure of its leaders to control the
nationalistic tendencies of many of their subject peoples. A year before the start
of the Soviet social experiment, James Connolly died in the aftermath of the
Easter Uprising in Ireland, an event that many believed to be nationalistic in its
essence. However, one of the more famous observers in the socialist community
at the time, V.I. Lenin, was one of the few to refuse to interpret the Easter
Rising in nationalistic terms alone1 In Sbornik Sotsial-Demokrataof October,
1916, Lenin wrote:2

The centuries old Irish national movement, having passed through various stages
and combinations of class interests...expressed itself in street ﬁghting conducted
by a section of the urban petty bourgeoisie and a section of the workers after a
long period of mass agitation, demonstrations, suppression of the press etc...For
to imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in
the colonies and in Europe, without the revolutionary outbursts of a section of

the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of politically non-
conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against landlord, church,

 

1 According to Mike Milotte, Connolly and Lenin probably did not know of
each other.
Mike Milotte, Communism In Modern Ireland, (Dublin, 1984) 20.

2 Reproduced in Owen Dudley Edwards and Fergus Pyle, editors, 1916. The
Easter Rising, (London, 1968) 192-3; (Lenin’s italics). Also published in Berner
Tagwacht, 5-9-1916, and quoted in P. Berresford Ellis, editor, James Connolly:
Selected Writings, (London, 1973) 36.

4
monarchial, national and other oppression—to imagine that means repudiating
social revolution...Whoever expects a ”pure" social revolution will never live to see
it. Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what
revolution really is.

Connolly had reached the basic conclusion that guided Lenin and Trotsky, Mao. I
Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and other socialists who led revolutions on a national
basis: that Marx’s theories could be used as a guiding and driving force in
revolutionary movements that developed within a national context, without being
treated as infallible doctrine. Other more recent radical thinkers, particularly in
Latin America, have synthesized the political ideology of class conflict with the
duty to seek social justice which many see mandated in the Christian Gospels-
focussing less on the national factor. The success or failure of these various
revolutionaries in this century is debatable, depending on one’s political
perspective. But as for Connolly, a revolutionary ﬁgure who died without seeing
his program in place, this much is evident: three-quarters of a century later—even
as this paper is being written—signiﬁcant parts of his country are still plagued by
competing visions of nationalism, class antagonisms, and chronic sectarian
violence. Most of his ideas cannot be evaluated from concrete manifestations,
unlike those of the other ﬁgures mentioned, because Connolly’s theories never
reached that stage of actuality within the context for which they were developed.
If this failure protects Connolly from the harsh evaluations levelled against many
of the other ﬁgures, it also allows for the re-evaluation of Connolly’s ideas

without many of the complexities and prejudices that come with an historical

analysis of actual manifestations of socio-political and religious ideologies.

5
Although his ideas have been largely overlooked outside of Ireland, James
Connolly was one of the most original and creative socialists in Europe or
America at the turn of the century, and arguably one of the greatest socialist
thinkers to come from the British Isles As one of the few signiﬁcant socialist
theoreticians who could truly claim membership in the working classes of Europe,
Connolly used his experiences and his perspective as inspiration for his theories

and actions. Born in 1868 in Edinburgh, Connolly led a remarkable life of

 

hardship, poverty, profound thinking, and proliﬁc writing until his execution in
front of a British ﬁring squad in 1916. At their last meeting, at his prison bed
just before his execution, his wife mourned the end of what she described as his
“beautiful life.”3 The principles that guided his life were rooted in his Irish-
Catholic, working-class existence, and enabled him to make great strides in the
integration of Marxism, nationalism, and Christianity. His determination to live
out his principles resulted in his participation in the apparently nationalistic
Uprising of 1916, an action that puzzled many in the international socialist
community.

Far from a doctrinaire Marxist, Connolly used Marxism as a guide to help
shape his vision of a truly free Ireland. In constructing a socialist philosophy to
ﬁt the unique situation in Ireland at the time, he had to harness the forces of
nationalism to achieve the just ends that he saw exclusively in socialism, and he
had to prove that socialism and Christianity were not only compatible, but

mutually related in terms of tactics and objectives. But to Connolly, these

 

3 Nora Connolly O’Brien, James Connolly: Portraitof a Rebel Father, (Dublin,
1935, 1975) 321.

concepts were all inter-related.

To understand the signiﬁcance of James Connolly’s life and particularly his
theories, one has to place Connolly within the broader trends of Irish history.
Connolly’s work and achievements focussed on three essential elements within
Ireland in the last two centuries: nationalism, class struggle, and Christianity.
Although these elements are hardly unique to Connolly’s thinking, his attempts to
unite these often contradictory elements make the analysis of the history of these
elements, up to the time of Connolly’s career, essential in understanding
Connolly. Although there are many works that deal with the impact of religion
and the phenomenon of sectarianism during this period, relevant material that
deals with the relationship of religion with nationalism and socialism is not as
available at the present time. Speciﬁc works on Irish socialism before Connolly
are rare, as were Irish socialists before Connolly. But because the secondary
literature on Irish history during this period is the most abundant on Irish
nationalism, the following analysis generally examines the development of these
three traditions by looking at the course of Irish nationalism, and to some extent,
its relationship to socialism and religion. The fact that this sketch of Irish
socialism, religion, and nationalism parallels the development of Irish nationalism
should not be seen as an attempt to portray Connolly primarily as a nationalist,
but only reﬂects the inordinate amount of historical material that deals with Irish
nationalism, as opposed to the other two topics, and suggests the degree to which
Irish nationalism lends itself to the study of these other two topics, since they are
both often intertwined with nationalism.

Therefore, what follows over these ﬁrst two chapters is a brief evaluation of

7
these three topics from the late 18th century to the time of Connolly’s career, so
that Connolly’s profound inﬂuence on the three elements, individually and
collectively, can be demonstrated. However, it should be noted that the following
analytical overview of signiﬁcant episodes of Irish nationalism—as a separate
entity as well as its relationship to socialism and religion—is based on secondary
sources. Subsequently, the nature of this overview offers the opportunity to study
Connolly’s analysis of these episodes as well, at least insofar as his commentary

on these manifestations overlaps with this one.4

By doing this, we can examine
how Connolly viewed the history of Irish nationalism as it related to his own
ideas. His views on these movements and their leaders are relevant to this part
of this study because it reveals much about his thinking and where he placed
himself within the broad range of Irish nationalist traditions. This analysis is
divided into two chapters only for the sake of convenience. It examines Irish
nationalism as it evolved up to Connolly’s time, and is followed by a brief
summary of his life and career in order to put his life in the context of his times.
Signiﬁcantly, Connolly himself looked to the era of the Volunteers and the
Rebellion of 1798 for the precedents of much of his type of nationalism (in terms
of non-sectarianism, elements of class struggle, and extra-parliamentary methods).

Hence, it makes sense for this discussion to begin at this point also.

 

4 Connolly commented on many of these nationalist movements in Labour In
Irish History,(Dublin, 1910).

 

 

In examining the important manifestations of Irish nationalism in the last two
centuries, it is important to note the complex and often contradictory nature of
the various movements. Irish nationalism is and was far from a monolithic
phenomenon. Different Irish nationalist movements disagreed on tactics, the
roles of physical and moral force, social and political ideologies, the appropriate
class basis of the movements, organizational structure, the role of parliamentary
methods, and the place of religion in the movements, which then had implications -
for the place of sectarianism, or non-sectarianism, in Irish nationalism.
Furthermore, Irish nationalists often disagreed on two other important issues: the
deﬁnition of “Irishness", and the ultimate objective regarding the appropriate
relationship between Britain and Ireland.

What actually deﬁned the "Irish" was a subject of considerable contention
among various trends within the broad range of Irish nationalist traditions. Were
the people of Irish descent living in the urban areas of Britain and the United
States, for example, still Irish? Did one’s Irishness depend on one’s
denomination? Were landowners more Irish than the dispossessed? Were
absentee landowners Irish? Were republicans more Irish than other nationalists
who advocated the continuation of certain ties with Britain? Geography, religion,
allegiance, socio—economic class background, and other factors all had roles in
different deﬁnitions, with varying degrees of emphasis depending on the

movement that was doing the deﬁning

9

Quite often, various Irish nationalist movements strongly differed in their views
on the proper relationship between Britain and Ireland. Did Irish nationalism in
its essence mandate complete separation from Britain? Did separation have to. s
be economic and social as well as political? Was parliamentary separation, with
maintenance of the monarchical ties, sufﬁcient? Could Irish nationalism truly
support allegiance to the British crown? Can Ireland ever truly be independent
of the influence of such a powerful neighbor? These questions divided and
deﬁned the various Irish nationalist movements. The tension over this issue can
be seen throughout the history of Irish nationalism, and is still evident in certain
issues today. There has been a broad range of nationalist movements that have '
tried different methods to cultivate and/or capitalize on a sense of Irishness,
despite the lack of agreement in deﬁning that concept Still, it must be
remembered that Irish nationalist traditions, however nebulous, always served the
purpose of expressing the varying degrees of discontent for diverse elements of
the Irish population regarding the relationship of Ireland to Britain. (The most
signiﬁcant exception to this generalization, the nationalism of Protestant Ulster
since the early 19th century, which has generally sought to achieve or maintain
closer ties to Britain, is discussed in greater detail below.)

Therefore, to place Connolly within the context of Irish nationalism, we have to
examine signiﬁcant manifestations of Irish nationalism with regards to four
deﬁning factors: tactics, organization, religion (in terms of both denominational
make-up and the views on or use of sectarianism), and socio-economic aspects
(the class backgrounds and social philosophy of the nationalists). What follows is

by no means meant to be a history of Irish nationalism since the Volunteers

10
Instead, some signiﬁcant manifestations of Irish nationalism are individually
examined in chronological order so that continuities, trends, and phases can be
discerned. By analyzing the complex phenomenon of Irish nationalism in regards
to these four considerations, James Connolly’s position within the broad range of
Irish nationalism can be established.

However, it should be noted that in examining these manifestations, this survey
will concentrate mostly on lower-level, popular movements, as Connolly did in his
own political activities, and as Connolly himself represented. Therefore, although
Henry Grattan’s Parliament was important for the nationalist tradition, it is the
popular wing of the movement, the Volunteers, which receives the attention here.
Likewise, while Charles Stewart Parnell is important for the parliamentary
characteristic of Irish nationalism, it is the Land League, commonly associated
with Parnell but actually inspired and directed by Michael Davitt, that is focussed
upon here. Finally, Daniel O’Connell is examined here, despite his parliamentary
career, because he was intimately connected with both the Catholic Association
and the Repeal Association, both of which enjoyed widespread support. The
parliamentary level of Irish nationalism is being neglected here simply because
Connolly’s brand of nationalism was basically divorced from this level. Thus,
extended discussions of parliamentary ﬁgures and politics would be irrelevant

l 1
The Era Of The Volunteers

The Volunteers ﬁrst formed during the time of the American Revolution, with . .
the purpose of aiding in the defense of Ireland against any possible attempt at an
invasion by the French. However, their signiﬁcance does not rest in their military
accomplishments, of which there were none. The Volunteers were basically a
network of middle-class Protestant social groups, usually led by a local aristocrat.
Indeed, the Volunteers were more of a threat to the British because they were
outside of the boundaries of government control. The Volunteers represented
the genesis of a signiﬁcant tradition among the middle and upper classes of
Ireland: the willingness to establish and employ extra-parliamentary channels for
change, without necessarily attempting to make essential changes within the
structure of the governing system itself. The inability to achieve and maintain
any effective form of control over the Volunteers was a constant point of concern
for Dublin Castle and the British government, despite the avowed loyalty of the
Volunteers to the British Crowns
In addition to the lack of government control over these groups, the suspicious
of the Castle can be explained, in part, by the fact that the Volunteers were
heavily inﬂuenced by the Whiggish, liberal ideas espoused by the “Patriot"
opposition in the Irish Parliament, led by Henry Grattan. The Patriots can be
seen as part of a wider movement in Europe and America at the time. Groups

in places such as France, the Netherlands, and the rebellious American colonies

 

5 Maurice O’Connell, Irish PoliticsArtd Social Conﬂict In The Age Of The
American Revolution, (Philadelphia, 1965) 85-7.

12
held in common the ideals of the decentralization of government power, liberal
economics, and new ways of expressing affection for their respective countries. In
Ireland their development is indicative of the evolution of a distinctly Irish ”sense
of national identity and independence” on the part of elements of the Protestant
Ascendancy and Ulster Presbyterians.6 The Patriots were led by the more liberal
elements of the wealthy landowning classes, but enjoyed the strong support of
radical elements within the middle classes, which hoped to beneﬁt from reform of
Parliament and the reduction of trade barriers implemented by the British
mercantilist system. This support manifested itself in the form of the Volunteer
81' 0095-

The Volunteers expressed their support for the Patriots through extra-
parliamentary pressure exerted through organized conventions, petitions to the
government, demonstrations, and organized military exercises Large bodies of
uniformed men (often armed) drilled and paraded at key times and places,
thereby contributing to the government’s fear. They were organized in the rural
areas as militia groups, with the local landowner usually acting as the organizer
and leader of the corps, as well as the economic and social leader in the area.7
In urban areas they were often organized by profession. The upper-level
positions of leadership were held by the upper ranks of the nobility, whose
members often held seats in the Irish parliament The rank and ﬁle were largely

from the Protestant middle classes In rural areas the groups were predominantly

 

5 Ibid, 20.
7 Ibid., 94.

13
comprised of respectable small farmers. In general, they were strongly

8 Thus, the Volunteers were

predisposed to the defense of property and order.
primarily middle-class in their composition as well as their outlook.

James Connolly’s judgement of the Volunteers was mixed In Labour In Irish
History(l910), Connolly portrayed the Volunteers as victims of the weak Irish
capitalist class, which was crippled by the English mercantilist system, but which
also needed government support to survive. Connolly claimed that, if not for the
unwillingness of the capitalist class to support the Volunteers in any issues beyond
economic reform, political and social reform "would have been won under the
guns of the Volunteers without a drop of blood being shed".9 At a later date,
however, Connolly saw the Volunteers in a different light: as10
active members of the yeomanry who afterwards achieved notoriety for their
crimes against Ireland, just as considerable sections of the volunteers of our day
have become soldiers of the English army-active agents of the military army of
the oppressors of their country.

In order to shed some light on Connolly’s conﬂicting assessments, it should be
noted that Connolly was erroneous in his characterization of the class background
of the Volunteers Connolly portrayed signiﬁcant elements of the Volunteers as

coming from ”the people” and the "working class".11 But, although there were

representatives from lower classes in the Volunteers, Maurice O’Connell states

 

3 Ibid, 88-90.

9 L111, 5s

1° WR, 1-8-1916.
11 L1H, 56, 62.

 

14

that it is ”abundantly clear that they were not made up of the lower classes"12
The Volunteers were essentially middle-class in membership, and upper-class in
leadership. Hence, the Volunteers were not 'betrayed" by the middle classes;
they primarily were of the middle classes Connolly’s over-emphasis (a tendency
not unique to this issue) of lower-class representation was done in an apparent
attempt to show continuity in the area of popular support from the earlier
Volunteer movement to Connolly’s own brand of nationalism.

In addition to the establishment of the extra-parliamentary traditions within the
Irish political arena, the Volunteers are signiﬁcant in the trend towards non-
sectarianism in Ireland. In fact, the Volunteers were almost exclusively
Protestant However, the purpose of the movement was not to promote
sectarianism, but to promote Ireland’s interests, particularly in the economic and
political arenas This did not mean that the Volunteers were without religious
prejudices. Although some Catholics were admitted in small numbers to some
Volunteer units, most of the Volunteer corps were very uncomfortable with the

idea of repealing the Penal Laws that kept arms from Catholics 13

But many
religious prejudices were simply remnants of the traditional discrimination which
was practiced since the conquests and dispossessions of the 17th century. Some
fears concerning supposed Catholic attempts to reappropriate the land still
lingered, but there had not been any signiﬁcant sectarian outbreaks for some time

during the later part of the Penal Era.

 

12 M. O’Connell, 1965,89.
‘3 Ibid, 77, 79-80.

15

It was in this environment that the Volunteers arose. Their almost exclusively
Protestant character was partly due to religious discrimination on the part of
some Volunteer units, but it was more a product of the social and economic basis
of the Volunteer participants Protestants were much more likely to have a sense
of political consciousness, tending towards the patriotic attitudes described earlier.
In the Presbyterian communities of Ulster, for example, afﬁnity was felt for the
cause of the American radicals, not only because of the many familial ties that
existed between Ulster and the North American settlements, but also because of
a mutual identiﬁcation with oppression and economic disabilities under a strong
English government.

Protestants possessed the essential combination of political rights and economic
power, which were manifested in the goals of the Volunteers Middle-class
people in other areas of Ireland, particularly merchants in the port cities, felt
disadvantaged in relation to the English because of the many restrictions placed
on Irish imports and exports Finally, many members of the emerging middle
classes felt at least partially excluded from political power. Not only were the
middle and lower classes vastly under-represented in the decision making process,
but prom-nationalist sentiments that were expressed by the Volunteers were
largely in response to the apparent English control that was exercised over what

14 Therefore, the Volunteers, acting as

was supposed to be the Irish Parliament
the expressions of these political and economic grievances, were signiﬁcant in that

greater religious discrimination was not among their objectives Sectarianism was

 

1‘ Ibid, 22.

l6
largely ignored and somewhat obsolete at the time.

However, the trend towards non-sectarianism that the Volunteers represented
was largely a failure. The Volunteer-Patriot movement had won victories on the
"Free Trade" issue in 1779 and 1780 (not so much free trade in the laissezfaire
sense as equalization of trading rights with the rest of Great Britain), and by 1782
had succeeded in obtaining legislative independence from Britain. But further
constitutional reform, particularly on the issue of representation (since British
inﬂuence in the Irish Parliament was maintained through Dublin Castle’s
patronage of borough-owning aristocrats) brought about a proposal, strongly
supported by the Northern Dissenters, and particularly the Belfast Volunteers, to
enlist the aid of politically conscious Catholics against the mobilizing

15 The potential for such unprecedented Catholic

conservative-aristocratic forces
inﬂuence, particularly in a land issue, divided the Volunteers Fears of a Catholic
land restoration re—emerged, and the need to keep Catholies from political power,
as well as from arms, was recognized. In the Irish Parliament, this division was
evident among the opposition forces in the growing tension between Henry
Grattan, himself a convert from an anti-Catholic position, and Henry Flood, who
was taking a stand on the sectarian issue to support his return to the leadership
of the Patriots The split essentially undercut the Patriot-Volunteer forces in the
face of growing British determination to limit concessions to the Irish.

Sectarianism was also a factor in the policies of the British government, at least

in terms of the impact of those policies The Catholic Relief Act of 1778 was an

 

15 Priscilla Metscher, Republicanism and Socialism in Ireland, (Frankfurt am
Main, 1986) 48.

17

attempt to enlist the support of Catholics for the government in order to counter-
balance the support which the Ulster Presbyterian community was voicing for the
American revolutionaries A similar Act in 1782 further undercut the overtures -
that the radicals were making to the Catholics Signiﬁcantly, these government
actions were seen by many Protestants as typical of the British government’s
neglect for Protestant concerns, a feeling that was voiced frequently over the
following two decades The government’s limited reform of the landholding
system, the Tenantry Act of 1780, further undercut and marginalized the Patriot
and Volunteer forces in the struggle for political power that was developing
between the middle and upper classes16

The Volunteer split, Grattan’s failure to control the religious issue in
Parliament, and growing Protestant resentment of Catholics set the stage for the
quick decline of the Volunteers Their demise was quickly followed by the rise of
sectarianism, starting in Ulster, which had been one of the areas of the most
vigorous Volunteer activity. Although the early 17805 had seen the most ”rapid
growth of peaceable relations and diminution of ancient rivalries“ between the
three main denominations in Ireland, by the middle of the decade sectarianism
was rising in Ulster. 17 Economic competition in different levels of the linen
industry, partially a result of the relaxed legal discrimination against Catholics, led

to the creation of Protestant intimidation gangs such as the Peep O’Day Boys,

 

‘6 M. O’Connell, 1965, 294.
‘7 rhid, 35a

18
and their Catholic counterparts, the Defenders18 Thus, the combination of
Protestant resentment—due in a large part to what appeared to many to be recent
government favoritism of Catholics-and the threat of economic competition from
a newly emerging and potentially overwhelming Catholic community, which was
most apparent in areas where Protestant weavers were directly affected by a
Catholic inﬂux into their profession, resulted in the end of the period of relaxed
tensions and brought about the sectarian divisions that can be traced to the
present day. This sectarianism found its expression in the formation of the
Orange Lodges, in the articulated fear of a Catholic attempt to reverse the 17th
century conﬁscations, and in atrocities committed by both Protestants and
Catholics Although only certain elements of the Protestant and Catholic
communities were involved in the movements at this time, the divisions and
grievances which were formulated then remained basically constant for the next
200 years Republican tradition still accurately blames the British administration
for the sectarianization of Ulster. The Peep O’Day Boys were "Anglican-led and
English-inspired", while Orangeism was started simply as an attempt "to drive a
wedge between Catholics and Presbyterians who had occasionally managed to
make common cause“ in opposition to agricultural changes and the restrictive

Penal Laws 19

 

18 Marianne Elliott, Partnersln Revolution, (New Haven, 1982) 19.
19 Kevin Kelley, The Longest War, (Dingle, 1982) 10.

 

19
The United Irishmen

James Connolly continually referred to the United Irishmen as his political-
ideological predecessors. In Connolly’s view, the United Irishmen were the ﬁrst
to mix separatist political attitudes towards Britain with a class-based philosophy.
(The validity of this interpretation is discussed below.) In Labour In Irish History
and other writings, Connolly constantly evoked images of prom-socialists ﬁghting
to save Ireland from England as well as from the pro-British ruling class of
Ireland, before they eventually fell victim to the indecision of their own leaders

20 Regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of

and the French commanders
Connolly’s characterizations, the United Irishmen are important not only because
of Connolly‘s self-proclaimed embodiment of their ideals, but also because they
do represent a major phase in the development of Irish nationalism.

To a great extent, the United Irishmen grew out of the more radical remnants
of the Volunteers, particularly in the Presbyterian community in Ulster where
latitudinarian and unorthodox views were still accepted on a wide range of
subjects. In addition to espousing the ideals associated with the progressive
elements of the Volunteers, such as constitutional separation from Britain, free
trade, and non-sectarianism, the early United Irishmen were also closely
associated with parliamentary / franchise reform. They hoped that a more

representative government system would make the Irish government more

responsive to the needs of distinctly Irish interests, rather than those of inﬂuential

 

20 L111, especially chapter 8; also WR 12-25-1915.

20
British and Irish aristocrats At ﬁrst their groups were simply social / political
clubs that saw themselves as somewhat associated with a more widespread
European reform movement But with the growing repression that came with the
French Revolution, and as their ideas became less acceptable, they were often
looked upon as traitors, and were eventually driven underground.

As a consequence of the war-time repression, the United Irishmen became a
more radical group. Similarly, Irish society became more polarized; loyalism and
republicanism both ﬂourished in the time following the 1793-5 repression. Mth
the inﬂuence of Theobald Wolfe Tone, a founding member of the United
Irishmen who had originally been a Whig reformer, the United Irishmen
underwent a transformation from reformism to republicanism by 1796. Also,
radical members of the artisan class were independently starting their own
republican ”United Irish“ groups which demanded complete separation from
Britain, and a government modeled on that of the French Republic.

Henry Grattan, one of the leaders of the opposition in the Irish Parliament,
condemned the government of Ireland for fostering sectarianism through support

21 Even

for Orangeism, and manipulating Catholic hopes for total emancipation.
as the government was acting on further concessions to Catholics, and thereby
antagonizing much of the Protestant population without necessarily gaining the
loyalty of the Catholics, the United Irishmen reafﬁrmed their commitment to

religious toleration and refused to capitalize on this pool of potential support.22

 

21 M. Elliott, 1982, 107.
22 Ibid., 3&9.

21

Confronted by the Catholic Emancipation Crisis and consequent sectarian strife
of 1792-5, the parliamentary opposition decided to support the anti-Catholic
sentiments in the Protestant community, and thus split from their traditional areas
of support, which at that time were typiﬁed by the United Irishmen. Thus the
United Irishmen were further isolated from mainstream political and social
arenas, and suppressed by the government. Meanwhile, the government paid lip
service to the ideas of religious toleration, but concurrently cultivated
sectarianism and promoted sectarian violence in the form of the Protestant-
dominated civil militia. One British commander openly admitted his intention “to
increase the animosity between the Orangemen and the United Irishmen."23

As the sectarian violence continued and even intensiﬁed in Ulster, the Catholic
Defenders organization grew in strength The Defenders were a reaction to
Protestant attacks, but they also showed contempt for the Catholic hierarchy, and
had sought ties with the revolutionary government of France before the start of
their association with the United Irishmen. The United Irishmen’s commitment
to non-sectarianism stemmed from (and was primarily limited to) the radical
elements of the Protestant middle class, and was detested by much of the rest of
the Protestant community. However, by the middle of the 17908 the Defenders,
without any real structure or leadership, and the United Irishmen, without any
real base of broad popular support, found it advantageous to merge their two
organizations Catholics again had seen their reformist ambitions frustrated in

1795, concurrently with the start of the Peep O’Day Boys attacks on Catholics

 

23 1c Kelley, 1982, 10.

 

22

(which, to the Catholics, appeared to be sanctioned by the government), and
explicitly joined forces with the United Irish radicals This merger gave the
United Irish cause, which had been primarily a political movement, a distinctly - -
social dimension. The merger also essentially destroyed the effect of the century-
old Penal Law system, which had effectively kept the majority of the Catholic
population tie-politicized and leaderless Signiﬁcantly, the result was that much
of the Catholic lower class was politicized for the ﬁrst time by radical republican
members of the Ulster Presbyterian community, while much of the upper-class
Catholic population, particularly the Catholic hierarchy, began to realize a share
of the ruling institutions, and thus opposed calls for change. The United
Irishmen essentially became a Protestant-led organization with a largely lower-
class Catholic following

When their views became more radical, and their organization became less
acceptable in upper-class circles, the United Irishmen began to look to France for
more than inspiration. Contacts were made with the French in order to facilitate
invasion plans, and arrangements were made in Ireland in order to organize and
attack the British during such an invasion. During these preparations, the
leadership of the now enlarged United Irishmen tried to set contingencies that
would keep a successful invasion / rebellion from simply replacing the British-
dominated government with French tyranny in Ireland. The main attraction
towards the French for the United Irishmen was not co-religious afﬁnity or
cultural ties, but a strategically convenient partnership against Britain that was
strengthened by republican attitudes This partnership blossomed with the French

decision to invade Ireland as part of their general strategy in their war against

23
England.

Because of logistical and communication problems, the French expedition to
Bantry Bay in late 1796 failed, as did later, less signiﬁcant attempts by the French
to attack the British in Ireland. This initial invasion attempt was extremely
uncoordinated between the French and the local United Irish leadership, since
most of the important leaders had already left Ireland for France and other
places This problem reveals the general lack of current information to which the
exiled United Irish leadership had access, demonstrating that they were quite out
of touch with the on-the-spot situation in Ireland. The lack of information
available to the United Irish leaders in France became even worse with the
growing repression that followed the invasion attempt, as martial law was
declared in March of 1798 The situation reached a peak in the crisis atmosphere
of May, culminating in the famous ’98 Rising Not only did the remaining United
Irish leadership fail to time the uprising to coincide with a French invasion, they
also failed to take advantage of the strong United Irish inﬂuence in Britain:
including contacts with United groups in England and Scotland, sympathizers in
the radical London Corresponding Society and the Society for Constitutional
Information, and particularly the strong elements of the United Irish membership
in the British Navy, which played an integral part in paralyzing British military

24 But the rising itself was generally a

power at the Spithead and Nore mutinies
sporadic, regional, and basically uncoordinated reaction to increasing government

sponsored Orange terror that accelerated again in early 1797. The United Irish

 

2‘ M. Elliott, 1982,121-50.

24
leadership did not fail to control and direct the rebellion as much as they were
incapable of exercising any type of command over the largely spontaneous
outburst Thus, it was essentially not a United Irish rising Although plans and. .
provisions had been made, the repression and consequent secrecy of the
leadership, combined with the cultural gulf between the leadership and most of
the membership made the United Irish leaders impotent at the crucial moment
Finally, the United Irishmen were crippled by rampant individualism and even
egomania among both the exiled and local segments of leadership.

With the frequent failures and frustrations of the United Irishmen’s ambitions,
the group became more and more marginalized and increasingly obscure. The
divisions in Irish society, although basically social and political, seemed primarily
denominational to many during the conﬂict, and, in fact, helped the strife to
degenerate into a sectarianized struggle over property ending with the desertion
of the remaining propertied elements from the United Irishmen during ”the great
Orange fear of 1798325 When the French ﬁnally invaded Ireland again, in
August 1798 to aid the rebellion that had already collapsed, they did not ﬁnd an
Irish people struggling against an English-dominated aristocracy as they had
expected, but Catholic ﬁghting Protestant. This sectarianization aided the
government forces by successfully undercutting the last relic of the old United
Irish structure: the exiled Protestant middle-class leaders By the time of Robert
Emmet’s 'Rebellion' in 1803, the United Irishmen were obviously a defeated

organization, barely a shadow of their formerly formidable presence. Although

 

25 Ibid., 197.

25
the United Irishmen existed in name until the second decade of the 19th century,
their remnants were essentially scattered throughout the English-speaking world,
and also absorbed into the French military.

In evaluating the United Irishmen, care must be taken to avoid generalizations
that may not necessarily be ﬁtting for the entire span of the existence of the
United Irishmen. The ideas espoused by the United Irishmen evolved over time,
as did the nature of the organization’s composition. Although it is not entirely
desirable to cram the United Irishmen into various stereotyped categories, it is
essential that some generalizations are made about this substantial manifestation
of that experience for the present purposes of ﬁnding James Connolly’s
relationship to the continuities and trends of Irish nationalist experiences For
this study, the focus should be on the movement in the middle to late 17903,
when the United Irish activity and strength were both climaxing in response to
growing government repression and Orange intimidation. Even as the leadership
became more and more radical, the membership of the movement reﬂected a
wide and growing base of popular support. Therefore, it is in this signiﬁcant
period of the United Irish development, if in any, that we should look to for
generalizations about the movement.

At this stage in the United Irish evolution, the movement was organized
around the guiding principle of secrecy. Local cells, both urban and rural, were
formed around local issues, but were theoretically part of a movement that
encompassed all of Ireland, as well as other parts of the British Isles The causes
that brought the adherents together on a local level would often include mutual

defense against government oppression and Orange attacks, prom-national and

26

anti-English sentiments, basic cultural prejudices, and, of course, simple anti-
Protestant bigotry. Recruitment usually involved secret oaths, often taken when
civil strife came to the area, and administered by local members to their
associates. At the upper levels, the United Irish organization was led by radical
middle-class professionals, usually urban in background, and included a large
proportion of representatives from the traditionally Presbyterian Ulster—Scotch
community. Because of arrests, persecution, and exiles, there was a relatively
disastrous turnover of United leaders in Ireland The secrecy that became more
and more essential as the 1790s progressed also became quite a hinderance to
efﬁcient administration of the organization. Efforts to limit knowledge of the
identity of the leaders, combined with the high turnover, meant confusion in
policy, information, and the chain of command

During the period in question, United Irish tactics varied At ﬁrst, before
wide-scale repression was achieved, the United Irishmen tried to present their
radical case for. political reform at every available opportunity: in pamphlets,
through the press, and at meetings, despite mounting public (middle and ruling-
class) disapproval of their positions As the ofﬁcial and unofﬁcial repression
increased, and the United Irish ideas became more radical, their tactics reﬂected
their move to the underground: cells were created throughout the British Isles
and in the British military, arms were gathered and stashed, contacts were made
with other radicals, and overtures were made to the French in conjunction with
speciﬁc plans for an uprising in Ireland

In view of the rising tide of sectarianism in the 17905, the United Irishmen

stand out as one of the few signiﬁcant forces to substantially ignore religious

27

denominations when formulating the movement’s deﬁnition of ”Irishness”. For
the United Irishmen, a common opposition to the nature of Britain’s role in Irish
affairs was far more important than denominational preference. The movement
was remarkable in that it was able to maintain this stand even as much of the
traditional base of support for recent Irish radicalism at the time, the Ulster
Presbyterian community, sank into the rampant sectarian conﬂict that was re-
emerging The charge could be made that, in incorporating the Catholic
Defenders into the United Irish organization, those combined groups then had a
share in the spiralling sectarianism. Although there is probably some validity to
such a claim, Defenderism was primarily a reactive phenomenon which
represented a Catholic response to the attacks of such lower-class Protestant
intimidation groups as the Peep O’Day Boys in the weaving districts of Ulster.
Atrocities in the sectarian violence did occur from both sides, but once the
United Irishmen merged with the Defenders, they tried to propagate the idea that
sectarian violence among the Irish was only an unfortunate and avoidable
consequence that resulted from the divide and rule tactics employed by British
policy makers. Any conﬂict that the United Irishmen joined in that had sectarian
overtones to it merely reﬂected the fact that much of the Irish population had
been divided over the issue of loyalty to Britain along denominational lines; and
these lines were quite reﬂective of class divisions in many areas But for the
United Irishmen, such conﬂicts were primarily political and national, rather than
religious or (as will be argued) social or class-oriented in nature.

As noted earlier, James Connolly looked to the United Irishmen as the

originators of radical republicanism based on class struggle in Ireland. He

28
reached this conclusion, in part, because he was somewhat of a romantic who
recognized the power of imagery related to the United Irishmen in a tradition-
steeped country such as Ireland; but also because of two statements made by the
popular nationalist hero, Theobald Wolfe Tone. The ﬁrst was Tone’s manifesto
of June 1791, when the United Irishmen were still a part of the accepted political
process in Ireland, and had yet to become a radical republican organization, but
were instead focussed on political reform. Connolly reproduced the manifesto in
Labour In Irish History, and said of it:26
It would be hard to ﬁnd in modern socialist literature anything more broadly
International in its scope and aims, more deﬁnitely of a class character in its
methods, or more avowedly democratic in its nature than this manifesto, yet
although it reveals the inspiration and methods of a revolutionist...(t)he Irish
Socialist alone is in line with the thought of this revolutionary apostle of the
United Irishmen.
The manifesto was simply the vision of Tone, one of the most radical founders of
the United Irishmen, regarding what shape the organization should take. It was
international in character, as were many of the views of the early Volunteers, the
Patriots, and the liberals in Ireland, as well as others in Europe at the time. The
document gave no speciﬁc program for the complete democratization of Ireland,
but Benthamistic phrases could easily be interpreted by a reader, such as
Connolly, as a call for radical democracy. Tone’s only reference to social classes
is a smattering of anti-aristocratic rhetoric. But besides being far from unusual at
the time for a middle-class activist, this prejudice is evident only in his proposed
methods for political action, and does not reﬂect a vision of a future radically

egalitarian society. Furthermore, Connolly basically ignored Tone’s afﬁrmation of

 

26 L111, 83-4; the manifesto is reproduced on pp. 82-3.

29

middle-class individualism, which would have been difﬁcult for him to reconcile
with his interpretation.”

The second was a now-famous quote from Tone, that Connolly referred to
repeatedly:28
Our freedom must be had at all hazards If the men of property will not help us
they must fall; we will free ourselves by the aid of that large and respectable class
of the community-the men of no property.
In referring to this quote, Connolly was trying to portray the United Irishmen (in
general) as a republican organization that, when frustrated by the reactionary

middle class, saw the light of hope in the cause of the laboring classes and,

 

27 But the manifesto is signiﬁcant for Connolly in that it parallels his tactical
program with Tone’s, revealing a strong degree of continuity from Tone’s tactical
(but not necessarily philosophical) ideas to Connolly. (But it must be
remembered that Tone was not always representative of the rest of United Irish
opinion.) It should be pointed out here that the three main points of Tone’s
program for the United Irishmen, outlined in the manifesto, were indeed 'in line“
with Connolly’s tactics First, Tone emphasized "publication, in order to
propagate their principles and effectuate their ends“ This was also probably the
key activity in Connolly’s career, as he was a proliﬁc writer and publisher of
social and political thought Secondly, Tone called for "communications with the
different towns” in order to apply political, and if necessary, extra-parliamentary
pressure to achieve their stated reforms Again, Connolly’s tactics followed the
same pattern (as is demonstrated below), by his focus on urban issues, and in his
revolutionary and socialist organizing efforts to embrace like-minded elements in
urban areas throughout Ireland Finally, Tone wanted "communications with
similar societies abroad—as the Jacobin Club of Paris, the Revolutionary Society
in England, the Committee for reform in Scotland Let the nations go abreast.
Let the interchange of sentiments among mankind concerning the Rights of man
be as immediate as possible.‘(Tone’s italics) A few lines earlier, Tone had
proclaimed that the great goal of the new Society was to be the ”Rights of Man in
Ireland“ He wanted a “free nation" that would ”stand in insulated independence”.
This mix of nationalism and internationalism was not unique to Tone at the time.
However, in Connolly’s day, socialism was seen as contradictory to nationalism.
Connolly clearly stated his position in blending the two ideas, (see Chapter 3) in
effect agreeing with Tone again.

2‘ Quoted from L1H, 69.

30

therefore, sought to achieve the just ends of national liberation through the
virtuous section of society: the poor and oppressed. Although this arrangement
ﬁts in nicely with Connolly’s perceptions of early 20th century Ireland, it does not
ﬁt into the real situation of late 18th century Ireland, upon which he tried to
impose this imagery. In fact, the policy-making elements within the United
Irishmen supported property rights, as when provisions were made to guarantee
private property in the event of a French invasion.29 The leadership of the
United Irishmen came predominantly from propertied classes, and a radical
transformation of the existing social order was not one of their goals

Connolly’s use of the quote reveals a desperate attempt to grasp a minor
statement and turn it into a guiding policy of the United Irishmen. Indeed, the
United Irish leadership was willing to embrace the lower classes in an attempt to
gain support for their primary goal: a radical transﬁguration in the nature of the
relationship between Britain and Ireland. However, Connolly misinterpreted the
tactics of the United Irishmen and Wolfe Tone, speciﬁcally their use of some
elements of social tensions based on class antagonisms, to promote a vision for a
new Irish society. The United Irishmen lacked ”any major social programme"
and, in fact, repeatedly displayed a fear of the masses of the Irish people, leading
Marianne Elliott to call this ”one of the principal contradictions in United Irish
thinking."30 This fear of the unpropertied majority drove the Protestant United

Irish leadership to seek French aid even when, according to Elliott, Ireland was

 

29 M. Elliott, 1982, 177-s
3° Ibid, 369.

 

31
capable of freeing itself from foreign control.31 Any meaningful calls to actually
change the essence of the social structure came from lower echelons of the
organization, and were basically ignored. Even if these quotes from Tone are .
indicative of an underlying proto-socialistic tendency, which is doubtful, it must be
remembered that Tone—although of symbolic importance to later Irish
revolutionaries, and of philosophical and spiritual importance to many Irishmen in
the early l7905—became a more peripheral ﬁgure as the decade progressed. He
was always seen as one of the most radical ﬁgures within the United Irishmen,
but whatever real influence he possessed waned with his exile to France.

Thus, even though the United Irishmen did not ﬁt into Connolly’s imagery of
socialist revolutionaries, they are still signiﬁcant in terms of shaping many of the
patterns of Irish nationalism, some of which were to be continued by Connolly.
Their use of propaganda and political literature to educate and inﬂuence the Irish
population was apparent in Connolly’s work. The militaristic structures and
covert measures utilized by the United Irishmen reappeared later in Connolly’s
activities Like the United Irishmen, Connolly looked at Ireland’s problems and
came to the conclusion that separation from Britain, in one form or another, was
the necessary remedy. (Although in Connolly’s view, distinct Irish nationhood
could only be one part of the overall solution because, as will be demonstrated,
he believed that political revolution without social revolution was generally
useless) And both Connolly and the United Irishmen saw the potential strength

of the lower classes of society as being the key to achieving this end. But the

 

3‘ rum, 4.

32
most signiﬁcant and lasting impact of the United Irishmen was their non-
sectarianism. The United Irishmen insisted on preserving their vision of a non-
sectarian struggle at a time when institutions were creating religious strife in
order to keep control, and thereby creating a lasting notion that loyalism
translated into Orangeism and was associated with property; while conversely,
Irish Catholicism became equated with poverty, rebellion, and disloyalty.
Connolly also felt that he had to cultivate religious toleration in the face of
growing labor unrest that was taking on a sectarian nature. Connolly saw
parallels between the United Irishmen and himself, since he believed that pro-
British capitalists in Ulster were primarily responsible for the sectarian violence

because of their need to divide and rule the working class.

Irish Nationalist Sentiments At The Time Of The Act Of Union

In addition to the United Irishmen, there were other manifestations of various
forms of Irish nationalism during the period of warfare between Britain and
revolutionary France. The Act of Union (1801) offers a window into the views of
the politically active classes that saw the United Irishmen as representing too
radical an expression of nationalism to be acceptable in their political spectrum
Obviously, the passing of the Act of Union is not generally accepted as an
expression of Irish nationalism; and, due to the working-class focus of most of

32

Connolly’s historical commentary, he essentially ignored the event. However,

 

32 In Labour, Nationality and Religion (Dublin, 1910), Connolly claimed that
”On 1 March 1800, no less than thirty-two Orange lodges protested against the
Act of Union, but the catholic hierarchy endorsed it.“ (p. 12) This statement was

33

the controversy surrounding the Act and the reaction it inspired offers much
insight into the development and relative importance of Irish nationalist
sentiments at the turn of the century and beyond. It also reveals the profound . .
differences between various deﬁnitions of Irish nationhood, as well as attitudes
towards these different deﬁnitions The debate over the Act itself demonstrated
the tension over the deﬁnition of Irishness: whether Ireland was to be a part of
Britain, or constitutionally distinct. Obviously, other factors were involved in the
controversy, particularly political, ﬁnancial, and economic considerations But the
Act polarized the political forces in Ireland over the position of Ireland within the
British Empire. Although for various reasons the view of Ireland as an integral
part of Britain prevailed at the time, the defeated political forces were themselves
indicative of dissenting views of Irishness

In The Passingof the Irish Act of Union, G.C. Bolton divides the anti—unionists
into two general categories: the liberal minority was represented by Henry
Grattan; and the more prevalent political opposition to the Act was associated
with the views of the Protestant Ascendancy. The liberal group “looked to the
growth of an Irish nation in which all should have the opportunity of deserving
citizenship, and which would combine its own distinctive ethos with a ﬁrm loyalty

to the British connexion”, while the dominant opposing view was that "the

 

not meant as a denunciation of Orangeism, per se, or even the Act of Union, but
of the Catholic hierarchy. This was one part of a long list of grievances that
Connolly used to indict the class—based policies of the Catholic Church throughout
Irish history. exemplifying his preference for putting class divisions ahead of
religious differences. However, his condemnation of the Church’s support for the
Act obviously indicates dissatisfaction with the Act itself.

34
autonomy of Ireland meant the autonomy of the Protestant Ascendancy."33 The
failure of the political forces opposed to the Act to agree on an alternative vision
of Irishness in resisting the Union displayed many of the ubiquitous contradictions
and complexities of Irish nationalism.

However, it was in the response of the Irish outside of the central political
arena where the broad varieties of Irish nationalism were most evident Much of
the support for or opposition to the Union was given on a
denominational / geographical basis Many of the politically conscious Catholics in
the south and west supported the Union in the hopes of greater civil liberties for
Catholics under the British Parliament Meanwhile, Protestant positions were
divided. The traditionally radical Presbyterians, mostly from the areas of Ulster
that were dominated by the plantation communities, were becoming increasingly
conservative and sought the stability offered by the Union.34 This view of Ireland
as an integral part of Great Britain was quickly becoming closely associated with
the Ulster Presbyterian community, which still strongly upholds this vision
(although on a more limited basis now), and should be seen as a competing,
though still valid deﬁnition of Irishness Therefore, this period was essentially the
culmination the Ulster Presbyterians’ conversion from the radicalism and
republicanism of the 17803 and 17905 to conservative Unionism, and represents a
watershed in the history of that community. Most of the other Protestant

communities in Ireland, especially in the "frontier" areas that were confronted by

 

33 G.C. Bolton, The Passingof the Irish Act of Union, (London, 1966) 218.
3‘ rum, 135.

35

a large local Catholic population, opposed the Union, fearing an “English
‘softness’ towards the Catholics who outnumbered and surrounded them, and thus
often sought their refuge in the sectarian Orange groups 35

However, reaction to the Act of Union was almost entirely constitutional
during and after the debate. Even Emmet’s Rebellion of 1803 was not
speciﬁcally a response to the Act This incident was more of a protest of the
general relationship between the two islands, in addition to being a consequence
of the basic lack of contact between the exiled United Irishmen and the actual
situation in Ireland at the time36 Still, the rebellion and the increased sectarian
reaction that followed it indicate that sectarian, extra-parliamentary, and even
violent actions were hardly discarded as weapons of competing visions of Irish
nationalism at this time, but they were not employed over the issue of the Union.

The basic catalysts for the legislation of the Union were political and
economic. After the Irish drive for political / legislative independence two decades
earlier, the British government hoped to put more of an ofﬁcial limit on Irish
autonomy, although unofﬁcial means had been utilized when they were needed.
The incessant political and social strife in Ireland had not abated with the
granting of greater independence to Ireland, but actually had increased over the
previous decade. The British government hoped that ﬁghter control of Ireland
could increase its ability to manipulate and channel the forces in the highly

unstable social situation, and would help the government to limit excess sectarian

 

35 Ibid., 139-40.
35 M. Elliott, 1982, 302-3.

36

atrocities, which "sounded archaic" to the English people, and was becoming a
source of much embarrassment 37

Furthermore, the Irish government had become quite a drain on Britain’s
ﬁnances, and the events of late 1796 to 1798 amply demonstrated the inability of
the Irish government to effectively deal with internal and external threats through
preparation for and recognition of danger. The passing of the Act displayed that
while the British often viewed the Irish as incompetent, they saw Ireland as an
integral part of the Empire, as in Lord Cornwallis’s contention that ”without an
Union the British Empire must be dissolved.”(8 June 1799)38 But the debate
over the representation to be granted to the Irish in the enlarged British
Parliament demonstrated a poor regard for the Irish by the British ruling class
The controversy revolved around the issue of how to arrive at a fair number of
representatives from Ireland: a representation proportionately equal for the
English and Irish populations would have enlarged the British Parliament by
about 40 % (while Scotland was already under-represented); but restricting the
inﬂux to a much less equitable proportion-400 new MPs in the House of
Commons—would maintain English hegemony. 39 Bolton claims that the second
option triumphed because of a "wish to enfeeble Ireland” and protect British

ruling interests However, the debate revealed the prejudice of the English

parliamentary leadership against the ”wild Irish“ and the 'Paddies"-and not just

 

37 Ibid, 9.
33 Quoted from G.C. Bolton, 1966, 157.
39 G.C. Bolton, 1966, 85-6.

37

the lower levels of Irish society, but also against the Irish (and speciﬁcally the
Anglo-Irish) classes which would provide the MPs40

In addition to these political motivations, related economic causes were also . .
inﬂuential in encouraging support for the Act of Union. Again, by looking at
geographical areas of support, it becomes apparent that Dublin was squaring off
against the other port cities of Ireland on the issue, thereby revealing some of the
economic considerations that came into play. The Dublin metropolitan area and
the surrounding counties supported ‘a population that was strongly anti-unionist
The residents of Dublin recognized that they were in a privileged position
because of the economic beneﬁts that came with being the seat of government in
Ireland. The surrounding residents realized that commercially, they were largely
dependent on this market41 But in Londonderry, Cork, and Galway, pro-unionist
sentiments were stronger, largely due 'to the hope of greater prosperity“ in
commerce after equality with Britain was achieved.42 Although religious
considerations had some inﬂuence on the way an area was to approach the issue,
in the cities the merchant class was deciding the question according to simple
self-interest The leaders of Belfast generally gave their support to the measure,
although not explicitly-since it had not been long since this area had been the
hotbed of republicanism. But the middle classes of Ulster had been the

beneﬁciaries of recent prosperity, which led them to turn their backs on their

 

4° Ibid, 86.
‘1 Ibid., 1301.
‘2 Ibid., 13s44.

38

traditional reformist impulses and to emphasize security concerns instead.43
Signiﬁcantly, the tension that was evident between Dublin and Belfast over the
issue would later reappear in Connolly’s time, when Belfast’s markets were more.
closely tied to the British Empire than were Dublin’s, and therefore the views of
the merchants of the two cities regarding Ireland’s relationship with Britain were
still divided along the same lines

Much of the Irish nationalist tradition holds that the underlying reason for the
Act of Union was to destroy the ﬂedgling Irish industries, particularly linen. In
the most recent period of the troubles in Northern Ireland, starting in the late
19605, signiﬁcant elements within the Irish republican tradition, which
incorporates a strong dose of Irish socialism from Connolly, still hold that the
linen industry was the real target of the Act of Union, for the beneﬁt of

44 The linen industry, strongest in Ulster, was a key

competing British textiles
factor in this economic equation. The weaving areas of Armagh, in particular,
had been the scene of the rise of sectarianism, which was initially caused by the
competition between weavers of the different denominations, and the linen
culture may have been a key factor in gathering lower-class Protestant support for
Orangeism instead of republicanism.” Since the Irish Parliament had become

independent, the Irish government had been trying to protect Irish industries such

as linen. With the Union, legislated protection of Irish goods was to be gradually

 

‘3 Ibid, 135.
‘4 Bernadette Devlin, The Price Of My Soul, (New York, 1969) 51.
45 RF. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, (New York, 1988) 272.

39
rescinded, making Ireland vulnerable to the British economic powerhouse. In
fact, the Irish linen industry did contract from a wide geographical base to the
settlement area of Ulster, but this was only a continuation of a consolidation
process that had been happening since the industry had reached its peak in the
18th century.46 Technical innovations and changing economic conditions had
much more to do with the retarded growth of Irish industry than the ulterior

motives of British policy-makers.“

However, the Union agreement resulted in an
approximately 250% increase in the Irish national debt, which, along with the
system of absentee landlords, took investment capital away from new Irish
industries48 The subsequent general decline in industrial growth prevented cities
from developing the capability to absorb excess rural population, a handicap
which would prove to be fatal in the 1840s

The Act was eventually passed through the Irish Parliament, which essentially
voted itself out of existence. The British government made full use of its ability
to dispense patronage by bargaining for votes for the Act with money and
positions49 But Bolton points out that these practices, which seem so corrupt
now, were much more acceptable at the time in that social-political level of

British society.50 However, even more signiﬁcant is the fact that the British

 

‘6 Mary E. Daly, Social and Economic Historyof Ireland Since 1800, (Dublin,
1981) 65-6.

4" Ibid., 87-8

43 p. Metscher, 1986, 74.
‘9 G.C. Bolton, 1966, 184.
5° Ibid., 184, 216-7.

 

 

 

40
government, in its determination and desperation to get the Act passed, made
promises of further concessions towards the emancipation of the Catholic
population in order to gain the support of the Catholics and other reform-minded
Irishmen. The failure of the British government to make sure that the Catholic
hopes were realized in the early part of the 19th century assisted the rise of a
leader who personiﬁed the ambitions of the Catholics: Daniel O’Connell. But
religious differences and political promises were not the only reasons for the
continuation of Irish nationalism. Irish nationalists who opposed the vision of an
Irish nation as a part of a larger whole-Great Britain-had encountered crucial
setbacks over the previous decade, but were to become more vocal in the 19th
century. Bolton concludes that “Irish separatism survived, not because of cultural
and religious peculiarities-similar factors existed in Wales and Scotland-but
because these peculiarities were mingled with economic and social grievances
which went unredressed '5 l A new generation of Irish nationalists were willing to

capitalize on the issues that the British government had brushed aside or ignored.
Daniel O’Connell: The Emancipation And Repeal Movements

As the actual passing of the Act of Union faded into the past, many elements of
the Catholic community became increasingly frustrated with the British
government’s failure to fulﬁll its promise of Catholic emancipation. Upon this

dissatisfaction, Daniel O’Connell built his political career, including his successful

 

51 Ibid, 221.

41
drive to achieve Catholic emancipation and his failed attempt to repeal the Act
of Union. James Connolly, however, essentially viewed Daniel O’Connell, the
'Liberator' for Irish Catholics, as a class enemy. Connolly saw O’Connell as the .
personiﬁcation of all that was wrong with middle-class nationalism, a tradition
that was still very strong in Connolly’s day, and that was still directly related to
Daniel O’Connell. Connolly saw a man who, in a crunch, would put class
privileges before country; who was involved in the violent suppression of Emmet’s
Rebellion as a member of the forces of reaction; and who used his parliamentary
position and popular base of support to actively oppose even the most basic
alleviations of the misery of the laboring classes Whether or not Connolly’s
interpretation is accurate (this is discussed further below), it is understandable as
Connolly’s attempt to disgrace the Home Rulers, the domith middle-class
nationalists of his own time, by exposing their symbolic leader as a enemy of
”true“ Irish nationalism.

Daniel O’Connell came from a Catholic landowning family from County Kerry.
During his education in France he witnessed some of the bloody events of the
French Revolution, and thus formulated his commitment to reject political
violence. However, his early political views were greatly inﬂuenced by some of
the ideas behind the French Revolution, and, to a greater extent, the American
Revolutions2 By 1798 he was called to the Irish Bar. While in the Bar, he

joined a militia unit composed of members of his profession, which was involved

 

52 T. Desmond Williams, 'O’Connell’s Impact On Europe" in Daniel
O’Connell, Kevin B. N owlan and Maurice R O’Connell, editors, (New York,
1985) 100.

42
in the suppression of Emmet’s Rebellion, of which Connolly wrote. Professor
Maurice R. O’Connell, one of Daniel O’Connell’s descendants, writes that Daniel
O’Connell had become distinguished in his work by 1805 and had become very. .
successful ﬁnancially by 1813, but was barred by the Penal Laws from

promotions 3

At that time O’Connell was involved in the politically charged trial
of the newspaper man, John Magee. Magee was targeted by Robert Peel as "a
protagonist of Catholic Emancipation, and thereby hung the reason for the
trial."54 Raised to be a leader among his co-religionists, O’Connell turned the
trial into a political protest of the Catholic condition. O’Connell lost the trial,
and was condemned by his wealthy land-owning uncle for his tendency to play
upon the emotions of the crowd, but he launched himself into politics”
O’Connell was a radical member of the old Catholic Committee until he split
with the organization to found the more confrontational, but still constitutional,
Catholic Association in 1823. His election to the British House of Commons in
1828 forced the issue of Catholic Emancipation, which was granted the following
year. After this success he set his sights on the repeal of the Act of Union, which
he blamed for Ireland’s problems, and founded the Repeal Association for this
purpose. He formed the ﬁrst cohesive group of Irish MPs, but for political
reasons did not press the issue of Repeal wholeheartedly until 1841. After

organizing the 'monster meetings" in the "Repeal year“ of 1843, he was challenged

 

53 Maurice R. O’Connell, “O’Connell: Lawyer And Landlord” in Daniel
O’Connell, 1985, 107.

5‘ mm, 110.
55 Ibid, 111.

 

43
by the government Committed to constitutional methods, O’Connell backed
down, and the tactics which he personiﬁed were largely discredited. The Repeal
Association split with the more radical Young Ireland group, and the advent of . _
the Famine in 1845 only magniﬁed his failure to achieve what he believed would
be the remedy for all of Ireland’s problems He died in 1847 during a pilgrimage
to Rome.

The whole of O’Connell’s political career was based on the premise that
Ireland’s problems were a result of Britain’s inability or refusal to effectively and
fairly govern Ireland. Irish political and social development, and the consequent
problems, which were often related to the system of land distribution, were quite
different from that of Britain, where “Free Trade and Chartism dominated the

political scene” at the times6

Britain’s inability to correct problems in Ireland
after the Act of Union led O’Connell to promote the idea of a reestablished
Irish Parliament, with continued loyalty to the British Crown. Thus, all of
O’Connell’s aims eventually centered around the idea of legislative separation
from Britain, and continued constitutional ties to England, with a reliance on
constitutional avenues to achieve that goal.

If this is what O’Connell stood for, what he became in the eyes of the people-
particularly in later generations—is something else. The legacy of O’Connell
included many myths from his contact with the Irish peasantry, and represented

their wishes for Ireland. According to John A. Murphy, O’Connell was a typical

'Gaeltacht man”, in that he was "pragmatic, adaptable, non- or even anti-

 

5‘ Kevin B. Nowlan, "O’Connell And Irish Nationalism” in Daniel O’Connell,
1985, 12.

44

republican, and entirely without sentimentality" regarding the Gaelic language or
lifestyle.” Indeed, O’Connell refused to take the leadership of movements
organized to protect the Gaelic language, seeing them as reactives8 But the
peasantry idealized and even deiﬁed O’Connell as a long-awaited saviour of their
people. This idealization took on religious connotations and imagery, and,
signiﬁcantly, 8 strong dose of anti-English sentiment Much of the folklore from
this period includes references that focus on O’Connell as the personiﬁcation of
the long awaited retribution that Catholic peasants hoped would be inﬂicted on
the 'Sasanaigh" (English) and the Orangemens9 Despite many of the gross
inaccuracies that abound in such legends, particularly the references to violent
retribution which was supposed to be administered by a person who was
effectively a paciﬁst, these tales are signiﬁcant in that they reﬂect O’Connell’s
deep and broad base of popular support, even if that support was often based on
misconceptions and idealizations

O’Connell’s social and political ideas, if they can be classiﬁed, tended towards
typical middle—class liberalism of the time, with patriotic, Catholic, Gaelic, and
Bethamite inﬂuences apparent60 In practice, O’Connell presented an ambiguous

record of his ideas In his career in Parliament, he hedged on political

 

57 John A. Murphy, ”O’Connell And The Gaelic World” in Daniel O’Connell,
1985, 35.

53 Ibid, 42.

59 Diarmaid O’Muirithe, "O’Connell In Irish Folk Tradition" in Daniel
O’Connell, 1985, 60-2.

60 Joseph Lee, "The Social And Economic Ideas Of O’Connell” in Daniel
O’Connell, 1985, 72

45
applications of the philosophies he supported, repudiated much of what other
Benthamites (and the classical economists) held dear, and, in his private affairs,
deviated from the strict application of the philosophies be embraced.61 '
Therefore, Joseph Lee suggests that O’Connell’s “eclectic” opinions on economic
matters indicate that O’Connell did not have a good grasp of “the economic
theories he invoked. '62 Essentially, O’Connell was an advocate of Catholic

liberalism: his Benthamism was tempered by his religion.63

He let his religious
values inﬂuence his private ideas, as he usually supported ”traditional“ values and
was rather paternalistic towards his tenants, which was not unusual for a person
in his position.

But O’Connell’s ideas and actions regarding the growing laboring classes drew
the most criticism from Connolly. Connolly was especially harsh on O’Connell
for his stand on labor organizations in Dublin and child-labor legislation. On the
issue of trade unions, Connolly portrayed O’Connell as the capitalists’ tool in
Parliament against the attempts by workers to organize.64 Although Connolly
called O’Connell "the most bitter and unscrupulous enemy of trade unionism
Ireland has yet produced”, Joseph Lee points out that O’Connell was not opposed

to trade unions in principle—the case in point involved craft unions in Dublin—but

opposed the tactics, the exclusionary tendencies, and the substantial degree of

 

‘1 Ibid, 72-8
62 Ibid, 745.
53 Ibid, 79.

5‘ L1H, 125-6t

46

control employed by these associations of upper-level workers65

Connolly’s argument against O’Connell on the child labor issue revolved
around O’Connell’s opposition to an attempt to legislate stricter enforcement of -
the Factory Acts (1833), which offered some limitations on child labor. Connolly
claims that O’Connell was serving "the interest of English and Irish capitalism“ in
maintaining that the Acts ”had legislated against the nature of things, and against
the right of industry."66 Again, Lee refutes Connolly’s charge, this time claiming
that O’Connell tried to stop the motion in order to keep another important issue,
the Irish Tithes Bill, on the agenda. Furthermore, since O’Connell did indeed
recognize the suffering of these working people, Lee claims-without supporting
evidence-that O’Connell was simply trying to protect the workers from "even
worse unemployment in what was already a bitter slump year. '67 This
justiﬁcation for O’Connell’s position disregards the fact that, in what was
apparently only a procedural issue, O’Connell venomously belittled such altruistic
interests as those who "go about parading before their world their ridiculous
humanity,“ and whose regulations would impoverish the owners68 In his
argument, O’Connell’s concern did not focus on the workers

Connolly’s attacks on O’Connell are signiﬁcant in that they demonstrate his
willingness to criticize a national hero because O’Connell’s brand of nationalism

was considered impure, or inadequate by Connolly. As Lee demonstrates

 

‘5 J. Lee, in Daniel O’Connell, 1985, 76-7.
6‘ L1H, 126-7.

67 J. Lee, in Daniel O'Connell, 1985, 76.
‘3 L1H, 127. (Connolly’s italics)

47

throughout his essay, there is much evidence that O’Connell did recognize the
plight of the poor-both urban and rural—in Ireland.69 However, the range of
O’Connell’s actions lends itself to ambiguous conclusions at best There is
enough contradictory evidence from his private writings and actions, both as a
politician and a landlord, to support both positive and negative evaluations—each
with some validity—of his record on these issues But his political philosophy can
still be recognized from the generalities of his public career. Basically, O’Connell
was a moderate Irish nationalist whose liberalism was contained by his
Catholicism: the 'universalism of his Catholicism subordinated the intrinsic
relativities of socio-economic issues to moral absolutes".70 For many in the
British Isles as well as on the continent, O’Connell represented the new Liberal
Catholic-I1 His contributions to Ireland were that he established Ireland’s
distinctive place in British politics, and he placed Irish nationalism within British
constitutionalism, thereby setting the pattern for Parnell, the Irish Parliamentary
Party, and the later Home Rule movement well into the Free State era of Irish
politics.

The way in which O’Connell went about promoting his ideas involved the
extension of the older extra-parliamentary tactics of mass organization pioneered

by the Volunteers, mixed with his strictly constitutional philosophy and utilization

 

69 J. Lee, in Daniel O’Connell, 1985; for example, see pp. 744—5 for
O’Connell’s concern for starving peasants, or p. 76 for his views on the
exploitation of workers

70 Ibid, 83.
7‘ r. Desmond Williams, in Daniel O’Connell, 1985, 101-3.

48
of the political process But his innovations, embodied in the structures of the
Catholic Association and the Repeal Association, represented a revolution in the
attainment and use of political power in Ireland. The Catholic Association was . .
built on the issue of emancipation, which had been primarily a concern of the
Catholic middle class But the ideas behind the Catholic Association were not
really new except in the sheer size of the undertaking. The Catholic Association
was also able to generate some appeal beyond the traditional parameters of
religion (in that elements of other excluded groups, such as some Protestant
dissenters, were mobilized) and of class, thus engaging the support of the
peasantry.72 O’Connell organized the Catholic peasantry by utilizing the network
of sympathetic lower clergy to gather the easily affordable "Catholic Rent“ from
members Sustained by this mass support, O’Connell then manipulated British
politics, where he sometimes held the balance of power, but quite often worked
with the Whigs Thus, the extra-parliamentary extremism of mass organizations,
militaristic assemblies, and emotional rhetoric was blended with a strict
constitutionalism evident in his parliamentary moderation.

“nth the decline of the Whig governments of the 18305 (governments with
which O’Connell basically cooperated), he decided to actively pursue the repeal
of the Act of Union. In 1840 O’Connell tried to duplicate the success he had
with the Catholic Association by creating a new organization patterned on the
previous one. After a slow start due to political apathy, the Loyal National

Repeal Association accelerated its activity in late 1842 and climaxed in the

 

72 AD. Macintyre, “O’Connell And British Politics" in Daniel O’Connell,
I985, 89.

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49
”Repeal Year” of 1843.73 In keeping with the idea that England’s difﬁculty was
Ireland’s opportunity, O’Connell hoped to take advantage of Britain’s apparent
imperial problems (of overextension) and economic problems (of increased
competition) by abandoning his recent parliamentary emphasis and concentrating
on agitation in Ireland. His plan for Repeal included ﬁve reforms: abolition of
the tithes, ﬁxity of tenure for the peasants, protection for Irish industry, enlarging
the franchise and establishing the secret ballot, and abolishing the poor law."4
However, even the image of hundreds of thousands of supporters gathered into
symbolic formations at historically signiﬁcant sites for the ”monster meetings”—
which often included men in uniforms and some drilling—failed to overcome the
political obstacles to repeal. 75 Tactically, O’Connell was trapped between two
classes of his supporters He tried to appease the peasantry, which hoped for
land tenure; and he had to maintain the middle class’s (and the hierarchy’s) need
for stability. Furthermore, despite O’Connell’s practical paciﬁsm, he was relying
heavily on "quasi-revolutionary rhetoric” to conceal the fact that his movement
was purely political and would not employ the violence implied by the militaristic
formations?6 The rhetoric itself often implied violence, as in this excerpt from a

speech at Mallow.77

 

73 Gearoid 0’ Tuathaigh, Ireland Before The Famine, 1798-I848, (Dublin,
1972) 184.

74 Richard Davis, The Young Ireland Movement, (Dublin, 1987) 37.
75 Ibid, 75.
76 Ibid., 12, 42

77 T.A. Jackson, Ireland Her Own, (London, 1970) 234; (Jackson’s italics and
parentheses).

50

Are we to be trampled underfoot? Oh, they shall never trample me at least!
(Shouts of ‘No! No!’) I say, they may trample me, but it will be my dead body
they will trample on and not the living man!
But Peel’s administration understood that such words were coming from'a man . .
who had based his career on the idea that no political end warranted violence.
Thus, the government called his bluff, banned the planned meeting at Clontarf,
and forced O’Connell to back down, thereby discrediting him in the eyes of many.

Although the mass mobilization of the population by the Repeal Association
was rather easily controlled by the British government, the movement had already
been hindered by the threat it represented to many of the Irish people,
particularly in its sectarian character. Despite O’Connell’s best intentions and
efforts, the Repeal Association was never able to shake its essentially Catholic
image (which was not entirely undeserved) in the eyes of many Protestants
O’Connell’s success with the Catholic Association gave him a wide base of
Catholic support, which was very noticeable to the non-Catholic population of
Ireland. Although it was not necessarily meant to be that way, the nature of the
Catholic Association did give it an overwhelmingly Catholic membership, and
fueled Protestant fears of a monolithic Catholic force in the form of politicized
masses, which appeared to oppose the security concerns of many in the minority
denominations With the rise of the repeal issue, many Protestants again
associated one of the greatest agitators of the time exclusively with the larger and
apparently threatening section of the population, despite the fact that, by the mid-
1830s, over a third of the MPs in O’Connell’s Irish Repeal Party were

51
Protestants"8 Furthermore, on subsequent issues such as education, O’Connell,
and to an even greater extent his son and apparent successor, John, were
inﬂuenced by the nationalist Gallician element within the Catholic hierarchy, led .
by repeal supporter Archbishop John MacHale, and did in fact become more
Catholic in their orientation in directing the Repeal Association79 Most failed to
see that O’Connell’s apparent reformist policies and extremist rhetoric were
balanced by a conservative perspective regarding the status quo. O’Connell’s
failure, despite great efforts, was his inability to convince the inﬂuential
Protestant communities of Ireland that he was offering an inclusive deﬁnition of
Irishness that did not put them in jeopardy, while at the same time maintaining
Catholic support for his career.

Somewhat ironically, the fact that the Repeal Association was seen as primarily
Catholic did not mean that the movement had the support of the Roman Catholic
hierarchy. Conservative Catholic leaders in both the Vatican and Vienna were
suspicious of mass organizations and reform, or anything that could be perceived
as revolutionary, such as monster meetings or ”the ideology of romantic
nationalism“ in general.80 The Vatican, which generally supported his ideas of
Catholic emancipation but was more suspicious of his ideas on repeal, was afraid
of his tactics The Irish hierarchy, who themselves were not in total support of

O’Connell, were directed not to encourage support for O’Connell, but often

 

78 Maurice O’Connell, ”O’Connell, Young Ireland, And Violence” in Thought,
(Vol. 52, No. 207) December, 1977, 382

79 R. Davis, 1987, 67-8
80 T. D. Williams, in Daniel O’Connell, 1985, 102, 104.

52
ignored such warnings81 Still, it must be remembered that the base of
O’Connell’s organizations was often the local, lower clergy, who gathered money

and support for the "Liberator.”

The ﬁrst half of the century preceding Connolly was a period of time that he
looked to for a romantic inspiration for his own ideas As far as Connolly was
concerned, the Rebellion of 1798 and Tone’s image as a social-republican brought
the ancient Irish tendency towards an independent cooperative society into the
modern era. The binding of Ireland to Britain, particularly with the Act of
Union, was an anti-Irish measure that, along with the economic and cultural
conquests, according to Connolly, attempted to complete the domination of
Ireland through British control of the political sphere. The early Volunteers, the
United Irishmen, Emmet’s Conspiracy, and the mass movement of O’Connell’s
extra-parliamentary forces were, in varying degrees, simply reactions to British
domination These early manifestations of protest contained many of the seeds,
real or romanticized, for Connolly’s later actions and ideas, particularly in the
areas of non-sectarianism, popular politics, the use of force, and social-
republicanism. But the next half century would also present ﬁgures and
movements that foreshadowed Connolly, both in terms of methods and ideology.
Although Connolly took a less romanticized view of these later groups and

individuals, in many ways his career was more closely related to, and, in some

 

31 Ibid, 104.

53
respects, an outgrowth of these later manifestations of protest. The next chapter
studies some of the important elements of Irish nationalism as they relate to
socialism and religion from the time of Young Ireland through Connolly’s own .

career.

CHAPTER TWO

llk59'1t..'|_j,!‘,.L't!.!|0T mi- MAN .‘1 --.I_LI I ,!'

‘l g. ,‘g' 'I_l‘ Ij|0_ For; 01' fl.” t -,!l‘ tilt",

Young Ireland And The Great Famine

If Daniel O’Connell represented "old Ireland" in terms of his political outlook and
his nationalist philosophy, then the "old Ireland” of O’Connell’s time effectively
died in the Great Famine. The new generation of Irish nationalists, particularly
those who came to be known as "Young Ireland”, represented a signiﬁcant
departure from. O’Connell’s nationalism, tactics, and organization, but were still
an integral part of the Repeal Association during the years of its greatest
agitation. It was within the Repeal Association that these young nationalists
advocated the most radical nationalism in pre-famine Ireland since Tone, but
eventually became frustrated with the politics and compromises of the old-style
nationalists Because of the short life span of this movement, it is generally seen
as being of secondary importance in the pantheon of Irish nationalism. Richard

Davis claims, "Only the Provisional IRA takes seriously Young Ireland’s role in

54

55

the tradition it claims to defend."1 But the ideas of the Young Irelanders on such
subjects as tactics, Irishness, race, and, religion represent such a signiﬁcant
departure from those of their predecessors, and are still relevant on issues such .as
violence and "liberation theology,” that they are essential in understanding Irish
nationalist traditions2 Their signiﬁcance caused Desmond Keenan to point to
the Young Ireland era as the beginning of modern nationalism in Ireland because
of their creation of a sense of a "national ethos" and "national destiny".3

O’Connell had been facing the biggest political challenge of his career since
Clontarf and was heavily reliant on the Whigs for political support The Young
Irelanders were the section of the Repeal Association that disliked the Whig
alliance because it did not ﬁt with their ideas of a self-sufﬁcient Irish nationalism
They increasingly saw themselves as the proponents of true nationalism—as
opposed to O’Connell’s reformism and conciliatory political practices The
leaders of Young Ireland had played an essential role in publicizing O’Connell’s
repeal agitation, but gradually diverged from his leadership because of questions
of strategy. The Repeal Association was experiencing internal factionalism by the
mid-18405, and by 1846 the Young Ireland group openly split from the Repeal
Association.

The reasons for the split are complex. On the surface, at least, the issue which

brought about the split was the matter of non-violence. O’Connell had based his

 

1 R. Davis, 1987, 1.
2 Ibid

3 Desmond J. Keenan, The Catholic Church In Nineteenth-Centulylreland,
(Dublin, 1983) 190.

56

career on exclusively non-violent methods for political change. At a Repeal
Association meeting in July 1846, the Young Ireland group refused to surrender
the abstract right to use violence for political purposes, even though they did not
see violence as a real avenue of action at that time. The Young Irelanders felt
that excluding such a possibility was not in the interests of what they hoped would
be a self-sufﬁcient nation

But the issue of non-violence does not adequately explain the split because the
depth of O’Connell’s paciﬁsm becomes an issue in any analysis of the event.
Although his methods made him appear cowardly to such groups as the
Orangemen, his position on violence was more of a practical than a principled
stand. He had been repulsed by the bloodshed of the French Revolution, but he
had also mortally wounded a man in a duel in 1815. The violence implied in the
language he used at the gathering at Mallow, reproduced above, also casts doubt
on the extent of his paciﬁsm O’Connell claimed that "ifI were a Quaker I could
not abhor violence more than I do."4 But O’Connell qualiﬁed his claim by then
rejecting the arguments of the Quakers-such as repeal supporter Ebenezer
Shackelton—for complete non-violence. In the ”Peace Resolutions" that
O’Connell introduced before the Repeal Association, and which led to the schism,
O’Connell again hedgedzs
It has been said very unwisely that this principle prohibits the necessary defence

against unjust aggression on the part of a domestic government, or a foreign
enemy. It does no such thing It leaves the right of self-defence perfectly free to

 

4 Ibid, 96.

5 From the Peace Resolutions introduced to the General Committee of the
Repeal Association on 11 July 1846; quoted from Maurice O’Connell, ”O’Connell,
Young Ireland, and Violence" in Thought, December, 1977, 401-2.

57
the use of any force sufﬁcient to resist and defeat unjust aggression.
The implications of such a support for self-defense, a doctrine rejected by the
Quakers, obviously had the potential for extremely broad interpretation within the
Irish context. This was probably the major inconsistency in O’Connell’s paciﬁsm.
Although these facts do not prove that O’Connell’s paciﬁsm was not genuine, they
do cast doubt on the depth of his convictions, show a degree of hypocrisy, and
present a more ambiguous attitude towards non-violence. Furthermore, they cast
doubt on his speciﬁc motives in arranging the debate over the issue of non-
violence.

Thus, although the two factions split during the debate over the use of
violence, most scholars see the issue as merely a device to rid O’Connell’s
organization of his critics The real point of contention was more likely the issue
of a renewed alliance with the Whigs Although Robert Peel had talked much of
reform, his ministry had in fact done little except for some sporadic attempts to
court the Catholic middle class and the hierarchy. 1846 saw the return of a Whig
government and the possibility for O’Connell to return to his parliamentary
tactics to further the cause of reform. With Clontarf, repeal had essentially been
defeated as a mass political issue, and O’Connell had to hope for limited success
with the Whigs The Young Ireland group saw themselves as the embodiment of
high principles of Irish nationhood and condemned "the wheeling and dealing
which was the central feature of O’Connell’s political style."6 The Young

Irelanders had supported O’Connell’s decision to back down at Clontarf, but now

 

6 G. 0’ Tuathaigh, 1972, 187-8.

58

opposed O’Connell’s conclusion that repeal was impossible, and that lower goals
had to be sought Therefore, Metscher claims that the split was ”artiﬁcially
invoked”; Gearoid O’ Tuathaigh sees the "continued sniping” of the Young
Irelanders over O’Connell’s “alliance with the Whigs” as an annoyance for
O’Connell, who then decided 'to force them to submit or withdraw”; and Richard
Davis attributes the split to the Young Irelanders’ attachment to an enthusiastic
type of romantic nationalism and “total rejection of the Whig alliance."7

However, Donal McCartney sees the split as being primarily caused, in fact, by
the refusal of the Young Ireland group to give up the theoretical right to employ
violence under certain contingencies to achieve Irish independence, and thus
O’Connell’s refusal to sacriﬁce what McCartney views as a principle of non-

8 Maurice

violence, rather than just a preference for moral over physical force.
O’Connell also offers a dissenting position on the issue, claiming that the renewal
of the Whig alliance was not the primary cause of the split Instead, Maurice
O’Connell claims that ”the principle of moral force was in danger” because of the
Young Ireland faction’s physical force rhetoric.9 After weeks of verbal attacks on
his policies, but not his leadership, Daniel O’Connell introduced the Peace
Resolutions to the Repeal Association in order to protect the policy of non-

violence, and thus the legality of the organization, which was his primary concern-

 

7 P. Metscher, 1986,95; G. 0’ Tuathaigh, 1972, 195; R Davis, 1987, 104
(respectively).

8 Donal McCartney, "The Changing Image of O’Connell" in Daniel
O’Connell, I985, 21.

9 Maurice O’Connell, “O’Connell, Young Ireland, and Violence” in Thought,
December 1977, 384.

59

-not the purging of the Young Irelanders Maurice O’Connell claims that Daniel
O’Connell had more than just a practical abhorrence of political violence, but
that he understood the phenomenon of violence in Ireland and its horrible
potential very well, and therefore was committed to a principle of non-violent
agitation. Yet even Maurice O’Connell’s argument is inconsistent, since he points
to Daniel O’Connell’s intent to use the issue to purge his organization of the
young nationalists when he quotes him as stating, "I drew up this resolution to
draw a marked line between Young Ireland and Old Ireland (cheers)."10 James
Connolly’s commentary on the subject, in Labour In Irish History, indicates that
he also saw the issue of moral versus physical force as no more than an
"academic question” that hid the true issue of democracy-at that time in its
bourgeois form represented by the Young Irelanders-versus O’Connell’s
aristocratic forces 11 It should also be pointed out that the Young Ireland leaders
present at the meeting felt that the issue was really over the Whig alliance. 12

The schism is signiﬁcant in that it reveals the growing differences between the
tactics of various traditions of Irish nationalism. The issue of moral versus
physical force was not settled with this split, but continued and continues to
deﬁne and divide Irish nationalist traditions up to the present day. The split also
highlighted other issues such as the relationship of Irish nationalism to British

politics, and the religious and cultural components in deﬁnitions of Irishness But

 

1° Ibid, 404.
‘1 L1H, 129-30.
12 R. Davis, 1987, 3, 99-100; D. McCartney in Daniel O’Connell, 1985, 26.

60
in general, the split emphasizes the tendency of Irish nationalism to splinter over
tactical issues and deﬁnitive questions, despite a common cause regarding the
objection to the British relationship to Ireland. In spite of the obvious '
advantages of tolerating differing views, “political pluralism...has always proven
difﬁcult to contain within Irish nationalism."l3
Religious differences were symptomatic of the increasing failure of the two
Sides to ﬁnd any common ground. Although they supported the principle of
religious toleration, the Young Irelanders were cornered on the religious issue by
the Catholic hierarchy, which was exerting pressure through its increasing
inﬂuence on the leadership of the Repeal Association. The continuing debate
over the relationship of the Catholic Church and the state in the area of
education—speciﬁcally over the issue of universities that were acceptable for
Catholics-furthered the divisions in the repeal movement The O’Connellites
wanted greater Catholic control of education, while the Young Irelanders saw this
as an opportunity to further the cause of non-sectarianism; and they consequently
invited much resentment from the Catholic hierarchy against themselves In
general, the hierarchy—although by no means a monolithic entity-supported the
tactics employed in the O’Connellite tradition rather than the Young Ireland
movement This is not surprising when one considers the growing rapprochement
between the Catholic hierarchy and the British government since the conclusion
of the Penal Period, a relationship which encompassed issues such as government

support for the Maynooth Royal College (to train clergy, but also to keep them

 

‘3 R. Davis, 1987,81.

61
free of subversive continental inﬂuences), the agreement on the non-sectarian
national education system (established in 1831), and the Papacy’s willingness to
concede the Veto of ecclesiastic appointments to the British government. 14
H owever, this is not to suggest that the Catholic hierarchy had developed an
intimate relationship with the Protestant communities of Ireland. Although there
had been a lessening of sectarian tensions among some elements within the upper
classes of Irish society in the early part of the 19th century, the Catholic Church
played a major part in the rising religious tensions that dominated Ireland for
much of the century, a trend that accelerated especially with the Tithe War in the
1830s The Catholic Church insisted on portraying itself as the persecuted
guardian of true Irishness, a limited concept that did not include Protestants 15
This bigotry was eventually personiﬁed by Cardinal Paul Cullen, who—from his
position in Rome, and later in Ireland after the Vatican sent him there-
attempted to make the hierarchy even more inﬂuential in politics Cullen took
the lead in promoting an image of a ”Catholic Ireland” by encouraging a self-
imposed social segregation from the Protestant community. 16 Cullen came to
control the dominant faction of the hierarchy in denouncing the non-sectarian
Young Ireland group, and in inﬂuencing the pro-Catholic tendency within the
Repeal Association

The lower-level clerics who supported the new nationalism—some

 

14 D. Keenan, 1983, 178.
15 Ibid., 362.

16 SJ. Connolly, PriestsAnd People In Pre-Faminelreland, I 780-1845, (New
York, 1982) 15.

62
foreshadowing modern liberation theology by uniting ”politics and the very
existence of the people'-—were forced into submission. 17 But it should also be
noted that in their relationships with the peasantry, the clergy often did not exert
as much inﬂuence as might be expected. Not only were the clergy often unable
to control peasant disturbances-even with primarily Catholic organizations and
movements—but the clergy themselves were often targets of peasant agitation
when they had violated conventional morality. 18 A priest was accountable to a
competing legal/ moral system advocated by the peasants if he refused to charge
reasonable fees for services or was involved in the eviction and land clearance

process that the agrarian agitators were combatting.19

Consequently, the Catholic
Church and Catholic landowners such as O’Connell denounced agrarian
movements, and the Church played an active role in their suppression. However,
the Young Irelanders failed to recognize or take advantage of the potential power
of the peasant movements (as is demonstrated below).

The Young Ireland movement gathered around a core of three ﬁgures who ﬁrst
cmperated in 1842 with the founding of their mouthpiece, the Nation. Thomas
Davis was a Protestant from Trinity who made his career in law. He died in
1845, before the ﬁnal split with the O’Connellites His death made it easier for
pro-Catholic elements within the Repeal Association, led by Daniel O’Connell’s

rather inept son John, to inﬂuence the policies of the Association. Charles

 

‘7 R Davis, 1987, 159.

18 SJ. Connolly, 1982, 256; also see Michael Beames, PeasantsAnd Power,
(New York, 1983).

19 M. Beames, 1983, 28, 114, 1901.

63
Gavan Duffy was a Catholic journalist from the north who would later act as the
historian of the Young Ireland movement, and would also become Prime Minister
of Victoria, Australia. John Blake Dillon, another Trinity graduate, wasifrom a. .
wealthy Catholic family from the west In these three men one can see the
elements of the new kind of nationalism that they promoted They deﬁned Irish
nationhood in spiritual and cultural, as opposed to religious or ethnic, terms If
O’Connell’s nationalism was basically utilitarian, tinged (in a large part, due to
their inﬂuence) with romanticism, they were essentially romantics, focussing on
traditions of Irishness The thrust of their tactics is evident in a saying associated
with Thomas Davis: "Educate that you may be free.”

The Young Irelanders were not internationalists Despite the popularity in
different parts of Europe at the time of many of the "Young“ groups that followed
the Italian example, the ”Young” label was ﬁxed on the Irish group, even though
they themselves rejected any resemblance to their contemporaries20 On the
other hand, Giuseppe Mazzini, the leader of Young Italy, repudiated the Young
Irelanders for not ﬁtting into his deﬁnition of a nationalist movement, and
advised the Irish ”to come to terms with being an integral part of the United
Kingdom".21 The Young Ireland group did share the same sense of romantic
nationalism with the other groups, though, and they also shared O’Connell’s

hatred of class politics Signiﬁcantly, the Young Irelanders based the cause of the

 

2° R. Davis, 1987, 1.

21 Peter Alter, The Irish Nationalist Movement Between Parliament A nd
Revolution: Constitutional Nationalism in Ireland 1880-1918, (Munich, 1971) 183;
RE Foster, 1988, 312.

64
Irish nation on the conversion of the land-owning class to their ideas

The early Young Ireland group hoped that by rekindling the nationalist spirit
with remarkable examples of poetry, prose and editorializing in their paper, the _ .
Nation, they could further the cause of repeal Together, they were a signiﬁcant
force on the Repeal Association’s directing committee, but they were careful to
emphasize unity with the older O’Connellite nationalists for the common goal of
repeal The impact of their movement was both enhanced and diverted through
the arrival of several new ﬁgures to their group. As the group expanded, the
latitude of secondary views on various topics became evident. The biggest name
of the new additions was that of William Smith O’Brien, a Protestant landlord
and MP for Limerick who led a parliamentary career independent of O’Connell’s
inﬂuence, but often parallelled his positions, until he joined the Repeal
Association at the highest echelons of that organization in 1843. More than any
other individual, O’Brien can be described as the bridge between the Young and
Old Irelands up to the point when the split found him siding with the new
nationalism.

Another notable ﬁgure to join the movement was John Mitchel, the most
radical and militaristic of the group—to the extent that at one point, he quit
Young Ireland because he felt that they were too moderate. An Ulster Dissenter,
Mitchel made his name as the most blatant revolutionist of the Nation writers,
and he eventually left that publication to start the United Irishmen "speciﬁcally as

an organ of revolution’, which took as its motto Tone’s tribute to the ‘men of no

65

property’. '22 Although Mitchel’s ideas were among the most progressive of the
Young Ireland movement, he is enigmatic in that he celebrated the slaughter of
workers and socialists during the 1848 June insurrection in Paris, and later fought
to defend slavery for the Confederacy in the US. Civil War.23 These facts
display the nationalist bigotry and even racism, as opposed to democratic
internationalism, that was evident in some elements of Young Ireland. But
surprisingly, these facts did not stop James Connolly from elevating Mitchel as a
model of a progressive Irish revolutionary.24

Mitchel was greatly inﬂuenced by the dynamic (and essentially neglected)
James Fintan Lalor, a peripheral and yet signiﬁcant member of Young Ireland.
Of all of the ﬁgures in Young Ireland, Connolly held the most respect for Lalor,
who was probably the most socialistic thinker in the movement. (Connolly edited
some of Lalor’s writings: The Rights Of Ireland and The Faith Of A Felon.) Lalor
differed from the other nationalists of the time in that he based his plan for Irish
freedom on the land issue, as opposed to simple repeal of the Act of Union.
Unlike the other Young Irelanders, Lalor came from the peasantry, and thus
detested the landlord class, which the other Young Irelanders were trying to woo.

Instead, he hoped for a social as well as national revolution. He sought a remedy

to Ireland’s problems in the nationalization of land: the forming of a new "social

 

22 P. Metscher, 1986, 101.
23 Ibid., 104.

24 WR, 11-13-1915; and L1H, 134, 1404. In L1H, Connolly tried to justify
Mitchel’s harsh words about the Paris insurrection as being due to ”garbled
reports” he was getting from the English press while he was in prison.(p. 144)
Connolly did not explain Mitchel’s defense of slavery.

66
contract" in which the ”people would confer new and valid titles to land on
landlords who recognized their right of occupancy, ie. to landlords prepared to
grant security of tenure to tenants'25 Based on this general theory of agrarian . .
socialism, which he promoted in his own publication, the Irish Felon, Lalor
worked out a plan of action that embraced elements of mass unionism in both
the rural and urban settings, and was summarized as such:26
1. To refuse all rent and arrears beyond the value of the overplus of harvest
remaining after due provision for the tenants’ subsistence for twelve months
2. To resist eviction under the English law of ejection.
3. To refuse all rent to the usurping proprietors, until the people, the true
proprietors, had decided in national congress what rents were to be paid, and to
whom
4. That the people should decide that rents should “be paid to themselves, the
people, for public purposes, and for behoof and beneﬁt of them, the entire
general people.”
Although he paid lip service to peaceful agitation, Lalor planned on violent
insurrection to protect the rights of the oppressed: "I want a prepared, organized
and resistless revolution. '27 Lalor believed that a revolution with such a

foundation “would propagate itself throughout Europe. '28 However, Lalor, who

suffered from several disabilities, was basically ignored by most of the Young

 

25 G. 0’ Tuathaigh, 1972, 19s

26 Lalor, quoted in Padraic (Patrick, also sometimes spelled Padraig) H.
Pearse, "The Sovereign People” (3—31-1916) in The Collected Works of Padraic H.
Pearse, (Dublin, no date) 360; (Lalor’s emphasis). (The binding title is The
Complete Works Of P. H. Pearse: Political WritingsAnd Speeches.)

27 P. Metscher, 1986, 99. Connolly’s later career emulated this tension
between moral and physical force, such as when he praised the use of peaceful
means, as advocated by his friend Francis Sheehy—Skefﬁngton, but made speciﬁc
plans for the use of violence, which he later employed without any immediate
success, like Lalor.

28 Lalor, quoted in P. Pearse, ”The Sovereign People" in The Collected Works
of Padraic H. Pearse, 361.

67

Ireland leadership. He led a small insurrection-actually just an attack on a
police station-in 1849, and died soon after; but his ideas were to inﬂuence later
generations of progressive Irish nationalists

Through Connolly’s inﬂuence, Patrick Pearse was exposed to Lalor’s writings,
and strongly identiﬁed with them. In his last work, "The Sovereign People",
Pearse quoted Lalor extensively. In particular, Pearse was impressed with Lalor’s
idea that29
the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to
the centre, is vested of right in the people of Ireland...To any plain understanding
the right of private property is very simple. It is the right of man to possess,
enjoy, and transfer the substance and use of whatever HE HAS HIMSELF
CREATED....But no man can plead any such title to a right of property in the
substance of the soil. The earth, together with all it spontaneously produces, is
the free and common property of all mankind, of natural right, and by the grant
of God...The sole original right of property in land which I acknowledge to be
morally valid, is this right of common consent and agreement
Thus, Lalor’s contributions were not really appreciated until after his death.

After the split with O’Connell’s repealers, the Young Irelanders found
themselves without any base of popular support Despite the success of their
Nation, the Young Ireland group had used the paper primarily to promote the
Repeal Association, and therefore had little individual fame outside of that
organization. However, O’Connell, who commanded the immense popular
support associated with repeal, was to see his fortunes decline because of the
alliance with the Whigs Since he had been willing to set aside demands for
repeal in return for reforms granted by the Whig ministry, O’Connell opened

himself up to criticism when the disaster of the Great Famine struck. Since the

 

29 Ibid., 354, 359-60; (Lalor’s emphasis).

68

repeal movement had been based upon the premise that justice could be won for
Ireland only through the repeal of the Act of Union, vacillation on this point was
devastating to O’Connell’s career when it became evident that O’Connell’s allies .
were unable or unwilling to deal with the catastrophe, particularly at the height of
the suffering in 1846-7. The famine transformed the Whig alliance into ”the kiss
of death for the O’Connellite forces," and offered Young Ireland a new
opportunity.30 In early 1847 the Young Ireland groups formed into the Irish
Confederation to promote a more radical solution to Ireland’s problems

The new situation in which the Young Irelanders found themselves required
them to transform themselves in order to survive as a substantial force and as a
distinct nationalist philosophy. But there were no signiﬁcant achievements until
the atmosphere was injected with excitement over the February Revolution in
Paris in 1848. Just as with the United Irishmen, the Young Irelanders were
radicalized by revolutionary events in France. The Confederates started to make
overtures to the Chartists, a movement that they had previously rejected.
Repealers and Confederates started to call for a republic in Ireland. Mitchel was
drawn back into the Young Ireland circles from which he had drifted, and talk of
actual revolution accelerated.

But as was the case with the United Irishmen in the 17905, it was the
government suppression that eventually transformed nationalist sentiments,
contingencies for rebellion, and excited tension into revolutionary violence. In

March, some of the Young Ireland leaders, including Mitchel and O’Brien, were

3° G. 0’ Tuathaigh, 1972, 196.

69
arrested. Although O’Brien was acquitted of charges of sedition, Mitchel was
sentenced to 14 years transportation. His calls for rebellion and rescue were
frustrated, but they probably helped to further enﬂame revolutionary sentiments .
The Confederates started to draw up speciﬁc, but still ”cautious" plans for an
uprising, based on the following three points:31
1. Upon an insurrection in the Autumn when the crops had been gathered in;
2. Upon simultaneous revolts in the rural districts;
:1 oI‘lvpon a strict preservation of the peace until the Government struck the ﬁrst
However, plans for a rebellion were easily monitored by government spies, and
Lord Lieutenant Clarendon suspended habeas corpus on 22 July.

The suppression was the immediate cause of the ”rebellion", if that term is
appropriate for the ﬁasco that took place. When the ofﬁces of the Nation were
raided by police, the Confederates realized that rebellion was their only
remaining option besides submission, despite the fact that they were still basically
unprepared for such an avenue of action Their attempts to rouse the Irish
people were largely ignored by a population devastated by the famine, except for
some minor elements in the Tipperary-Kilkenny area. Smith O’Brien was notable
for his attempts to lead the rising, and particularly for the romantic approach he
took to the whole debacle; but the attempt was basically still-born. It ended in a
tragicomical skirmish with police in a widow’s cabbage patch at Ballingarry. The
Young Ireland movement died in the anti-climactic surrender, arrests, and little-

noticed transportation, of its members The rebellion ﬁasco is hardly worthy of

comment except for the fact that it reveals a general lack of popular support for

31 P. Metscher, 1986, 107.

70
broad nationalist revolution in Ireland, a sentiment which was to dominate for
over a half of a century. Furthermore, the lack of attention given to the trials
and sentencing of the rebels further indicates that their ideas failed to take hold .
of the population at that time.

The rebellion is also relevant in that it offered James Connolly the opportunity
to criticize the Young Ireland group. Connolly supported many of the ideas of
the Young Irelanders, particularly the more progressive concepts associated with
Lalor and, to a lesser extent, Mitchel. Connolly viewed them as nationalist
revolutionaries in spirit, but, with the notable exceptions of Lalor and Mitchel,
claimed that they did not grasp the social implications-that is to say, issues
involved with the right to private property—of revolutionary activity at the time of
the Great Famine. In their attempts to win the landlord class over to their
version of nationalism, the Young Ireland leadership neglected what Connolly saw
as their ethical, national, and social duty:32
...the chiefs of the Young Irelanders were as rabidly solicitous about the rights of
the landlord as were the chiefs of the English government While the people
perished the Young Irelanders talked, and their talk was beautiful, thoroughly
grammatical, nicely polished, and the proper amounts of passion introduced
always at the proper psychological moment. But the people still perished.

By focussing on the actions of the leadership, particularly those of Smith O’Brien,
Connolly tried to show that, in the ﬁnal analysis, the Young Irelanders had failed
to understand the need for a complete social and political revolution, as he

advocated. With a few notable exceptions, Connolly listed the Young Ireland

leaders, described their actions, and displayed how they had failed to advance the

32 LIH, 134.

ID"

71

cause of national liberation because of their commitment to property rights The
largest share of criticism was reserved for Smith O’Brien:33
He wandered through the country telling the starving peasantry to get ready, but .
refusing to allow them to feed themselves at the expense of the landlords who
had so long plundered, starved, and evicted them; he would not allow his
followers to seize upon the carts of grain passing along passing along the roads
where people were dying for want of food...
Only James Fintan Lalor and John Mitchel met Connolly’s approval, for
advocating a rent strike and the widespread use of force to protect the food that
the peasants had cultivated. Of course, Connolly also went on to condemn the
government for its policies: "England made the famine by a rigid application of
the economic principles that lie at the base of capitalist society."34

But the evils of Britain’s capitalism could not be held solely accountable, as far
as Connolly was concerned. Most of the Young Irelanders also shared a degree
of responsibility, if only because they failed to realize the duties that went along
with political leadership, and to harness the potential power the distressed
peasantry could offer if it was properly directed, particularly before the Famine
had taken its toll. Except for men like Lalor and Mitchel, Connolly concluded
that”
the Young Ireland leaders of 1848 failed to rise to the grandeur of the

opportunity offered them to choose between human rights and property rights as
a basis of nationality, and the measure of their failure was the measure of their

 

33 LIH,135.

3‘ Ibid, 131. Connolly made a close evaluation of the policies of the
government, the economic considerations, the economic / agricultural output of
Ireland, and the needs of the population of Ireland, and then concluded that if
socialist principles had been in force in Ireland, there would not have been a
disaster.

35 lord, 138.

72
country’s disaster.

The Young Irelanders were largely from the middle classes Many of the
members came from professional backgrounds, and a large number of journalists
and writers participated in the movement There were also some elements from
the landowning class of society, the most notable being Wllliam Smith O’Brien.
Since the movement never had a popular base of support, as did O’Connell’s
associations, the membership came primarily from one class But this group also
had one of the most tolerant attitudes towards religion at the time, in contra-
distinction to the growing Catholic inﬂuence over the O’Connellites The
leadership was composed of representatives of all of the major denominations in
Ireland, and thus religious doctrine was largely unimportant in their broad
deﬁnition of Irishness, which emphasized cultural considerations, such as
language. They promoted a spiritual, cultural nationhood through popular
education, propaganda, and poetry that gloriﬁed Irish consciousness, and
sometimes violence. These tactics and ideas were to be inﬂuential in the middle-
class nationalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and particularly with
Connolly’s associate in the 1916 Rising, P.H. Pearse, who advocated a more
mystical kind of cultural nationalism.

Politically and socially, the Young Ireland ideas are signiﬁcant to two trends
within Irish nationalism. They set the precedent for middle-class cultural
nationalism. Their deﬁnition of Irishness was broad, non-sectarian, and
essentially political and cultural Their hope was that a dissolution of the Union
with Britain would bring justice to Ireland Most of the Young Irelanders hoped

to work within the Repeal Association, and to maintain some constitutional ties

73
with Great Britain. Despite their debate about the theoretical use of violence,
and the eventual attempt to employ violent means, the primary focus for most of
their existence was on peaceful tactics of education and propaganda, mixed in .
with some elements of contentious rhetoric. They did try to make use of political
avenues, but, as the split with O’Connell indicated, without compromising their
values Thomas Davis, for instance, proposed the withdrawal of Irish MPs from
the British Parliament, a tactic later employed effectively by the Sinn Fein

delegation in forming the Dail Bireann.36

During Connolly’s time, their cultural
deﬁnition of Irishness was evident in the Gaelic League, Sinn Fein, and the
Gaelic Athletic Association, as well as in individual ﬁgures such as Pearse,
Douglas Hyde, Arthur Grifﬁth, and some of the IRB conspirators

On another level, a different trend within the Young Ireland movement has
been signiﬁcant The more radical wing of the Young Irelanders wanted some
form of a social / democratic revolution to support a nationalist revolution in
Ireland Exempliﬁed by Lalor and Mitchel, this group operated at the fringes of
the Young Ireland group for much of the time, and was the strongest proponent
of armed insurrection and republicanism in the era after the split with the
O’Connellites They attempted to link the land issue—and more speciﬁcally the
underlying issue of the institution of private property-to the forces that had the
potential to be unleashed and directed when the Famine struck. In the end, their

ideas were rejected by the other Young Irelanders, and they were also defeated

But Connolly traced his own nationalism, from the tradition of Wolfe Tone,

 

3‘ R Davis, 1987,88

74
through them.

Fenianism And Cultural Nationalism

As one of the greatest Irish nationalists and advocates of social reform in the
second half of the 19th century, Michael Davitt was associated with two distinct
movements in Irish history, Fenianism and the Land League. This section and
the next examine some of the most signiﬁcant organizations of the period,
highlighting both the mutualities and the distinctions of the different movements
The focus of this section is Fenianism, and its relationship with other nationalist
movements, because it exempliﬁed the constant tension within Irish nationalism
over the issue of moral and physical force. The career of Michael Davitt, who
was in many ways a product of F enianism, but who also built upon the foundation
offered by the Fenians, is examined in the following section.

Fenianism was an integral part of one of “the three main political strands" of
Irish nationalism, according to Desmond Keenan.37 In addition to the
aristocratic-parliamentary tradition represented by the Whigs, and the
parliamentary-mass movement tradition of O’Connell, the republican movement
offered one of the main channels for the expression of nationalist sentiment
Along with some of the more radical elements within Young Ireland, Fenianism

was the link between the earlier republican revolutionaries, such as Tone and

37 D. Keenan, 1983, 178.

75

Emmet, and the militants of the 20th century.38 Although it was an unsuccessful
movement in the immediate sense, Fenianism played a leading role in keeping
the militant republican tradition alive, even when other channels of Irish
nationalist sentiments were enjoying much greater success, and it gave birth to the
ﬁgures who were to play an active role in the creation of modern Ireland

After the quick decline of the Young Ireland movement, some surviving
activists and other nationalists formed a new organization that would start where
Young Ireland left off, and would make changes in consideration of the inherent
weaknesses of the failed organization. The actual beginning of the Fenian
movement is less clear than is the development of the IRB organization itself.39
Fenianism sprang from discontent with Ireland’s relationship to England, and
dissatisfaction with the other options for expressing nationalism. Fenianism was a
discernable movement in New York in the mid-18508, and a few years later it was
brought to Ireland. The speciﬁc organization, the IRB, was founded in Ireland in
1858 as a secretive organization "to make Ireland an independent democratic

republic“, but the reference to democracy was removed from their oath in later

 

3‘ P. Metscher, 1986, 167.

39 The Initials, I.R.B., were very ambiguous for quite some time. As late as
the end of the 19th century, there was still some uncertainty as to whether they
stood for the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or the Irish Revolutionary
Brotherhood (See Kevin Nowlan, "The Fenian Rising Of 1867' in The Fenian
Movement, 1968, 23.) Of course, as the movement progressed, the republican
meaning dominated, but the IRB. was most often referred to by its initials or as
”the organization”. Fenianism takes its name from the legendary Finn Mac
Cumhall, leader of Ireland’s defenders in an ancient saga.

76
years, indicating a desire to present a more general, and yet purer nationalism.40
Because of the longevity and inﬂuence of this organization, its establishment can
be regarded as the beginning of the modern Irish revolution41

In the United States at that time, there existed a large Irish immigrant
community-largely a product of the Famine era-which, because of the deep
resentment it harbored for Britain, and the lack of an organized revolutionary
movement in Ireland, was becoming the center of Irish revolutionary activity.
These militant Irish-Americans in the early Fenian movement worked to cultivate
a revolutionary organization in Ireland In Ireland, under the direction of James
Stephens, the organization undercut all potential rivals, such as remnants of the
obsolete Young Ireland structures, and built up the IRB in the old Confederate
strongholds in south-eastern and southern Ireland, and then in Dublin.42 The
IRB rank and ﬁle came largely from the rural laboring class, so that the
organization effectively replaced the old agrarian secret societies such as the
Whiteboys and the Ribbonmen.43 Although it was still not a formidable threat to
the British, the IRB probably reached its greatest strength-in terms of an
anticipated rising against the British—in 1865. The government, acting on

information from its efﬁcient network of informants, suppressed the organization

 

40 E.R.R. Green, "The Beginnings of Fenianism" in The Fenian Movement,
T.W. Moody, editor, (Dublin, 1968) 17; P. Metscher, 1986, 126.

41 Tom Garvin, Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland 1858-1928, (Oxford,
1987) 5.

42 E.R.R. Green, in The Fenian Movement, 1968, 21.

43 P. Metscher, 1986, 114; Kevin B. Nowlan, "The Fenian Rising Of1867" in
The Fenian Movement, 1968, 23.

77
starting in September of that year.

This early period of Fenianism, up to the time of the 1867 rising, was
characterized by the singularity of purpose in Ireland, and factionalism in the
United States Power struggles were not infrequent, and there were major
schisms within the movement based on personalities and philosophies One of
the two main factions in America rejected the focus on direct action in Ireland,
and planned and staged a few ”invasions” of Canada, in 1866, 1870, and 1871, in
the hopes of provoking the United States and Britain into a conﬂict, and thereby
harnessing the anti-British sentiments that remained in the US after the
American Civil War. The invasions were failures and the hopes were unrealized
In Ireland, however, up to the time of the suppression, James Stephens kept tight-
-some would say authoritarian—control of the organization He directed the
movement as it branched out through literary organizations, old Ribbon Lodges,
and Irish elements within the British military. But the IRB was constantly
pressured by the American Fenians for action, and a considerable number of
Irish-American veterans from both sides of the US. Civil War were sent over to
help organize and lead a rising in Britain and Ireland

The long-awaited uprising was ﬁnally planned for 1867 by the Fenian leaders
who had escaped prosecution or been rescued from captivity, as James Stephens
had been. Pushed by the militant Fenians in the United States, whose ranks now
included recent political refugees from Ireland, such as Stephens, the remaining
IRB launched two separate uprisings The ﬁrst, in February of 1867, was called
off at the last moment because of the success of government surveillance.

However, not all local groups got the message, and a minor disturbance in Kerry

78
was the only noteworthy event The actual coordinated rising, which took place
in March, only amounted to simultaneous disturbances in many urban areas, but
notably not in Ulster and generally not in Connaught The rising highlighted the
Fenians’ lack of arms, but also exposed their plan to hold out long enough to
capitalize on anti-British sentiments in the US. However, the attempt collapsed
before aid could be sent from the Irish-American community, and long before
anti-British feelings could be transformed into political results in the American
political process A late expedition from the American Fenian community ended
in the arrests of that force.

The aftermath of the rising saw mounting criticism of the insurgents in Britain
and Ireland Even within the nationalist community in Ireland there was little
sympathy for the Fenians However, the subsequent treason trials of the leaders
did evoke some calls for leniency, even from such opponents of the movement as
Cardinal Cullen. The fact that Fenians had not attacked private property, and
the relatively small number of casualties-police estimated twelve deaths-helped
get death sentences commuted But a successful rescue attempt of some of the
leaders resulted in the unintentional death of one of the guards During the
public outrage that followed, three men were convicted on questionable grounds
The execution of these so-called ”Manchester Martyrs“ created a symbol for the
Fenians, but represented the general public outrage in Britain against Fenian
violence. The British public was left with the impression that a broad
underground threat existed within their own country.

After the rising, the IRB continued its policy of adhering strictly to non-

constitutional methods It competed with other nationalist movements, such as

79

Charles Stewart Pamell’s Irish Parliamentary Party, for the loyalty of Irish
nationalists Although many of its members participated in Michael Davitt’s Land
League, the organization as a whole refused to support that cause. Splinter
groups supported terrorism as a means to nationhood: the most famous factions
included the "Untouchables”, who were responsible for the famous Phoenix Park
murders; and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa’s faction, which staged the Dynamite
War of the 1880s However, these tactics basically "did little else except discredit
the nationalist cause."44

In the next generation of Irish nationalists, the IRB ﬁnally saw its plans come
to fruition. With the decline of Pamell’s political inﬂuence, the IRB started to
reeemerge from the failures of the 18605 and 18705, although the organization was
still not a nationalist force equal even to that of the weakened Parliamentary
Party. Members of the IRB were instrumental in the planning of the 1916 Rising
The most militant wing of the Irish Volunteers’ leadership "consisted essentially
of the supreme council of the LRB.'-including Patrick Pearse, Sean
MacDermott, and Tom Clarke—and was, along with Connolly, the force that was
responsible for launching the 1916 Rising when other elements in the Volunteers,
including their commanders, were willing to wait on taking any direct action.”

In theory, the IRB was organized in a rigid, centralized, and hierarchical

structure to maintain its secretive and conspiratorial nature. However, due to

varying local conditions, the structure, patterned after similar organizations on the

 

‘4 F.S.L Lyons, "Fenianism, 1867-1916' in The Fenian Movement, 1968,42.

45 Ibid, 45; Michael Hurst, ”Fenianism In The Context Of World History' in
Fenians And F enianism, Maurice Harmon, editor, (Dublin, 1968) 85.

80
continent that Stephens had some experiences with, was largely ignored, as were
many of the precautions for secrecy.46 The social composition of the IRB varied
at different levels and at different times in its history. The rank and ﬁle of the- -
early IRB in the cities came largely from lower levels of the working class; in the
rural areas recruits were often members of the old agrarian protection societies
Thus, in the US as well as Ireland and Britain, the "backbone" of Fenianism was

the laboring classes“

Although the movement was not necessarily class based, it
made most of its converts from the lower classes, and was therefore suspicious of
wealthier segments of society.48 Members of the upper levels of the organization
were more likely to come from the lower middle class, and—especially later in its
history—from the middle class This is particularly true with the rise and
inﬂuence of the intellectual elements which were associated with cultural
nationalism. However, more than the leadership, it was the rank and ﬁle—with its
commitment to a speciﬁc and well-deﬁned goal-that was responsible for the
persistence of the movement.

The IRB’s "social composition, combined with its secret organization, was the
basis of the charge frequently made against the Fenians that they were

communists '49 Although there were deﬁnitely some progressive tendencies

within the Fenian movement, most notably in the upper echelons of the

 

46 ERR. Green, in The Fenian Movement, 1968, 17.
47 P. Metscher, 1986, 133.

48 T.W. Moody, "The Fenian Movement In Irish History' in The Fenian
Movement, 1968, 106—7.

49 Ibid

81
organization, the Fenians were generally characterized by their single-mindedness
regarding the goal of an independent Ireland All other socio-political issues
were peripheral, at best, and were even viewed by some as a distraction. from the
primary goal because of their potentially factitious nature. However, there were
still some prominent indications of some progressive tendencies in the movement.
The proclamation issued by the provisional government, which was set up brieﬂy
during the rising of 1867, “made clear that the restoration of the land to the
working people of Ireland was a primary purpose of the rising along with the
establishment of a republic based on universal suffrage and the complete
separation of church and state."50 Similarly, when James Stephens ﬁrst returned
to Ireland after his stay in Paris, he was accused of holding to "socialistic theories“

by other Fenianss 1

But these examples of progressive tendencies within
Fenianism are rare within the movement, and are not really representative of a
speciﬁcally socialistic type of Irish nationalism.

It is not completely clear whether Connolly was forced into cooperation with
the IRB in 1916 to prevent him from leading a premature rising of his own

forces, or if he voluntarily allied himself with the IRB in order to strengthen the

anti-British militants. But his sympathetic views of the earlier Fenians had

 

50 K. N owlan, in The Fenian Movement, 1968, 30.

51 E.R.R. Green, in The Fenian Movement, 1968, 16.

However, Stephens was not a socialist His detractors were more likely referring
to his attitudes towards revolutionary organizations than to his socio-political
ideology. Stephens was considered by many to be very authoritarian in his
control of the IRB. He was "considering the possibility of a life president for
Ireland, which raised doubts about the depth of his republicanism."

Hereward Senior, "The Place Of Fenianism In The Irish Republican Tradition"
in Fenians A nd Fenianism, 1968, 64.

82
already been well established by that time. In Labour In Irish History,Connolly
stressed the Fenians’ ”militant class feeling and revolutionary nationalism“ in the
hopes of equating their pure nationalism with an emerging ”class-feeling" or class.

52

consciousness As Connolly got closer to 1916, he used the examples of Fenian

heroes to contrast with and inspire his own movement, and he praised the past
Fenian generations even more:53
They failed, but it was a failure more glorious than many a victory. But its glory
consisted in the fact that against all odds, and in spite of the calculations of the
trimmers and wiseacres there were proven to be in Ireland thousands of men and
women who were prepared to afﬁrm with their lives that Ireland was a nation
with an independent destiny of its own. Neither terriﬁed nor corrupted, the
Fenians redeemed the honour of their nation, and we of the working class are
proud to remember that those heroes were of our own class

Connolly viewed Fenianism as a necessary component in socio-national
development in Ireland For Connolly, the Fenians represented a primitive form
of nationalism and an early stage of class consciousness In Connolly’s time, the
later IRB had maintained their nationalist premise, but had failed to evolve into
a socialist movement, and therefore represented a retarded, or incomplete
nationalism which could aid in national liberation, but could not be the basis for
national liberation. Later Fenianism threatened Connolly’s work in that it could
keep individuals from developing into complete socialist-republicans Thus, for
Connolly, Fenianism did not establish the socialist—republican tradition in Ireland-

-that accolade went to Tone as far as Connolly was concerned But Fenianism

did carry on a signiﬁcant, but still incomplete, part of that tradition, and was

52 L111, 158-60.
53 WR, 8—7-1915; see also we, 7-31-1915 and 11-20-1915.

83

therefore worthy of some of his attention in his writing

The secretive nature and revolutionary basis of the movement got the Fenians
into trouble with the Catholic hierarchy. The IRB was founded in MarCh of 1858,
and by October of that year, priests were warning parishioners against it. In the
face of concerted clerical opposition to their movement, it is interesting that a
primarily Catholic organization such as the IRB was able not only to survive, but
to grow. Although the organization as a whole was not anti-clerical (despite
clerical opposition), the IRB was able to capitalize on the traditional challenge
that the basis of its membership, the old agrarian societies, presented to the
authority of the local parish priest The Fenians simply extended that challenge
on the national level to the hierarchy. Fenian reaction to ofﬁcial Church
condemnation varied Some Fenians did follow the direction of the Catholic
Church by quitting Fenianism. Many others held their Irish nationalism more
dearly than their Roman Catholicism, and basically ignored the issue as
inconsequential Finally, the devout Catholics who chose to stay in the
organization tried to justify their decision This last reaction is the most
important because it foreshadowed Connolly’s response to clerical condemnation
of his views Led by Charles Kickham, these Fenians challenged the authority of
the Catholic clerics in political matters with the motto "no priests in politics".54
Just as Connolly would do a few decades later, Kickham rejected anti-clericalism
and maintained his sincere Catholicism, but demonstrated the tendency of the

Irish Catholic hierarchy to actively oppose Irish nationalist organizations and their

54 Donal McCartney, “The Church And The Fenians” in Fenians And
Fenianism,1968, 17.

84
activities in the insurrections of the preceding century.

On the other hand, the Catholic hierarchy, led by Cardinal Cullen, claimed that
the IRB was hurting the cause of Irish nationalism, and, insofar as the terrorist. -
elements at the periphery of the movement were associated with Fenianism in the
public mind, this was an accurate assessment It is possible that, in the absence
of any strong nationalist leadership in the period before Parnell, the Catholic
hierarchy sensed a degree of competition with the Fenian movement to ﬁll that
void Cullen hoped to get the Catholic Church more involved in nationalist
politics, particularly in a movement similar to that of his hero, O’Connell.

Cullen’s willingness to equate Irish nationalism with the Catholic Church in
achieving a “Catholic Ireland" was indicative of "how completely the desire of not
offending Protestant sentiments had been abandoned '55

But this is not to suggest that Cullen and the Catholic hierarchy represented a
monolithic force which opposed the Fenian brand of nationalism. Rome itself did
not speciﬁcally prohibit Fenianism until 1870, and thus left some ambiguity for
the Fenian propagandists to seize upon and exploit In the Irish clergy there was
more of a tendency within the younger and lower level clergy to sympathize with
the movement A prime example of the lack of unanimity within the ranks of the
Catholic clerics was the case of Fr. Lavelle from the Archdiocese of Tuam
(Connaught). Operating on the fringes of the Fenian movement, Lavelle made it
difﬁcult for the hierarchy to ﬁnd the speciﬁcs for which to discipline him. He

was outspoken in his condemnation of the hierarchy’s position regarding the

 

55 D. Keenan, 1983, 152.

85

Fenians, and ignored injunctions by hearing the confessions and administering
other sacraments to Fenians In addition to attacking the system of landlordism,
he publicly deﬁed Cullen by performing the funeral of a well known nationalist.
hero for the Fenians Most notably, he foreshadowed liberation theology by
declaring a Christian duty to resist tyranny in his lecture on “The Catholic
Doctrine of the Right of Revolution".56 Lavelle’s position is even more
signiﬁcant in view of the rift he highlighted in the Irish hierarchy. Although he
was not a whole-hearted supporter of Lavelle, John MacHale, Archbishop of
Tuam, was able to offer some protection for Lavelle from the attacks of other
members of the Catholic Church, particularly Cullen MacHale was one of two
bishops-the other being Dr. Keane, Bishop of Cloyne-who declined to
promulgate the Papal Bull that condemned Fenianism.” This willingness of
MacHale to resist the bulk of the hierarchy on issues such as Lavelle’s activities
may have indicated some sympathy with moderate elements of the Fenians, or it
may have been no more than an attempt to guard his traditional domain from the
interference of a rival, in this case Cullen Nevertheless, this case exposed a
signiﬁcant degree of ambiguity on the part of the Catholic Church regarding the
issue of the 'sin" of being a member of the IRB.58

The Fenians, for their part, stood their ground against the Catholic Church.

Although there were some deﬁnite anti-clerical elements within the IRB, the

 

56 D. McCartney, in Fenians And Fenianism,1968, 15.
57 D. Keenan, 1983,47.
58 D. McCartney, in Fenians And Fenianism, 1968, 16.

86

organization as a whole was generally not an anti-clerical movement, at least for

any signiﬁcant period of t:ime.59

The ”conﬂict" between the two organizations, if
it can be called that, did in fact contribute to limiting the role of priests. in
politics, thus continuing the general post-O’Connell tendency to contain the
inﬂuence of Catholic sectarianism in Irish nationalism This distinction between
“Catholic” and "Irish”, according to Donal McCartney, is reﬂected in the degree to
which there is any separation of Church and State in 20th century Ireland60 The
growing role of the Catholic Church as a distinct nationalist force was a
phenomenon that was concurrent with and yet distinct from the rise of Fenianism.
But, as was suggested by the failure of Fenianism to take hold in Ulster, in the
eyes of many Protestants the Fenians represented the continuing Catholicization
of Irish nationalism, which had subsided to some degree with Young Ireland

The tactics of the Fenian movement are rather apparent in the structure of the
organization As a secretive movement, the IRB was committed exclusively to
physical force. Interpreting the failure of the Repeal Association as proof that
Britain would never be moved to grant independence to Ireland without the
pressure of violence, the Fenians believed that constitutional, reformist, and
Home Rule efforts were not only in vain, but tended to have a demoralizing

effect on the nationalist movement as a whole.61 This reliance on physical force,

however, does not indicate a dependence on terrorist tactics by the organization

 

59 D. Keenan, 1983, 88; T.W. Moody, in The Fenian Movement, 1968, 108
60 D. McCartney, in Fenians And Fenianism, 1968, 23.
61 T.W. Moody, in The Fenian Movement, 1968, 103.

87

Although there were obviously some elements within (or more often, at the edges
of) the Fenian movement that employed terror to further their cause, terror and,
more particularly, assassination were generally not a part of the tactics of the
mainstream Fenian organization62 Instead there was more of a tendency towards
conspiracy, propaganda, and continual scheming for the oft-planned but long
awaited uprising

Besides their obvious role in the Easter Rising in 1916, the Fenians left their
mark on Ireland in several signiﬁcant ways Although throughout much of their
existence they were overshadowed by otherforms of Irish nationalism, particularly
Pamell’s brand of constitutionalism in the 18805, the Fenians helped focus
attention on important issues, and in that way hastened some reforms, such as the
disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 and the Land Act of 1870.
Gladstone admitted that the Fenians exposed “the vast importance of the Irish
question” to the British, and thus served as somewhat of a catalyst for his
conversion to Home Rule.63 Despite their many failures, the F enians kept alive
the idea of revolutionary Irish nationalism at a time when constitutional methods
were at their peak, and in doing so, not only linked 1798 and 1848 with 1916, but
further alienated Ulster from the idea of Home Rule. Although much of their
support was simply a reaction to socio—economic changes in Ireland at the time,

the movement was essentially a political one, with the goal being singularly

 

62 H. Senior, in Fenians And Fenianism, 1968, 66.
63 T.W. Moody, in The Fenian Movement, 1968, 111.

88
nationalist rather than social or economic.64 Their inﬂuence on the cultural
nationalists helped to shape the goals and tactics of these organizations, and their
attitudes towards extra-parliamentary methods inspired many of the ﬁgures who. .
helped to create the modern Irish State. As members of an international
movement, they reveal a signiﬁcant trend among the victims of the Irish diaspora
to focus on their homeland and to work for a revolutionary solution to their
problems Conversely, for the Irish in Ireland they initiated the idea of working
within what Michael Hurst calls “an unofﬁcial Irish empire" to rid Ireland of
British control.“

Like the parliamentarians with whom they were often competing for support,
the Fenians put great efforts into expanding their inﬂuence through associated
organizations The Fenians had the advantage of conspiratorial experience in
orchestrating the democratic takeover of target organizations Operating at a
different level than the Home Rulers, the IRB realized great successes in
promoting and inﬁltrating the nationalist cultural organizations of the late 19th
and early 20th century. Their targets included the Gaelic Athleﬁc Association,
the Gaelic League, and Arthur Grifﬁth’s Sinn Fein movement Most importantly,
the IRB had inﬁltrated the leadership of the Irish Volunteers by 1914, before the
split saw most of the 200,000 Volunteers heed Redmond’s call to join the British
forces in the First World War as the National Volunteers in the hopes of getting

Home Rule at the end of the conﬂict. The 11,000 or so remaining Irish

 

‘4 T. Garvin, 1987, 5.
65 M. Hurst, in Fenians And Fenianism, 1968, 89.

89
Volunteers kept that name under the leadership of Professor Eoin MacNeill, and
the IRB quickly captured the key positions in that organization Although it is
not necessary to study the IRB penetration of each of these organizations, their. -
involvement with the GAA and the Gaelic League offer prime examples of their
inﬂuence.

As one of the early manifestations of the cultural nationalism of the Gaelic
revival, the GAA was founded in 1884, according to the guiding force behind its
establishment, Michael Cusack, to counter "the tyranny of imported and enforced
customs and manners“ imposed through “foreign and hostile laws and the
pernicious inﬂuence of a hitherto dominant race".66 The number of people
attending the initial meeting of the GAA is unclear". probably from seven to
thirteen were present But three of these people were members of the IRB.
Either the IRB was genuinely interested in promoting expressions of nationalism
through Irish athletics, or—as the police believed—the GAA was set up as a front
organization for the secretive Fenians67 Whether or not the GAA initially
represented an intentional attempt by the IRB to create and dominate cultural
expressions of Irish nationalism, within a very short period of time “the IRB was
to take open control of the GAA” while the GAA was able to ”sustain its
nationalist athletic image during the crucial period of the establishment of its

popularity."68 Unlike other notable expressions of cultural nationalism that

 

66 W. F. Mandle, The Gaelic Athletic Association And Irish Nationalist Politics
1884-1924,(Dublin, 1987) 4.

67 Ibid, 8-9.
63 Ibid, 10.

90

followed, the GAA enjoyed great success at the very time when the parliamentary
manifestation of Irish nationalism was still very popular. Well into the next
century, the GAA was generally regarded as a prime recruiting pool for‘the IRB,
if not an IRB dominated organization

The other pillar of the Gaelic revival was the Gaelic League, founded by
Douglas Hyde in 1893 for the purpose of promoting the Irish language as well as
Irish customs, and conversely, for the "de—Anglicization of Ireland".69 Although
the League was not intended to be a part of a sectarian or political movement, its
proliferation—despite its ultimate failure to replace the English language with
Irish-epitomized and contributed to the resurgence of Irish nationalism at the
time because ”cultural sovereignty reinforced the Irish national consciousness and
underpinned the demand towards national separation"?0 According to Peter
Alter, during "a time when the political nationalism in Ireland lost appeal and
importance" the Gaelic League attracted "the younger generation to the
expression of cultural nationalism.”l Tom Garvin sees the League as a ”political
party which denied that proposition", a conclusion which is supported by the fact
that Hyde himself became a leading, but still respectable ﬁgure in Irish politics;
although Hyde refused John Redmond’s overtures to pull him into the Home

Rule party for fear of making the Gaelic League an overtly political

 

‘9 P. Alter, 1971, 185.

70 Ibid, 183. Alter claims that in 1891, only 14% of the population still
spoke Irish, while only 0.8% of the population could not speak English; (pp. 183-
4). .

71 Ibid, 183.

91
72

organization Despite the fact that the League represented the only notable
failure in Europe to revitalize a declining language at the time, it left a lasting
impression on the Irish education system, and more immediately, inspired the .
new generation of Irish nationalists such as Patrick Pearse with an enthusiastic
attachment to the Irish language.

Garvin points out that the Gaelic League was one of the main forces behind
the creation of a romanticized view of Irish history which was to have a profound
inﬂuence on many of the IRB leaders involved in the 1916 Rising73 The Gaelic
League was also signiﬁcant in that it was the ﬁrst organization to use the
language issue as a tool in an attempt—which eventually failed on the language
issue but not on the political issue—to reverse the Anglicization process in order
to create "the qualiﬁcations for a national cultural development".74 This basis for
cultural nationalism would not only contribute to the great Irish literary / dramatic
revival in the early 20th century, but was also essential in the formation of the
conception of an "Irish Ireland”, which was extremely inﬂuential throughout the
panorama of emerging nationalist organizations However, this idea of an “Irish
Ireland” also had the effect of excluding the Ulster Protestant community from

sharing in the gloriﬁcation of medieval Gaelic culture, which formed the

underlying and symbolic basis for this type of 20th century cultural nationalism.

 

72 r. Garvin, 1987,91; P. Alter, 1971, 189.
73 T. Garvin, 1987,78, 154, 159, 161.
74 P. Alter, 1971, 185.

92

Although they were both a part of an uneasy nationalist political front, which
also included the Catholic Church, Land Leaguers, Home Rulers, and other
cultural nationalist groups, the IRB attempted and essentially failed to inﬁltrate. .
and control the League until several years into the 20th century. Conversely, the
Gaelic League inﬂuenced the IRB’s acceptance of a Gaelic Ireland as a
nationalist goal Although these cultural movements were ideologically closer to
Fenianism than they were to the parliamentary tradition, they had the effect of
making Irish nationalism, including the Fenian version of this phenomenon, an
acceptable and even attractive channel for middle-class and Roman Catholic
nationalist sentiments

Regarding cultural nationalism, James Connolly was rather silent on the issue
of nationalist athletic activities; but he did, however, comment on the language
issue. Connolly had mixed feelings on cultural nationalism. He chastised this
type of nationalism for its self-centeredness and its inherent tendency to
automatically exclude the good points of other cultures Furthermore, he asserted
that "You cannot teach starving men Gaelic'.75 On the other hand, he noted that
the revival was opposed by the forces of capitalism, and concluded that the
activities of the cultural nationalists were beneﬁcial, but that these groups should
recognize capitalism as the force that was responsible for the destruction of
Gaelic culture, and therefore recognize Irish socialism as a natural ally, if not a
leader, in combatting this force. Connolly, like Daniel O’Connell before him,

expected and supported "the establishment of a universal language to facilitate

 

75 we, 10-1-1898.

93

communication between the peoples"?6 Yet be qualiﬁed this endorsement"
But I incline also to the belief that this desirable result would be attained sooner
as the result of a free arrangement which would accept one language to be taught
in all primary schools, in addition to the national language, than by the attempt. .
to crush out the existing national vehicles of expression

In his rationalism, Connolly fully expected the rise of a universal language, but he
emphasized that it must be accepted by the nations, and not imposed through
economic forces by competing imperial powers Daniel O’Connell had previously
recognized the apparently inexorable growth of the English language in Ireland
Although he did not make a crusade out of promoting the use of English as a
universal language, due to his utilitarianism he refused to be a part of early
efforts to promote the use of Irish. On the other hand, Connolly also expected
the rise of a universal language, but apparently hoped to maintain the vitality of
the national language. He was therefore very critical of O’Connell, holding him
largely responsible for the decline of the Irish language. He claimed that it was
O’Connell who “conveyed to the simple people the impression that Gaelic was
something to be ashamed of-something ﬁt only for ignorant pe0ple."78 Thus“,9
those who drop Irish in favour of English are generally actuated by the meanest
of motives, are lick-spittles desirous of aping the gentry, whereas the rank and ﬁle
of the Gaelic movement are for the most part thoroughly democratic in sentiment
and spirit.

The whole issue of the language movement offers some insight into Connolly’s

views of nationalism and internationalism. He supported internationalism,

 

7‘ WR,12-2-1899.
77 Ibid

7" Harp, 41908
79 WR, 3-1903.

94
attacking the divisions caused by petty differences and irrational values But he
felt that this world harmony could only be achieved willingly—whether regarding
the issue of language or the broader idea of separate nationalisms working in an .
international system—rather than being imposed by a strong power. This
conception of Irish cultural nationalism presented Connolly with one of the major
dilemmas in his life: whether or not to cooperate with what he viewed as middle-

class and thus inherently incomplete nationalists

Michael Davitt And The Land League

Michael Davitt was one of Ireland’s greatest nationalists and social agitators, and
his remarkable career included some time in prison in Britain as well as a spell in
Parliament As the initiator of the Land League agitation, he represents a truer
representative of the organization than its nominal leader, Charles Stewart
Parnell Furthermore, his public career overlapped that of Connolly in terms of
time, tactics, and concerns Perhaps for this reason, he is largely absent from
Connolly’s writings However, despite Connolly’s neglect of Davitt, he is still
signiﬁcant if only because his career and ideas still offer some striking parallels to
and signiﬁcant differences from Connolly.

Davitt was born to a peasant family during the Great Famine, and his life was
greatly inﬂuenced by the Famine and the “Great Clearances" which followed in
the wake of that disaster. The early period of his life, and especially his devoted
Irish Catholic family, signiﬁcantly impacted Davitt’s thinking in his later career.

The clearances during and after the Famine—when the landlords consolidated

95

their holdings by taking advantage of the government policy that essentially
forced tenants to surrender their holdings in order to receive food—educated
Davitt to the evils of landlordism. Furthermore, his biographer, Francis 'Sheehy- .
Skefﬁngton, emphasized the role that the clergy played in directing the starving
peasants to pay their rents rather than to work for their own survival80 During
the clearances, Davitt’s family was evicted and moved to Lancashire where, at the
age of eleven, Davitt lost an arm in an accident at a textile mill However, the
incident gave him a chance at an education in a Wesleyan school where he
started to develop his ideas in distinguishing between the oppressors and the
oppressed in British society and in the imperial context

Davitt joined the Fenian movement at the height of its popularity in the mid-
18605, when there were approximately 80,000 members of the movement in
Britain alone. He participated in the ’67 rising in Britain, and, frustrated by the

failure, immersed himself in the movement as an effective organizer for the

 

80 Francis Sheehy-Skefﬁngton, Michael Davitt: Revolutionary A gitatorAnd
Labour Leader, (Boston, 1909) 2 Sheehy-Skefﬁngton was one of Connolly’s
contemporaries He was an activist and writer who promoted socialism,
feminism, and, despite Connolly’s arguments, paciﬁsm. Nevertheless, he and
Connolly enjoyed a lasting friendship. During the Easter Rising, Sheehy—
Skefﬁngton was organizing citizen patrols to prevent looting when he was
arrested, and later was murdered on the orders of an apparently deranged British
ofﬁcer. Waiting for his own execution, Connolly was planning on appointing
Sheehy-Skefﬁngton as his literary executor when he learned of Sheehy-
Skefﬁngton’s death. Despite their disagreement over tactics, Sheehy-Skefﬁngton
was Connolly’s ﬁrst choice to carry on his work and propagate his ideas because
of his principled commitment to the same goals

The deﬁnitive account of Sheehy-Skefﬁngton’s life and career is:
Leah Levenson, With Wooden Sword: A Portrait Of Francis Sheehy-Skeﬂington,
Militant Paciﬁst,(Boston and Dublin, 1983).

96

cause81 According to Sheehy-Skefﬁngton, Davitt had an impact on the
movement in his insistence on keeping the Fenian activities acceptable to the
public, and yet still effective. This is suggested by his opposition to assassinations
as a Fenian policy, while at the same time he was preparing the organization for
the next opportunity to attack British power in Ireland Davitt kept at these
activities in Britain until he was sentenced to ﬁfteen years penal servitude in 1870
for smuggling weapons Largely due to public pressure, he was paroled in 1877
and returned to the Fenian cause, working to make the organization less
secretive; while at the same time Davitt started to gather support for his "new
departure" ideas for Irish nationalists

The new departure concept was a unique and signiﬁcant attempt in the history
of Irish nationalism, and, more than any other issue, distinguished Davitt as a
major ﬁgure in Irish history. While in prison, Davitt spent a considerable amount
of time contemplating the relationship of the Fenian movement to other Irish
nationalist traditions He settled on the idea of creating a mass movement which
would include a broad range of nationalistic forces by forming an alliance
between the revolutionary tradition-represented by a more open Fenianism—and
the constitutional tradition of the parliamentary Irish Home Rule Party. After his
release, Davitt approached both John Devoy and Parnell with his ideas John
Devoy was a Fenian exile who led the Clan na Gael, an organization associated
with Fenianism, in New York. Through that organization, Devoy worked to

coordinate Irish and Irish-American forces and resources in support of Irish

 

31 RF. Foster, 1988, 366.

97

nationalism Davitt’s lecture tour of the States offered the two men the
opportunity to formulate a plan of action Needing a well-known and respected
ﬁgure to lead the movement, Davitt proposed that Parnell assume that position in
addition to his parliamentary career. Parnell had become a leading Irish MP
through his use of obstructionist tactics in the House of Commons, and had been
a leader in the call for amnesty for Davitt and other Fenian prisoners At ﬁrst
hesitant because of his fear that the movement “would embrace all kinds of
elements and probably resort to illegality and violence, as all such popular
combinations were only too prone to do”, Parnell accepted the position and
embarked on what would be a very productive, and yet often bitter relationship
with Davitt.82

In 1879 Ireland was experiencing an agricultural depression and a poor harvest,
which automatically invoked fears of another famine, and prompted agrarian

83

unrest Davitt, touring the Irish countryside, found farmers and other groups

willing to participate in any movement which would alleviate the pressures of

rent. 84

Davitt was critical of the Fenians for their failure to address the misery of
the peasantry in any practical manner, and worked to bring the land issue into

the national question Davitt understood that by harnessing the national issue to
the immediately popular land issue (he himself equated landlordism with British

rule in Ireland) he would be able to combine the movements into a unique

 

32 P. Metscher, 1986, 186.
83 PSI. Lyons, in The Fenian Movement, 1968, 41.
34 P. Metscher, 1986, 183.

98
formula to make substantial progress on both the national and the land issues”
Thus, starting in Mayo, Davitt organized the Irish National Land League to
eradicate the institution of landlordism, and to alleviate the plight of the
peasantry as much as possible until the ﬁrst goal could be achieved Focussing on
a speciﬁc instance where a landowning Catholic priest was threatening evictions,
the Land League organized the local population to resist the evictions and to
apply social pressure on the offending party. Davitt certainly hit upon a very
popular issue: accelerated by the post-Famine clearances, the consolidation of the
ownership of land in Ireland had reached the point that by 1876, half of the land
was owned by less than 800 landlords; and to exacerbate that disparity, only
approximately one-half of the landlords lived on their estates86
Following the initial successes of the land agitation, Davitt tried to improve on
the structure of the movement in 1880 with the founding of the Ladies’ Land
League, and-capitalizing upon support within the Irish-American community—the
American Land League. Despite the seemingly peripheral nature of such
auxiliary organizations, the Ladies’ Land League was to play a central role in the
movement the next year when the Land League itself was suppressed The
League was outlawed, Parnell was sent off to Kilmainham Jail, and Davitt was
also thrown back in prison Relying on their belief that the British government

would not arrest the women who headed the organization, the movement was

able to continue to keep up the pressure of the agitation With the increase in

 

‘5 F. Sheehy-Skefﬁngton, 1909, 65.
3‘ R.F. Foster, 1988, 375.

99
agitation that followed the arrests, a vigorous obstructionist drive in the House of
Commons, and the British government experiencing severe troubles on the
overseas imperial front, the Land League seemed to be on the verge of realizing .
great success However, Parnell refused to call for a general rent-strike until
after all of the local leaders were themselves in prison Against the wishes of his
sister, Anna Catherine Parnell, as well as of Davitt, Parnell agreed to call off the
no-rent-strike and to work with the Liberals to pacify Ireland through reform
measures in return for Gladstone’s promise to release him from prison For this,
it has been said, Parnell’s sister, the head of the Ladies’ Land League, never
forgave him.

This so-called "Kilmainham Treaty" accentuates the differences between the
parliamentary tradition of Irish nationalism and the social and revolutionary
traditions Davitt had disagreed with Parnell on policies before, but felt
particularly betrayed by this incident, and was to become one of Parnell’s
"strongest opponents'87 Although they still cooperated on some issues in the
next several years, when Parnell’s career disintegrated because of the O’Shea
affair, Davitt’s bitter opposition to his former colleague ”indicated a depth of
resentment that only the betrayal of trust could evince."88 While in prison, Davitt
was elected to Parliament in 1882, and in the same year, tried to replace the
outlawed Land League with the more extreme Irish National League, but he did

not realize comparable success Immediately after Parnell’s release from prison,

 

3" W.F. Mandle, 1987,81.
33 Ibid, 13.

100

the infamous "Phoenix Park murders” were perpetrated by the “Untouchables",
casting unfounded suspicion on Parnell and the Land League, and requiring
Parnell to distance himself even further from any non-constitutional elements
But perhaps Davitt’s biggest obstacle to reviving the movement was his own
success at achieving results At least in part due to Davitt’s movement, Gladstone
instituted limited reforms on the land issue that successfully aided in the
paciﬁcation of the population

The tactics employed by the Land League agitators were nothing new, but they
did realize unprecedented degrees of effectiveness The use of social pressure
had been a part of the earlier agrarian movements, such as the Whiteboyism and
Ribbonism, where social ostracism used against evicting landlords and incoming
tenants was employed along with intimidation and violence to counter evictions

and rent increases89

However, these groups relied more on secretive and violent
tactics, and the use of social pressure was not a primary tool until the advent of
the Land League. Building on the old agrarian techniques, the Land League
agitation would encourage the community to completely ostracize any offending
landowner, in addition to more violent intimidation methods which also
frequently appeared The oft-quoted case of Captain Charles Cunningham
Boycott offers some insight into their tactics A land agent who was targeted
because he was threatening evictions, Boycott was isolated by the rest of the

community, as Davitt recounted:90

The local blacksmith refused to shoe any of his horses; the herds who looked

 

89 See M. Beames, 1983.
90 P. Metscher, 1986, 202

101
after his cattle left him; the baker in the nearest town refused to serve Lough
Mask House with bread, the postman most reluctantly delivered his letters, and,
ﬁnally, all his domestic servants declared they could no longer stay “the pe0ple
are ag ’inst it".
Finally, Boycott had to bring in ﬁfty Orange laborers from Ulster, guarded by
10(1) members of the Royal Irish Constabulary, to harvest the crops Obviously,
the cost-effectiveness of such harvesting techniques prevented this from becoming
an annual occurrence. (Boycott left Ireland permanently a few years later.) In
many such situations, crowds would gather to protest against evictions, and
discourage new tenants from settling on the land. The Land League tried to
convict landlords in the court of public opinion by publishing lists of the names of
those who were evicting tenants or using ”rack-rents“ This was, of course, in
addition to violent rhetoric, threats, and the intimidation associated with the
widespread agrarian outrages Just as he opposed the use of assassinations and
the dynamite terrorism by F enians, Davitt discouraged the outrages and
emphasized the boycott as much as he could—but not always successfully.

Davitt structured the League so that it could take advantage of its broad base
of support as well as Pamell’s appeal and inﬂuence. Davitt was often the driving
force of the League’s policies, and Parnell acted as the restraining force, a
situation which did nothing to lessen the tension between the two. The prime
example of this was Parnell’s decision to abolish the Ladies’ Land League, in
spite of Davitt’s argument that the Land League agitation had forced the
government into a position where the Land League could dictate terms as long as

the Ladies’ Land League was able to continue to direct the agitation Davitt’s

creations, such as the Ladies’ Land League and the American auxiliary, suggest

102

an astute planner and an insightful mind that recognized the impact of a popular
moral force movement on public opinion The foundation of the Land League
was solidly entrenched in the desire for land reform, but the structure itself was. _
unsteady, "combining tight political organization with slovenly clerical
administration and loose rhetoric."91

Although the Land League agitation was deﬁnitely the peak of Davitt’s
inﬂuence, he went on to promote his national and social ideas for another
quarter century. He involved himself in the British labor movement, acting as a
respected mediator in disputes, and launching the short—lived Labour World in
1890, which failed the next year, according to Sheehy-Skefﬁngton, because it was
ahead of its time.92 He continued to serve in Parliament, although he did not
view that position as the most advantageous from which to operate, and left in
1899 over the issue of the British war against the Boers, which caused him to
pursue more active anti-imperial methods Like many Irish nationalists, Davitt
was sympathetic to the Boers, and he went to South Africa to investigate the
situation He also helped other Irishmen to join the Irish Brigade serving the
Boer Republics, but was disappointed in the lack of active support for his views
in the U.S., and felt that a prime opportunity to strike at the British Empire was
lost. He continued to write and speak publicly until his death in Dublin in 1906,

while James Connolly was in the United States

 

91 RF. Foster, 1988, 411.
92 F. Sheehy-Skefﬁngton, 1909, 181.

103

As a Fenian, Davitt represented a unique and open-minded approach to
Fenian goals, but his ideas were largely rejected by the movement as a whole.
The IRB was coming off of a failed attempt to lend support to the Home Rule . .
cause in the mid 18705, and most Parnellite sympathizers had split from the IRB
by 1877. Thus the IRB was dominated by the physical force philosophy when
Davitt proposed the new departure. Davitt hoped to bring the revolutionary
Fenians into a general nationalist front with the parliamentarians and the
Catholic Church, but the IRB opposed this compromise of their tactical
principles. This is not to suggest that the IRB Opposed Davitt’s intention of
helping the peasantry. But the Fenian movement, despite instances of paying lip
service to the Irish peasantry, had traditionally failed to recognize the potential
strength of this disaffected part of the population because of the Fenian
insistence on being a political rather than a social movement. Conversely,
Davitt’s premise was the idea that ”the energies of the peasant, which the Fenians
had failed to exploit, were turned towards economic ends—something more
comprehensible to the peasantry than the idea of an Irish republic."93 Still, the
Supreme Council of the IRB, of which Davitt was a member until 1880, believed
that participation in a political front led by parliamentarians would demoralize
and contaminate their "pure” nationalism. Nevertheless, Davitt kept many
contacts with individual Fenians, and the Land League was supported by the

participation of many Fenians, some of whom who were “entrenched in the

 

93 H. Senior, in Fenians And Fenianism, 1968, 66.

104

original executive of the Land League, four members at least being Fenians."94
Somewhat ironically, when Parnell’s fortunes declined with the O’Shea scandal,
his rhetoric became more violent, and he and the Fenians started a mutual, if
brief, relationship.

Davitt’s religious attitudes were predictably tolerant. Raised as a Catholic, but
in a tolerant atmosphere, his social and political goals were not clouded with
religious bigotry. He sought to forge a common cause with Orangemen and to
stem the rising tide of distinctiveness between Ulster and the rest of Ireland But
the potential for a true non-sectarian movement was probably decimated with the
Phoenix Park murders. Not surprisingly, the Irish Catholic clergy was divided on
the Land League. Many priests supported the movement, and they were an
integral part of the new departure. However, there also existed condemnation by
many in the hierarchy for the unrest, and the Vatican did show signs of
displeasure with the movement as a whole.”

Davitt was distinguished from the other Fenians mostly by the depth and
broad-mindedness of his thinking On organizational \structural issues, Davitt’s

ideas were much more elastic than those of many of his fellow Fenians. Davitt

wanted to open up the secretive IRB, and forge an alliance with other nationalists

 

9‘ RF. Foster, 1988, 404-5.

95 F. Sheehy—Skefﬁngton, 1909, 144. Sheehy-Skefﬁngton, himself quite an
anti-cleric, believed that an anti-Parnell encyclical that attacked the Parnell
tribute—a revenue system not unlike O’Connell’s—was actually an attack on the
nationalists in general. Sheehy-Skefﬁngton maintained that the Vatican looked to
the inclusion of Ireland in Great Britain as the channel for Roman Catholicism to
inﬂuence the heart of the greatest empire in the world at that time. Any move to
separate Ireland from Britain could damage Catholic power in the British
Empire.

105
and other forces for change. Davitt’s failure, or at least incomplete success, was
that in tying his primary goal of Irish national independence—which he believed,
as most Irish nationalists had for the past century, would bring justice to Ireland-.—
to his more immediate goal of land reform, he unintentionally undercut his own
program when the immediate cause realized startling progress, as Garvin points
out:96
The successful conclusion of the Land War weakened the revolutionary impulse
seriously. Once the alliance of English Liberalism, Irish agrarianism, and Irish
constitutional nationalism had destroyed landlordism, the ‘agrarian motor’, which
revolutionary separatists had hoped to use to move their own rather difﬁcult
cause along, began slowly to run out of fuel.

Davitt’s ideas on parliamentary politics indicate a strong preference for
democratization and anti-imperialism He tried to put the Irish Parliamentary
Party at the vanguard of the movement to enlarge the franchise, and promoted
participation and leverage at the local levels of the political process. He
supported the vigorous obstructionist tactics in the House of Commons, and, like
some of the Young Irelanders before him and the later abstentionist Sinn Feiners,
advocated the threat of withdrawal of the Irish MPs from Westminster and the
creation of an Irish Assembly if the Union was not repealed. His frustration with
the resistance of the parliamentary system to change, combined with his
identiﬁcation with the apparently victimized Boers, led him to turn away from
Parliament. His democratic principles were also applied to the economic sphere,

where be positioned himself securely at the edge of British socialism. Despite his

nationalist sentiments, Davitt held internationalist values which were usually

 

9‘ T. Garvin, 1987, 3-4.

106
expressed through his labor activities. Davitt was the author of several
progressive proposals, and he tried to link the Irish cause with the concerns of the
Orangemen, British workers, Boers, and other subject races in the Empire.
Sheehy-Skefﬁngton declared that Davitt’s ideas led to the ”ﬁrst labour movement”
in the British Isles (and eventually to the social reform programs of the British
government in the early 20th century).97 Like Connolly, he felt that any
relationship between Britain and Ireland could only be maintained if it was
mutually and voluntarily created.

However, it is in the area of the land question that Davitt left his most
indelible mark, and his activities in this area offer the best insight into his socio-
political philosophy. Davitt was greatly inﬂuenced by Henry George’s views on
the relationship of the private ownership of land to social problems, and the two
ﬁgures maintained an active and stimulating relationship. Davitt held a strong
belief in the ownership of Irish land by Ireland, which caused him to repudiate
the land reforms instituted by the British government. Davitt was "the only real
exponent of land nationalization" in Ireland at the time, and his conception of
land nationalization "chimed in with notions of communal ownership under
Brehon law', just as Connolly’s ideas were largely based on this idealization of

the past.98

Davitt’s contributions were based on the premise that equated
landlordism with British rule in Ireland. He reached his conclusions regarding

the relationship between these two forces independently of, but in much the same

 

97 F. Sheehy-Skefﬁngton,1909, 67.
93 RF. Foster, 1988, 415, 411.

*1

107

manner that James Fintan Lalor had three decades earlier, and this symbolized
one of “the true lines of evolution in Irish politics"99 They both arrived at the
conclusion that striking at landlordism would be striking at the heart of British . .
power in Ireland, because, in the eyes of the peasantry at least, British inﬂuence
was centered on and in the large-landowning class Thus, Davitt had deﬁnite
socialistic tendencies, most often evident in his rhetoric which foreshadowed
Connolly: 100
The individualistic civilisation of the present system denies to the million the
possibility of giving play to what is good in human nature, by putting its passions
and selﬁshness into deadly activity in a cut-throat competition for wealth.
But Davitt did not consider himself to be a socialist:101
...I am not a Socialist myself; I am content to be an Irish Nationalist and Land
Reformer; but there are many articles in the political creed of Socialism to which
I willingly subscribe.
In fact, Davitt was repelled by some socialist ideas, and particularly by those of
the Fabians, because he feared restrictions of individual liberty.

For his part, Connolly was an admirer of some of Davitt’s ideas, if not
necessarily the person himself. Connolly supported the idea of using the land

issue as the basis for a nationalist movement: 102

 

99 F. Sheehy—Skefﬁngton, 1909, 66.
10° Ibid, 145.

10] Ibid, 237. Davitt went on to say: "...Socialists are not, so far as I can
see, either drunkards, gamblers, or wife-beaters If they were, they would vote
Tory, and the churchmen would not denounce them They are sober, earnest,
intelligent citizens, who see clearly the evils of the existing system in their effects
upon the industrial and civic lives of the wage-earning masses, and who have the
courage to put forward proposed reforms which shall minimise, if they cannot
eradicate, these evils in the existence of the labouring poor.”

“’2 L1H, 163.

108
When the revolutionary nationalists threw in their lot with the Irish Land League,
and made the land struggle the basis of their warfare, they were not only placing
themselves in touch once more with those inexhaustible quarries of material
interests from which all the great Irish statesmen from St. Laurence O’Toole to
Wolfe Tone drew the stones upon which they built their ediﬁce of a militant
patriotic Irish organisation, but they were also, consciously or unconsciously,
placing themselves in accord with the principles which underline and inspire the
modern movement of labour.
But Connolly’s conception of a socialist republic did not have an agrarian basis
In fact, Connolly had very little experience with rural Ireland. Connolly’s
socialism focussed on the urban proletariat, and he tended to view agrarian-based
nationalism in much the same way as be viewed cultural nationalism: as a benign
force that held the danger of entrapping potential socialist-republicans in an
incomplete vision of a free Ireland Thus, he did harbor some suspicions for
Davitt as a middle-class nationalist or even as a dupe of the middle class leaders,
and, surprisingly, be portrayed Parnell as the abandoned protector of progressive
Irish nationalism. 103 Still, in Labour In Irish History,Connolly mourned the
aborted efforts of the Land League, the failure to ”call into existence a spirit of
enquiry into the right of property“ and, in an apparent reference to the
Kilmainham Treaty, the willingness of the leadership to104
lend their energies to an attempt to focus the whole interests of Ireland upon a
parliamentary struggle as soon as ever a temporary set-back gave them an
opportunity to counsel a change of tactics

Later, however, Connolly was to credit Davitt with making “horriﬁed and

energetic protests” against the trend among the Irish voters to ignore Socialist and

 

103 For Davitt: WR, 92-1899 and Harp, 8-1908; for Parnell: WR, 10-8-1898.
10‘ L1H, 164.

109
Labour candidates in the wake of ”the Home Rule-Liberal alliance.“los Still,
despite the differences between the two approaches to Irish national and social

issues, the continuities from Davitt to Connolly are substantial.

It was in this context that Connolly launched his career in Ireland. The half
century immediately preceding Connolly’s career was directly relevant for his
ideas, as well as for the context of his actions Despite his distaste for the
cultural nationalism of Young Ireland, he was very impressed with the ideas of
Lalor and, to a lesser extent, Mitchel on social organization and revolution. The
cultural nationalism of Thomas Davis was to be personiﬁed in Connolly’s partner
in rebellion, Patrick Pearse. Davitt, arriving at the same conclusions as Lalor
regarding the link between political and socio—economic issues in Ireland,
foreshadowed Connolly’s ideas on this subject, as Connolly focussed on the urban-
industrial factor instead of the rural-agricultural issues as the key to true
independence. The secrecy and physical force of the Fenians inﬂuenced
Connolly, but their ability to operate a revolutionary movement in Ireland in spite
of the attacks of the powerful Catholic Church was reﬂected in Connolly’s own
efforts at such an endeavor. The Catholic Church challenged the physical force
tradition of the Fenians, and, with the Parliamentary Party as well as the many
cultural nationalist groups (including those controlled by the IRB), offered a

broad front of Irish nationalism. Connolly came into this milieu of competing

 

‘05 L1H, 164—5.

110
social and nationalist forces, ﬁrst as a soldier, and then as a young socialist and

laborer from Edinburgh.

Since there are already in existence a few accounts of Connolly’s life, and
furthermore, since his biography is not a central concern of this paper, there is no
need for an exhaustive examination of his early years or of his career at this
time. 106 However, this paper would be negligent if it were to exclude any outline
of his life. What follows is by no means meant to be a complete account of such
a complex character. But in order to complement the preceding sections in their
attempt to trace Connolly’s philosophical lineage in the three relevant areas, the
following is simply a short sketch which provides some background, chronology,
and immediate context for the next chapter’s examination of his ideas on the
integration of nationalism, socialism, and Christianity.

Contrary to the many reports which followed immediately after the 1916
uprising and his consequent execution, Connolly was not born in County
Monaghan, but in an Irish slum in Edinburgh in the year after the Fenian
uprising. His Irish Catholic family had emigrated there, and his father was a

laborer for the city. By his eleventh year, Connolly was working at the Evening

 

106 See, for instance: Ruth Dudley Edwards, James Connolly, (Dublin, 1981),
which is part of the "Gill’s Irish Lives" series; C. Desmond Greaves, The Life And
Times Of James Connolly, (London, 1986) is considered the deﬁnitive account of
his life; Sean Cronin, Young Connolly, (Dublin, 1978) deals with his early career;
and Nora Connolly O’Brien, James Connolly: Portrait Of A Rebel Father, (Dublin,
1935, 1975) is an account from the perspective of his eldest daughter.

111

News before being dismissed by a government inspector; he then went on to other
jobs At the age of fourteen he joined the military, and was stationed in Ireland.
In 1889 he deserted, but was lucky enough to have had the government lose his. -
records. He married and immediately joined other members of his family in the
Scottish socialist movement, and within three years had become the secretary of
the Scottish Socialist Federation

The early 18905 saw Connolly begin his proliﬁc writing career, and his less
successful career as a political candidate. In 1896 he moved to Dublin as an
organizer for the Dublin Socialist Club, and helped to establish the Irish Socialist
Republican Party while supporting himself as a common laborer, as he would for
many years His arrest the following year for demonstrating against Queen
Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was one of several run-ins with the law for his
political activities, and his writings and lectures were starting to attract attention
within the socialist communities in Ireland and Britain In the spring of 1898 he
spent a few weeks in Kerry (one of his rare experiences in rural Ireland) as a
journalist for New York’s Weekly People, to cover a potential famine That
summer, with the ﬁnancial help of some British socialists, including Kier Hardie,
he launched the Workers’Republic in Dublin The next year, Connolly organized
the Irish anti-war movement protesting British aggression against the Boer
Republies. He continued to write and publish articles, pamphlets, and poetry, to
run unsuccessfully in municipal election in Dublin, to organize socialist and labor
groups, and to lecture throughout the British Isles and North America until 1903.

Frustrated by the lack of progress in Ireland, both personally and politically,

Connolly moved to New York The next year his family, mourning the death of

112

his eldest daughter in an accident, joined him. Finding work in the insurance
business, he studied other languages in the hopes of forging organizational links
with workers of other nationalities; he mastered German, French, and Italian
(Connolly also knew a little Irish, and possibly some Arabic). He joined the
Socialist Labour Party, founded the Irish Socialist Federation, and was an early
member of the Industrial Workers of the World, for which he undertook
successful organizational endeavors in the New York area. He was involved as
an ofﬁcial in a number of labor and socialist groups, wrote for a number of
publications, and in 1907, ﬁnished his ﬁrst major work, Labour In Irish History.
The next year he started The Harp for the ISF, and lectured and published for
the IWW until 1910 when he returned to Ireland at the invitation of Irish labor
leader (and Dublin editor of The Harp) Jim Larkin

Back in Ireland, Connolly immersed himself in organizational activities, and
published his second great work, Labour, NationalityAnd Religion Mth his
American-bred syndicalism, he joined Larkin’s ”one big union", the Irish
Transport and General Workers’ Union, in 1911, the same year that he moved to
Belfast. For the next two years he organized for the ITGWU and led sporadic
strikes throughout the industrial communities in Ireland. In the political arena,
he founded the Independent Labour Party of Ireland, agitated to include
progressive components in the Home Rule Bill, and unsuccessfully contested the
Belfast municipal elections The famous Dublin Lockout of 1913 brought
Connolly to the uppermost levels of the British labor pantheon The Dublin
capitalists, led by William Martin Murphy, attempted to break the ITGWU by

forcing employees to take an anti-union oath. Although they failed to destroy the

113
ITGWU, the owners did inflict major damage on the cause of trade unionism in
Ireland Arrested at the early stages of the conﬂict, Connolly went on a hunger
strike and won his own release. With Larkin’s arrest, Connolly took control of . .
the ITGWU and agitated for Larkin’s freedom, as well as for British labor
support. The end of the confrontation saw Connolly’s deep frustration with
British labor organizations, and his creation of the world’s ﬁrst “red guard“, the
Irish Citizen Army.

In early 1914, Connolly spent much of his time protesting the potential
partition of Ireland The controversy, with the consequent mass mobilization of
the citizens, was pre-empted, however, by the start of the First World War.
Connolly distinguished himself as one of the very few European socialists to stick
to his principles in opposing what he viewed as a war for the capitalists fought by
the working classes Connolly led the anti-war movement again, and began acting
on the age-old Irish nationalist premise that England’s difﬁculty was Ireland’s
opportunity. With Larkin’s departure to the U.S., Connolly became the leader of
the ITGWU, and initiated contacts with the IRB in the h0pes of organizing an
anti-British rising before the war ended The following year, Connolly studied,
wrote, and lectured on guerrilla warfare. He also published his last major work,
The Reconquest Of Ireland, in December, 1915.

After threatening to start a rising without the IRB, Connolly was ”co-opted"
into the Military Council of the IRB in early 1916, and accelerated plans for a

rising.107 Working with Pearse and other IRB members, Connolly arranged for

 

107 Accounts vary as to the actual circumstances surrounding this event, but
”co-opted" is the term most frequently used to describe it. Most writers now see
Connolly’s disappearance for a few days in January of 1916 as a mutual

114
the mobilization of Citizen Army and Irish Volunteer forces for Easter Sunday,
without the knowledge of Eoin MacNeill, the leader of the Volunteers. Despite
the fact that MacNeill issued countermanding orders when he discovered the plot
at the last minute, and knowing very well that they had no chance of practical
success, on Sunday Connolly and the other militants met in Liberty Hall,
headquarters of the ITGWU, and decided to proceed with the Rising on Easter
Monday. The Proclamation of the Republic, printed up in Liberty Hall, was
signed by Connolly, Pearse, Thomas Clarke, Sean MacDiarmada (MacDermott),
Thomas MacDonagh, Eamonn Ceannt, and Joseph Plunkett, and was issued on
Monday, 24 April. Connolly was named the Vice-President of the Provisional
Government of the Republic, and the Commander of the Dublin forces After
several days of vicious ﬁghting, in which Connolly was shot both in the arm and
the leg, he ordered the surrender of the insurgents on 29 April to prevent further
senseless devastation Enduring terrible agony from his wounds, Connolly was
ﬁnally tried on 9 May, defending himself only against accusations of mistreatment
of prisoners 108 Propped up in his bed, he was sentenced to death.

On 12 May, he was brought to Kilmainham jail, and, unable to stand because

 

arrangement between Connolly and the IRB. However, many observers at the
time, particularly those associated with Connolly’s ICA and union activities,
thought that his disappearance from Liberty Hall could only be a result of the
IRB abducting him. They believed that he would not willingly leave his duties at
Liberty Hall without making arrangements with his ICA and union associates
Perhaps this refusal to see Connolly’s participation in the scheme, supported by
his subsequent full-hearted cooperation with the IRB, was indicative of a group of
socialists who did not want to admit Connolly’s nationalistic tendencies See, for
example, Frank Robbins, Under The Starry Plough, (Dublin, 1977) 70-4.

108 Statement to Court Martial, 9 May, 1916, reprinted in Piaras F. Mac
Lochlainn, Last Words, (Dublin, 1971) 188-9.

115
of his injuries, which had become gangrenous, he was strapped to a chair. He
had sent for a Catholic priest, Fr. Aloysius, to whom he restated his ﬁrm belief
that he could, in good conscience, be both a Catholic and a socialist. According .
to Fr. Aloysius, in relating the event to Connolly’s family: 109
He was very brave and cool...I asked him: ”Will you pray for the men who are
about to shoot you,“ and he answered: "I will say a prayer for all brave men who
do their duty.“ ...And then they shot him.
James Connolly was the last prisoner executed, and was buried in a common

grave with his comrades He was survived by his wife, Lillie, and six children

 

109 N. Connolly O’Brien, (1935) 1975, 327. In other accounts, Connolly’s last
words, as recorded by the attending surgeon, were: "Yes, Sir, I’ll pray for all brave
men who do their duty according to their lights” See, for instance: P. Mac
Lochlainn, 1971, 193.

CHAPTER THREE

 

"StrugglingTowards The Light"

James Connolly was among the more proliﬁc and innovative socialist

thinkers/ activists at the turn of the century. In shaping socialism to ﬁt the
situation in Ireland at the time, he had to harness the forces of nationalism to
achieve the just ends that he saw in socialism; and he had to prove that socialism
was compatible with Christianity. Rejecting doctrinaire Marxism as legalistic and
overly inﬂexible, Connolly used Marxism as a guide to achieve what he saw as a
truly free Irish nation, where justice could be enjoyed by all. The unique
situation of Ireland at the time dictated that, as a socialist, Connolly would have
to deal with Irish nationalism and Roman Catholicism But to Connolly, these
concepts were all inter-related This brings up the question of whether Connolly
saw himself ﬁrst and foremost as an Irishman, a Catholic, or a Marxist Since his
death, socialists have tended to de-emphasize his Irish nationalism and
Catholicism, while Catholics and nationalists have tried to deny his socialism.
This quarrel was and is indicative of the general misunderstanding of Connolly’s

ideas, often caused by the selﬁsh prejudices of socialists, Catholics, and Irish

116

1 17

nationalists who, in attempting to claim Connolly as their own, have ignored his
writings on the inter-relationships of these three factors in Irish society. This
chapter will explore the dynamic relationship of these three often incompatible . .
elements in Connolly’s writings in order to evaluate the prioritization of values in
Connolly’s theories

Connolly recognized the vast prejudice against his ideas in Ireland at the time.
At one point, Connolly wrote of the need for everyone who was ”struggling
towards the light out of the economic darkness of to—day' to be aware of the real
issues involved in the relationship between Roman Catholicism and socialism.1
At another time, Connolly justiﬁed his opposition to the First World War by
claiming that the Irish worker had no quarrel with Germany, and welcomed "the
German as a brother struggling towards the light."2 Some accounts of his
execution have him promising to "pray for all brave men who do their duty
according to their lights”, including the soldiers about to shoot him.3 Perhaps the
beauty of this phrase is its power and its ambiguity. It is representative of the
poetic energy that is present in so much of Connolly’s writing. As a union
organizer and socialist agitator, Connolly was a master at imagery, public
speaking, and motivation As an intelligent and moral person who had seen the

misery caused by greed, and who had channeled his outrage into poetry and

songs, Connolly was blessed with the ability to convey his thoughts in an

 

1 Harp, 9.190s
2 The Irish Worker, 10-31-1914.
3 p.1=. Mac Lochlainn, 1971, 193.

118
emotional, and at times almost lyrical, manner. But the phrase "struggling
towards the light" leaves the reader—and perhaps the modern reader to a greater
degree-wondering what ”the light” is supposed to represent. In the context of ~ -
Connolly’s writing, ”the light“ could be individual and / or social enlightenment,
social justice, God, or a high level of spiritual consciousness For Connolly, these
kinds of ideals stood somewhere in Ireland’s (and humankind’s) foreseeable
future. The roles played by socialism, nationalism, and Christianity in hastening
and guaranteeing this ideal future in Connolly’s theories are the keys to
understanding Connolly. Therefore, Connolly’s socialism, nationalism, and
Catholicism need to be examined But it should be emphasized that all three
ideas were inter—related in Connolly’s mind The synthesis of these three idea-
systems was inherent in their individual and collective characters, as far as
Connolly was concerned What follows is an examination of Connolly’s
integration of these three separate, and often contradictory, philosophies Thus,
because there is some obvious overlap among all three philosophical concepts,
each one is discussed below, as much as is possible, as it relates to the other two
ideas4 First, Connolly’s synthesis of socialism and nationalism is examined by
studying his writings on the two subjects as separate entities and as they relate to
each other. Following that is an examination of Connolly’s integration of
socialism and Christianity, particularly in its Catholic form Noticeably absent

from this analysis is any effort to evaluate an attempt on Connolly’s part to unite

 

4 There is very little in Connolly’s writings that relates his nationalism to
Catholicism This was probably because of his insistence on keeping the Irish
socialist movement free from domination by any one religion

119
Catholicism and Irish nationalism. This is simply because Connolly refused to
make such a link. Although he recognized that Catholicism was the religion of
most of the people of Ireland, this did not seem to present to him, as it did to .
many other Irish nationalists, with an avenue for the expression of nationalism If
anything, it only made the Catholic Church more susceptible to his attacks for its
failure to improve the lot of the majority of the Irish. Connolly spent a
considerable portion of his career in Belfast, and elsewhere, trying to cut across
denominational lines in order to build working-class solidarity. His deﬁnition of

Irishness did not leave room for religious bigotry.

Connolly, Socialism And Nationalism

When James Connolly was executed, it appeared that the cause of Irish
nationalism had suffered a terrible loss But just as devastating was the blow
suffered by socialism, which lost a great thinker who was devoted to achieving
justice for oppressed peoples Connolly, one of the few European socialist
theoreticians to actually come from the ranks of the working class, was extremely
inﬂuential in his time; not only with other socialists, but also with other
nationalists-:particularly his compatriots in Ireland His ideas were reﬂected in
the writings of other nationalists, were debated by other socialists of his time, and
are still embraced by a substantial element of the nationalist and socialist
movements of the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland today. Connolly was a
voracious reader and a proliﬁc writer. While working as a casual laborer, union

organizer, and publisher in Scotland, Ireland, and the United States, this self-

120

taught Marxist attracted attention with his articles, which were printed in many a
local radical press, and his major works, which he published in book and
pamphlet form. His most original ideas centered on the broad themes of
socialism as it related to nationalism and Christianity. In evaluating his ideas on
these topics it must be remembered that, with the exception of his idealized
conception of an ancient Irish communal system, he had no concrete model of
socialism to describe and analyze, so his work was basically abstract predictions
on production and distribution systems, as well as moralistic theory. What is
remarkable about his work is its relevance to the current situation in both parts
of Ireland His ideas have re-emerged, along with the troubles in Ireland, to be
re-evaluated and embraced by many radicals

Almost immediately after his death, Connolly was portrayed as an Irish
nationalist, ﬁrst and foremost, who also happened to espouse radical social ideas
Although this representation may well have indicated a miscalculation on
Connolly’s part, it is historically inaccurate. Connolly was primarily a socialist.
His writings relate all other ideas, including nationalism and religion, as well as
more speciﬁc issues such as Home Rule, partition, and World War One, to his
socialism The essence of Connolly’s socialism was Marxist theory, with which he
was well acquainted, and which he explicitly recognized as valid in its basic
tenets, such as dialectic materialism, the Labor Theory of Value, class

antagonisms, and the rejection of utopian socialism.S However, for Connolly,

 

5 Connolly’s treatment of the Labor Theory of Value offers an excellent
example of his sarcastic wit, which appears frequently in his writings After
demonstrating the validity of this theory, to his satisfaction, in Labour, Nationality
And Religion, Connko concluded: ”Altars, beads, cassocks, shoes, buildings,
ploughs, books—all articles upon the market, except a politician’s conscience—have

121

Marxism was a guide, and not dogma. Marxism offered a means of analysis with
an objective of progressive action According to Connolly, a socialist did not have
to accept every Marxist premise or conclusion, but had to agree on human justice
as the goal of socialism. For example, Connolly was the ﬁrst to embrace the
Marxist idea of historical materialism in interpreting Irish history, but claimed
“that there are many good Socialists who do not hold it, and that a belief in it is
not essential to Socialism."6

In Ireland at that time, Connolly saw evidence to support his conclusion that
capitalism, in replacing feudal social relationships, needed to balance production
and consumption: th the newer, more efﬁcient production techniques
increasing output and competition, and the saturated exploitation of world
markets proportionately diminishing consumption, capitalists had to further
exploit the workers to maintain their proﬁts According to Connolly, this
oppression would reach a breaking point when the workers would seize control of

7 Socialist control would translate into a

the state and the means of production
three-point policy: (1) the means of production put under the control of bodies
responsible to the community; (2) a democratic society to insure that the
government acted in the interests of the community; (3) and national, rather than
imperial or international representative bodies, to make the government most

responsive to the people.8

 

their exchange value determined..by their labor cost.’(p. 24)
6 LNR, l9; (Connolly’s italics).
7 WR, 7-1-1899.
3 L ’Irlande Libre, 1897.

122

For Connolly, socialism represented the purest form of democracy, but simply
instituting a state monopoly was not socialism Worker control of the means of
production could not be separated from worker control of the state. Connolly is.
said to have vacillated between Marxism and syndicalism, between seeking control
of the state and advancing the working class through trade unionism For
instance at one point, while active in American labor organizations, Connolly
wrote:9
...the emancipation of the working-class will function more through the economic
power than through the political state The ﬁrst act of the workers will be
through their economic organisations seizing the organised industries; the last act
the conquest of political power.
This line of thinking is most thoroughly developed in Socialism Made Easy.
However, particularly after the disappointments of the 1913 Lockout, Connolly
tended to stress political goals, as indicated by his increasing involvement in the
ICA, and his eventual gamble for political power in 1916 In the context of the
failure of 1913 and the sectarianization of the Ulster working class, Connolly
changed his emphasis, prophetically warning of10
the tendency in the Labour movement to mistake mere concentration upon the
industrial ﬁeld for essentially revolutionary advance...The Greater Unionism is
found in short to be forging greater fetters for the working class; to bear to the
real revolutionary industrial unionism the same relation as the servile State would
hear to the Co-operative Commonwealth of our dreams...they may also be on the
road to foisting upon the working class a form of organization which will make
our last state inﬁnitely worse than our ﬁrst
Some see in this a progression in the maturation of his social philosophy.

Although at different times in his career, Connolly could be seen pursuing purely

 

9 Harp, 4-1908.
1° Forward, 5-23-1914.

123

political activities, while at other times he submerged himself in trade union
matters, the differences are only a matter of emphasis in tactics He never
rejected one or the other routes to justice for the working class, and most
variations in emphasis can be explained as the application of merely tactical
questions to problems under changing circumstances These tactics were meant
to lead to a situation where the workers would ﬁnally have a right to what they
produce, rather than having to surrender the majority of it to the parasitical
capitalist class Naturally, Connolly’s ability to perceive and describe all social
issues in a black-white contrast was applied to the social classes and human
problems of his time. Connolly claimed that only the pure form of democracy
manifested in socialism could eradicate the ’destitution, and all the misery, crime,
and immorality that ﬂow from that unnecessary evil," which he saw in
capitalism 1 1

In Connolly’s view, capitalism was the epitome of injustice, a system which
consolidated the control that had been exercised by the old feudal aristocracy. 12
In a speech during his 1903 campaign for the Wood Quay Ward in Dublin’s
municipal elections, Connolly attacked the immorality of capitalism, claiming that
capitalists had stolen the land from the natives of Ireland, and then exploited
13

them by demanding rent for its use, while never producing anything themselves.

Because of the nature of the system, not only did capitalism teach immoral and

 

, 11 Speech made during Belfast election, 1913.
12 L’Irlande Libre, 1897.
13 Speech made during Dublin election, 1903.

124

uncivilized attitudes which were comparable to cannibalism, but no real justice
could ever exist within such a system. 14 Thus, he claimed:15
Capitalism teaches the people the moral conceptions of cannibalism-the strong. .
devouring the weak; its theory of the world of men and women is that of a
gloriﬁed pig-trough where the biggest swine gets the most swill. The idea of
human relations which would grow out of the working class of Ireland solidifying
and concentrating their forces for their common beneﬁt would make for human
brotherhood and a conception of the universe worthy of a really civilised people.

Connolly attacked the middle-class concept of individual and civil rights as
effectively meaningless to the worker who had no corresponding economic rights.
Politics was a matter of the stomach, Connolly claimed, and freedom of speech
and the press meant little to starving people. Freedom was not an end in and of
itself, but only a means to justice in society. Connolly pointed out that one of his .
crities went so far as to admit that, in a capitalist system, '(one’s) right to use
these means (private property) is at the same time a right to exclude others from
their use."16 These negative rights—that is, freedom from outside intrusion
without any requirements regarding the corresponding responsibilities to one’s
fellow beings—meant that, despite capitalist claims regarding natural rights, there
was no such thing as a basic right to life in the capitalist system. As Connolly
claimed: the worker “has no effective right to live in this world unless a capitalist
can see his way to make a proﬁt out of hint"l7 To have any hope of freedom,

the worh'ng class had to assert its rights by cultivating a class consciousness that

 

1“ Harp, 1-1910.
15 Ibid

16 LNR, 28. Connolly quoted Fr. Kane 8.1 from his Lenten Discourses
against socialism; (my parentheses).

17 LNR, 2s

125
was to be ”alert, disciplined, intelligent, (and) determined to be free."18

Connolly’s methods of achieving such a class consciousness ranged from the
practical to the extreme. This was evident in his relationship with middle-class . .
nationalists While on the one hand craving their support in his struggle for Irish
freedom, Connolly also had an ideological obstacle to overcome before he could
allow himself to deal with them: “(socialists have) learned from history that all
bourgeois movements end in compromise, that the bourgeois revolutionists of to-
day become the conservatives of to-morrow."19 Connolly had to assert the
superiority of his socialism (and his type of nationalism) over middle-class
nationalism, at least in his own mind, so that he could coordinate activities with
these groups in good conscience.

In fact, his relationship with one such nationalist, Patrick Pearse, tells much
about how these two ideologies would inﬂuence each other, and therefore, how
they were connected in Connolly’s mind Pearse’s activities in the IRB and in
cultural nationalist organizations represented progressive involvement in
mainstream middle-class nationalism for Connolly. Connolly seemed to rule out

any kind of afﬁliation on the grounds that it would be an unstable relationship,

since, in Connolly’s thinking, their respective groups would be bound to clash at a

 

18 The Irish Worker, 10-31-1914; (my parentheses).
19 L ’Irlande Libre, 1897; (my parentheses).

126

future date.20 Connolly recognized that many southern Irish capitalists, whose
markets were much more domestic-oriented than their northern counterparts,
were interested in Irish independence so they could better protect their markets .
But Connolly was able to see the advantages of allying himself with the
progressive elements of middle-class nationalism.21 In an article published in
1897, Connolly explained that, although these nationalists had essentially failed in
their logic and their ability to observe past events, there was some value in their
cultural movements, such as the promotion of the Gaelic language. The main
concern was to try to get the nationalists to link their national aspirations with
the ﬁght against injustice.22 Hence, Connolly allowed himself to be co—opted into .
the secretive and nationalistic Irish Republican Brotherhood and committed
himself and his resources to the its goal of an Irish Republic, to the extent that it
appeared to his fellow socialists that he had lost himself in nationalistic politics

Pearse, on the other hand, started to embrace some of Connolly’s socialist
ideas into his writing Together, the two took the concepts of "shock methods"
and "blood sacriﬁce" and applied it to the nationalist attempt to shock the people

of Ireland into a national consciousness with the Easter Uprising of 1916. Their

relationship is indicative of Connolly’s refusal to be constricted by doctrinaire

 

2° Erin’s Hope, (Dublin, 1897) 234. As late as 16 April 1916, Connolly was
telling his ICA, ”In the event of victory, hold on to your riﬂes, as those with
whom we are ﬁghting may stop before our goal is reached We are out for
economic as well as political liberty. Hold on to your riﬂes!”
R.M. Fox, The HistoryOf The Irish Citizen Army, (Dublin, 1944) 128.

21 L ’Irlande Libre,1897.
22 Shan Van Vocht, 1-1897.

127

Marxism, and his ability to ﬁnd new, more practical paths to bring about the

desired ends At the same time, however, his extremism was evident:23

No nation is worthy of independence until it is independent No nation is ﬁt to- _
be free until it is free. No man can swim until he has entered the water and
failed and been half drowned several times in the attempt to swim...Experience
would strengthen us in power to attain security. Security would strengthen us in
our progress towards greater freedom.

Although many people have learned how to swim without almost killing
themselves, the logic of this statement, albeit burdened with hyperbole, was
extended to Connolly’s self-sacriﬁce in the Easter Uprising.

Tactically, Connolly had plans which were designed to speed the progress
towards a just state. In founding his Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1896, with .
the goal of bringing about the ideal of a socialist state which would be
independent of the British Empire, Connolly promoted the use of accepted
political methods to enact his ten-point program, which he viewed only as the
means to a greater end:24

1. N ationalisation of railways and canals.

2. Abolition of private banks and money lending institutions and establishments
of state banks, under popularly elected boards of directors, issuing loans at cost.
3. Establishment at public expense of rural depots for the most improved
agricultural machinery, to be lent out to the agricultural population at a rent
covering cost and management alone.

4. Graduated income tax on all incomes over 400 pounds per annum in order to
provide funds for pensions to the aged, inﬁrm and widows and orphans

5. Legislative restriction of hours of labour to 48 per week and establishment of a
minimum wage.

6. Free maintenance for all children

7. Gradual extension of the principle of public ownership and supply to all the
necessities of life.

8. Public control and management of National schools by boards elected by

 

23 WR,12-18-1915.

24 Programme of the ”Irish Socialist Republican Party," founded in Dublin,
May 29, 1896. Manifesto published in Dublin, September, 1896.

128
popular ballot for that purpose alone.
9. Free education up to the highest university grades
10. Universal suffrage.
This program was typical of Connolly’s preference for non-violent action
Although he was not a paciﬁst, Connolly abhorred violence, and tried to promote
peaceful political and trade union activities with his writings This does not mean
that he refused to use violence, but only that he denied the dominant Marxist

25 Connolly claimed that class

view that revolutionary change had to be violent.
violence usually arose when the ruling classes attacked the workers, or when the
ruling classes refused to abide by decisions arrived at through the democratic
process Still, Connolly obviously saw a place for violence in certain instances
when he thought it was necessary as the last resort, such as the Easter Uprising.
As time went on he became more convinced that violence would have to be
used:26

To my mind an agitation to attain a political or economic end must rest upon an
implied willingness and ability to use force. Without that it is mere wind and
attitudinizing..We believe in constitutional action in normal times; we believe in
revolutionary action in exceptional times These are exceptional times

This conviction became even more pronounced particularly with the situation in
Ireland after the advent of World War One. As part of this evolving view of the
use of violence, Connolly formed the Irish Citizen Army in 1913. This
organization, which was Europe’s ﬁrst "red guard,” was created to protect workers

during the Dublin Lockout of 1913. At about the same time, Connolly began

studying military science, and became an expert at strategy and guerrilla warfare,

 

25 WR, 7-22-1899.
26 Forward,3-l4-l9l4.

129
subjects upon which he wrote several articles His expertise and his Citizen Army
were both key elements in the Easter Uprising.

It was during the Dublin Lockout of 1913 that Connolly, who previously had . .
been known almost exclusively among labor organizations, ﬁrst attracted more
widespread attention James Larkin, an Irish socialist who had been an organizer
for the British trade unions in Ireland, was instrumental in bringing Connolly
back from the United States, where Connolly had been involved in socialist and
union activities from 1903 to 1910. Fed up with the unresponsiveness of the
English socialist leaders, and alarmed at the rise of sectarianism in industrialized
Ulster, Larkin formed the Irish Transport and General Workers Union with the
intention of creating 'one big union“ of both Catholic and Protestant workers He
was largely successful in this despite the efforts of Ulster capitalists to use
religion as a divide-and—conquer tactic on the workers The Lockout started when
Dublin capitalists, led by William Martin Murphy-a Home Rule MP and
newspaper owner—tried to force employees to quit the ITGWU. When Larkin
was imprisoned during the Lockout, Connolly took over control of the union
The violent confrontations and oppression of 1913 helped to change Connolly’s
views on violence, and conﬁrmed Connolly’s opinions about "the moral
hideousness of a society propped by such means"27

The Boer War, the Lockout, and the start of the First World War were
probably the major factors that helped shape Connolly’s views on imperialism.

Independently of Lenin’s and Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas on the subject, Connolly

 

27 Address to fellow workers on the occasion of the Coronation of King
Edward V11, 1902.

130

was integrating his opinions on the imperialism of the great powers with his
theories of socialism. As early as 1899, Connolly had used a Marxist analysis to
condemn British imperialism in Southern Africa He organized protests ‘ against. .
British participation in the Boer War, which he saw as little more than shameless
British groan28 By 1912 Connolly was associating the British Labour Party and
English trade unions with imperialism The British socialists and trade unions
had insisted on the need for the purity of internationalism in socialist movements
This, in effect, supported British imperialism by undercutting local and national
socialist movements in their struggle against foreign capital, according to
Connolly. In response to the criticism by English and Ulster trade unionists of
his writings, which called for a speciﬁcally Irish socialism, Connolly replied: ”The
internationalism of the future will be based upon the free federation of free
peoples and cannot be realized through the subjugation of the smaller by the
larger political unit. ’29

In the Irish context, this argument came to the fore-front most speciﬁcally in
the Walker-Connolly controversy. Connolly spent a considerable amount of
energy debating the nature and appropriate course of socialism in Ulster with
erliam Walker, a Protestant labor leader. In Connolly’s view, Walker was using
reactionary tactics by insisting that Ulster socialism embrace the Independent
Labour Party, rather than the Socialist Party of Ireland, and thus putting Ulster

socialism in the position of playing into the hands of Edward Carson and British

 

 

2" WR, 11-4-1899.
29 Forward,6—10-1911.

131
30

imperialism. Despite Connolly’s best efforts to wed Ulster socialism and trade
unionism to the movement in the rest of Ireland, and thus strengthen his own
movement with support from the most industrialized part of Ireland, Walker
succeeded in giving Ulster socialism and trade unionism a decidedly British
orientation, under the guise of internationalism and the anti-Home Rule nature
of Ulster.31 Connolly condemned Walker’s socialism, associated with the
Independent Labour Party of Britain, as Fabian-type opportunism which was
undercutting the true Irish revolutionary socialist movement, and used the
opportunity of the controversy to propagate his own brand of socialism by

exposing historical inaccuracies in the basis of Orangeism 32

By showing
examples of Catholic and Protestant suffering at the hands of the English as well
as the Papacy, Connolly tried to present an historical basis for Catholic and
Protestant laboring-class solidarity against class oppression orchestrated by
English and Papal inﬂuences, thus denying the Orangemen the exclusive right to
criticize the Pope, and calling into question the historical legitimacy of their

33

claims to Britishness However, Connolly obviously failed to win the

Orangemen over to Irish social-republicanism and thereby prevent the eventual
partition of Ireland The failure of his reasoning was his premise that, even in

Ulster, ”class interests are stronger in political warfare than religious bias".34

 

3° Forward,6-10-l9ll.

31 Forward, 5-27-1911.

32 Harp,9-1909.

33 Forward, 7-12-1913, 9-9-1913.
3‘ Harp, 9-1909.

132

Connolly’s hatred of imperialism, the basis of his Irish socialism, was applied to
the First World War. While so many of the European socialist movements were
voting war credits for their governments and marching off to the slaughter,
Connolly insisted on looking at the unfolding crisis from a socialist perspective. In
two articles published in late August, 1914, Connolly blasted his fellow socialists
for their willingness to ignore their consciences and ﬁght in an immoral war for
misguided reasons He urged people to examine their own domestic situations:
"the socialist of another country is a fellow-patriot, as the capitalist in my own
country is a natural enemy. '35 Thus, since World War One was not the workers’
ﬁght, Connolly refused to participate in the war: ”(Do not) slaughter our comrades
abroad at the dictate of our enemies at home."36 For Connolly, the war was the
fault of the unrestricted greed of capitalism and imperialism, particularly in its
British varieties37

The conditions in working-class Ireland just after the turn of the century were
appalling According to a report of the Housing Commission, the death—rate in
Dublin was the very worst in the British Isles38 As Connolly recognized, the
uneven economic development in Ireland-the most highly developed industrial
base was centered in Belfast—had a negative effect on the well-being of the
working class The lack of a well developed industrial base in the south meant

that there was a large pool of casual labor-which often included Connolly—

 

35 Forward, 8-15—1914.

36 Forward, 8—22-1914; (Connolly’s italics, my parentheses).
37 The Irish Worker, 10-31-1914.
38 The Re—Conquest of Ireland, (Dublin, 1915) appendix II.

133
centered on the shipping industry of Dublin’s docks

Conditions such as these acted as a catalyst for people who saw the need for
change. Connolly recognized that nationalist and socialist issues were very much.
related in Ireland A constant theme in Connolly’s writing acknowledged that to
have any kind of viable movement regarding these issues, both nationalist and
socialist concerns had to be addressed Irish trade unions had been, at least
before Larkin’s successes, relatively insigniﬁcant offshoots of English trade unions
At a time when violent socialist and nationalist revolution seemed inopportune,
the founding of distinctly Irish trade unions represented a revolutionary (but
practical) step forward, since it underscored the separatist ambitions of many of
the Irish people. Connolly was in the forefront of the nationalist and socialist
movements: founding the Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1896; joining the
Socialist Labour Party in 1903; forming the Textile Workers section of the
ITGWU in 1911; and establishing the Independent Labour Party of Ireland in
1912.

In addition to these and many other activities, Connolly continued to write
profusely. In 1910 his ﬁrst major theoretical work was published Labour in Irish
History was the ﬁrst Marxist analysis of Irish history. In it, Connolly attached a
moral superiority to the social structure of ancient Ireland, portraying a
communal system that epitomized primitive socialism. For years he had been
depicting this image of the Celtic communal structure, the proto-socialism of

which was "the social principle which underlay the Brehon Laws of our

134
ancestors"39 Although many historians dispute the accuracy of these claims
today, the imagery and ethnic pride evoked by this connection exerted a
powerfully unifying force for many Irish people. According to Connolly’s
interpretation, this system was destroyed by the violent imposition of the capitalist
system on Ireland by the English Therefore, by establishing this line of
reasoning, Connolly could argue that socialism was distinctly Irish, while
capitalism was foreign to the Irish people.

Connolly argued that since this invasion and the subsequent destruction of the
ancient Celtic communal landholding system, the Irish middle classes—both
Protestant and Catholic (and including the Irish hierarchy of the Catholic
Church)-had continuously betrayed Ireland by conspiring with the ruling British

40 Later revolutionaries, such as Wolfe Tone and John Mitchel,

monied interests
realizing the need for social as well as political change, tried to free Ireland by
appealing “to that large and respectable class of the community, the men of no
property".41 The validity of equating Irish capitalists with English foreign
interests, as far as Connolly was concerned, was only conﬁrmed in the Lockout of
1913. Basically, Connolly’s achievement with Labour in Irish History was that he
was able to associate capitalism with England, individualism, and anti-Irish forces,

while identifying socialism as being inherently Irish. The fact that his linking of

socialism to the unique evolution of Irish history was at best a tenuous connection

 

39 WR, 8-13-1898.
4° See also Erin ’s Hope, 1897, 9-11.
41 we, 8-5-1899.

135

did not matter. With this work, Connolly effectively made socialism Irish for
radicals in the Irish working class, and for many progressive nationalists as well.

The purpose, then, of socialism in Ireland was to free Ireland But Connolly. .
had to deﬁne what he meant by a ”free nation":42
A free nation is one which possesses absolute control over all its own internal
resources and powers, and which has no restriction upon its intercourse with all
other nations similarly circumstanced except the restrictions placed upon it by
nature.
In such a situation, the nation-state could develop naturally—a prerequisite to
social progress But nation-based socialism represented only a preliminary stage
in the struggle towards uniting the workers of the world: “The ﬁrst duty of the
working classes of the world is to settle accounts with the master-class of the
world-that of their own country at the head of the list'43 For Connolly, this did
not necessarily validate his critics’ charges that he was unpatriotic.
'Labour...represents the highest form of patriotism, and that true patriotism will
embody the broadest principles of Labour and Socialism"44 Nor did this mean
that his ideas were essentially anti-English. In replying to such charges by British
socialists, he declared”
...under a Socialist system every nation will be the supreme arbiter of its own
destinies, and..will have its independence guaranteed and its freedom respected
by the enlightened self-interest of the social democracy of the world The
statement that our ideals cannot be realized except by the path of violent
revolution is not so much an argument against our pr0paganda as an indictment

of the invincible ignorance and unconquerable national egoism of the British
electorate, and as such concerns English Socialists more than Irish ones

 

42 WR, 2-12-1916

‘3 The Irish Worker, 11-294913.
‘4 The Irish Worker, 1031-1914.
45 Labour Leader, 1-1898.

136

Connolly looked at the English workers as fellow victims, (although they did have
a role in the imperialism that was victimizing other countries) and refused to
advocate hatred for all Englishmen Instead, he saw himself only as a supporter
of justice in Ireland For Connolly, socialism was the “indispensable condition“ to
achieving this justice46 Unlike his predecessors in Irish nationalist traditions,
however, Connolly did not deﬁne Irishness based on religion, birth, or culture, but
class:47
We are out for Ireland for the Irish. But who are the Irish? Not the rack-
renting, slum-owning landlord; not the sweating, proﬁt-grinding capitalist; not the
sleek and oily lawyer; not the prostitute pressman..Not these are the Irish upon
whom the future depends Not these, but the Irish working class, the only secure
foundation upon which a free nation can be reared The cause of labour is the
cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. They cannot be
dissevered

Nationalism and socialism were both necessary elements for Connolly’s
revolution A simple replacement of the English ruling class by an Irish ruling
class would be unsatisfactory for Connolly, because it did not matter to the
peasants which government was evicting them.48 In one of his most famous
diatribes, which foreshadowed the arguments of Third World countries against
neo—imperialism, Connolly claimed:49
If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green ﬂag over Dublin
Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the socialist republic your efforts
would be in vain England would still rule you. She would rule through her

capitalists, through her landlords, through her ﬁnanciers, through the whole array
of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this

 

‘6 L ’Irlande Libre, 1897.
‘7 WR, 48-1916.

‘3 WR, 6-10-1899.

49 Short Van Vocht, 1-1897.

137

country...England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered
hypocritical homage at the shrine of that freedom whose cause you had betrayed
Nationalism without socialism...is only national recreancy. It would be
tantamount to a public declaration that our oppressors had so far succeeded in
inoculating us with their perverted conceptions of justice and morality that we .
had ﬁnally decided to accept those conceptions as our own, and no longer needed
an alien army to force them on us

These abstract declarations of an interdependence between Connolly’s
socialism and nationalism were best illustrated when he applied them to an issue
he was facing during his time. The Home Rule question was divisive in the labor
movement, as Ulster capitalists, who had much of their business tied up in
markets throughout the British Empire, were willing and eager to exploit religious
differences among their workers in order to maintain close political and economic
ties with Britain In the early part of the century, Connolly gave his grudging
support to the middle-class idea of Home Rule, seeing a tactical advance in it
For Connolly, it was not yet a social issue, but more of a technically political one,
and he hoped that Ireland could avoid some of the bloodshed of an additional,
purely nationalist revolution Just as Connolly hoped to use the ballot box to
take Ireland past mere trade unionism and into the realm of socialism (where
workers would do away with masters), he also hoped to eventually take Ireland
past constitutional relationships with the British Crown into the realm of
republicanism (where Ireland would be its own master). In both cases the system
would have to be fundamentally altered, and not just reformedso By 1916,

Connolly had come to see the Home Rule Bill as an empty promise that was no

longer worthy of even grudging support because it prohibited the right to redeﬁne

 

5° WR, 8-27-1898

138

property relationshipssl

Connolly’s integration of nationalism and socialism was not always popular with
other socialists Just as he was unable to understand their willingness to get
involved in the First World War, most of them could not understand why he was
willing to sacriﬁce his life in the apparently nationalistic Easter Uprising In
some respects he is comparable to other, more famous socialists—such as Lenin,
Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh—who were all known for their attempts to adapt

Marxism to their respective national situations52

Connolly was one of the ﬁrst
Marxist thinkers, and certainly the greatest Irish Marxist, to shape Marxism into a
speciﬁcally nationalist variety. Irish Marxism, in this case. That is the
accomplishment for which he is best known, but it was his work on integrating

religion with socialism that may prove to have the most potential.
Connolly, Socialism And Christianity

Connolly’s Catholic faith was, like his socialism, based in ethical reasoning Both
Catholicism and socialism, in Connolly, were indicative of the centrality of moral
issues in his philosophical basis However, religion was a decidedly non-
"scientiﬁc' side of his thinking, as opposed to his views on the ”science” of

socialism. But this does not mean that Connolly’s arguments regarding religion

 

51 WR, 2-12-1916.

52 Lenin was one of the few of Connolly’s fellow Marxists to defend
Connolly’s participation in the Easter Uprising He did this based on the
principle of national self-determination

139

did not employ the same sharp and passionate reasoning of his political discourse
Connolly’s treatment of religious issues may not have employed the theologian’s
vocabulary—not a surprising revelation when one considers that he was writing . .
primarily for a working-class audience; but his handling of the issues suggests a
deep and theological understanding of the subject

Although references to religion are scattered throughout Connolly’s writings,
his most comprehensive work on the subject is found in Labour, Nationality and
Religion, which was published in 1910. The thesis of the work-that a person
could be a socialist as well as a Catholic at the same time without any
contradiction—is a principle that Connolly held dear to his death. The work was
written simply as a rebuttal to a series of anti-socialist ”Lenten Discourses“ given
by a Father Kane, S.J., in Dublin in 1910. Therefore, Connolly followed no
distinct logic of his own in the work, but used Kane’s line of reasoning as a
framework for his response, and that structure offers an advantageous framework
to study Connolly’s defense of his integration of Catholicism and socialism at this
point as well Within this structure, Connolly not only refuted what he saw as
one of the clergy’s best (yet still ineffective) attempts at putting socialism under
the ban of the Catholic Church, but he also succeeded in proving the
compatibility of socialism with Christianity (and Irish nationalism).53

Connolly started out with a blistering attack of the Roman Catholic Church’s
role in Irish history. He listed instance after instance where the Church acted in

the interests of the English / capitalist oppressors, to the detriment of the Irish

 

53 LNR, 7.

140

people His list began with Rome’s sanction of the initial Norman invasion of
Ireland, and demonstrated the Church’s seemingly perpetual stand against all
Irish independence movements, thereby implicating the Church hierarchy in many
of the outrages in Ireland’s history. In such a critique, Connolly almost comes
across as a bigoted Protestant or an atheist (although he had ﬁrmly defended the
Church against the attacks of other socialists, such as Daniel de Leon, in the past,
particularly on family issues); but he had a speciﬁc purpose for this He was
criticizing the actions of the Church not only from a socialist perspective, but
from the viewpoint of one who was sincerely committed to the faith and who, out
of affection for the Church, wanted to see the institution change its misguided

policies of the pasts4

He simply refused to grant the Church or the clergy the
freedom from criticism and scrutiny that they had traditionally enjoyed in

Catholic Ireland, particularly when they used their position of respect to attack
the people by attacking socialismss He showed that the laity had the right and
responsibility to ignore the Church’s unjust directions, because history always
showed that the reformers and revolutionaries were vindicated by events, and by
the Church itself, which always seemed to support the ideas of the “radicals“ a
generation after their deaths: the Church had always proven to be reactionary and

short-sighted

 

54 In fact, Connolly’s commitment to Catholicism led him to defend the
Church in many socialist circles, to the point where, in a lecture to the ITUC at
Liberty Hall in 1968, Owen Dudley Edwards called Connolly "one of the best and
most enlightened apologists the Catholic Church has seen since the Industrial
Revolution" This lecture was published as The Mind OfAn Activist-James
Connolly, (Dublin, 1971) 30.

55 See, for example, WR, 7-1-1899, and The Irish Worker2-28-1914.

 

€111

[ht

141

In examining the Church in this manner, Connolly viewed it as an historical
entity in Ireland, instead of an irreproachable successor to Christ. The analysis
supported his Marxist conclusions: in many respects, the Catholic hierarchy had. .
the same interests as Protestant and capitalist oppressors Church opposition to
Irish independence movements had little to do with religious principles and much
to do with the protection of the status quo in which the hierarchy enjoyed a
privileged position From this study, Connolly decided that in the current struggle
against injustice, the Church would still try to be on the side that it thought was
most likely to dominate. Although the Church would hedge its bets and try to
conveniently forget its anti-socialist stance when socialism prevailed, Connolly was
genuinely concerned that, once again, the institution of the Church would be on
the wrong side and that this time it would be too late to make up for its
miscalculations6 Connolly did not want a socialist society where religion would
either whither away, or be viewed as an enemy of progress, but he wanted to
promote the elements of "true religion” in the Catholic Church:57
...when the organized Socialist Working Class tramples upon the Capitalist Class
it will not be trampling upon a pillar of God’s Church but upon a blasphemous
deﬁler of the Sanctuary, it will be rescuing the Faith from the impious vermin
who make it noisome to the really religious men and women
Therefore, Connolly hoped to help the Church adapt and change, as it had in the
past, but this time for the better. Still, the self-centeredness of the Church

hierarchy led to Connolly’s dim view of this part of the institution:58

 

56 Harp,9-1908
57 Harp, 1-1909.
53 LNR, 15.

142

In so far as true religion has triumphed in the hearts of men it has triumphed in
spite of, not because of, the political activities of the priesthood That political
activity in the past, like the clerical opposition to socialism at present, was and is
an attempt to serve God and mammon..today (the) robber class, conceived in sin
and begotten in iniquity, asks the church to defend it, and from the Vatican
downwards the clergy responds to the call.

Therefore, many of the moral strictures promulgated by the Church were
morally bankrupt, since the Church itself was simply acting in its own self-interest
by acting as a tool for the capitalist class Connolly’s studies of history always
found the Church siding against the poor and oppressed in Irish history as a
means of capitalist exploitation These methods had personally touched Connolly
and his family, as his daughter, Nora, recalledzs9

He came to Mass with me and the priest began to attack him without naming
him, about something, I forget now it is so long ago. It was something that he
was concerned with, and everybody around us knew it was Connolly and you
could feel the heads turning around and turning around, from each side, you
know, and I put my hand and said, “come on, get up and don’t stay listening to
this" and he just put his hand and sat me down and he said, "you sit down, you sit
down,” he said "Let him have his say, we want our say too."

Connolly also brought this situation up in his Socialism Made Easy when, in
explaining why so many socialists leave the Church, he wrote of a typical
socialist:60

Some Sunday he goes to Mass as usual, and he ﬁnds that at Gospel the priest
launches out into a political speech and tells the congregation that the honest,
self-sacriﬁcing, industrious, clean men and women, whom he calls ”comrades", are
a wicked, impious, dissolute sect..he hears that his immortal soul will be lost if he
fails to vote for capitalism...At such a juncture the Irish Catholic Socialist often
rises up, goes out of the church and wipes its dust off his feet forever.

 

59 Quoted in 0.1). Edwards, 1971,55.
6° Socialism Made Easy, (Chicago, 1908) 31.

143
Connolly felt that the reason that his election campaigns were unsuccessful was
that, like many efforts at social progress, they were victimized by the popular
prejudice fostered by opponents, such as Kane, in the interests of capital.

There were two reasons that Connolly felt that the anti-socialist stance of the
Church was theologically misguided: it ignored the example provided by Christ;
and, it disregarded the teachings of the early Church. In sporadic, but very
effective references to Jesus, Connolly foreshadowed liberation theologians by
claiming that Christ came to an economically oppressed people and, like
socialism, was rejected by the wealthy segments of society. According to
Connolly, like socialists, Christ wanted to serve men, not to rape and plunder, as
the capitalist class did Therefore, the Catholic clergy should try to emulate
Christ rather than try to dominate the public:61
It seems to be unavoidable, but it is entirely regrettable, that clergymen
consecrated to the worship of God, and supposed to be patterned after a
redeemer who was the embodiment of service and humility, should in their
relation to the laity insist upon service and humility being rendered to them
instead of by them...1n all questions of social and political relations of man they
require the common laity to bow the neck in a meekness, humility, and
submission which the clergy scornfully reject
To Kane’s claims that inequality was not only a fact of nature, but also ordained
by God, Connolly responded that, although things naturally could not be in a
state of perfect equality, the injustice of Man’s economic system should not be
blamed on God To Kane’s expressed fears of mob rule, Connolly simply replied
that the ”mob," a more righteous class than the capitalists ruling elites,

represented the people for whom Jesus died.

 

5‘ LNR, 7-a

144
Similarly, the early Church was closer to the true religion of Christ than the
modern, middle-class controlled Church could ever hope to be Connolly’s text is
inundated with the quotations of early Church leaders who seemed to hold a
proto-socialist perspective, as in this quote from St. Ambrose:62
Nature furnishes its wealth to all men in common God beneﬁcently has created

all things that their enjoyment be common to all living beings, and that the earth
become the common property of all...Only unjust usurpation has created the right

of private property.

By demonstrating the positions of saints and popes of earlier times regarding this
issue, Connolly destroyed Kane’s claim that the Catholic Church had always
supported a divine right to private property.

The thrust of Kane’s argument was that socialism and Catholicism are
incompatible He constructed his basic argument around three fundamental
issues, which Connolly proceeded to dismantle one by one: family, religious
freedom, and the atheism of socialist doctrine Kane espoused the
misconceptions about the socialist treatment of family rights that were popular at
the time He claimed that, under socialism, the state will take priority over the
family, unlike capitalism (which allowed the family to ﬂourish, according to
Kane). For Kane, socialism would force families to surrender their children to a
bureaucratic state (which would be responsible for raising the children), and
wives would be frequently discarded by lustful husbands who would no longer be
restricted by the moral injunctions that Kane associated with capitalism.
Connolly exposed Kane’s sexist conception of the bourgeois family, giving people-

-and particularly working class women (who had superior morals because of their

 

62 Quoted from the title page of Labour, Nationality and Religion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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in:

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145
honorable class background, according to Connolly)-more credit for the ability to
make rational decisions about entering into healthy relationships (Connolly was
quite a feminist) In fact, Connolly pointed out, it was the capitalist countries, .
particularly the United States, where divorce rates and prostitution were soaring
because of the degradation of women which was caused by attitudes which were
engendered by the capitalist system. For Connolly, the family unit, with its lack
of self-centered action and individualistic attitudes, represented the manifestation
of Christian ideals in the basic moral social unit, which should be extended to
society.

To Kane’s charge that socialism would prohibit religious freedom, Connolly
explained that religious oppression was most often evident in conservative forces,
and liberal ideologies were most often involved with ideas that were hostile to
religion Although there were obviously some atheists in the socialist movement,
it was only the "blatant and rude atheism of some of its irresponsible advocates“
that had repelled many people from socialism, largely because this was
emphasized by its anti-socialist opponents63 Connolly claimed that, in reality,
there were more atheists among the leading capitalists and that the slanderous
charges of atheism were only indicative of an entrenched, privileged class that
was afraid to debate the real values of socialism. In Connolly’s way of thinking,
socialism was only interested in political and economic freedom, to which religion
was not an obstacle, and therefore, religion was not of any interest to the socialist

movement as a whole Any charges to the contrary only revealed the desperation

 

53 Harp, 9-1908.

 

 

 

 

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146

of the privileged classes which needed to engage in a smear campaign to prevent
the workers from considering the true merits of socialism Religious beliefs were
a private and personal matter for Connolly’s socialists, just as Marx’s oWn
atheism, Connolly contended, was a personal conclusion that was never intended
to be forced upon the rest of the socialist movement

Kane was most troubled with the Marxist doctrine of economic determinism
Connolly contended that, although he personally saw the validity of this doctrine,
its acceptance was not essential to every socialist Socialism was more concerned
with the goal of a just human society, and interpretations of history were of a
relatively peripheral importance. Still, Connolly went ahead and gave an able
demonstration of the validity of this concept, using Christianity’s view of the
institution of slavery as an example. Basically, Connolly argued that Christianity
had accepted (or at least tolerated) the morality of slavery as long as it had been
an economically proﬁtable institution With the changing economic conditions
brought about by the Industrial Revolution, society found that the exploitation of
an oppressed pool of wage-labor was more cost-effective than the maintenance of
slaves Therefore, Christianity proclaimed the immorality of slavery, but
simultaneously was able to justify the blatant and intentional impoverishment and
exploitation of the working classes for the beneﬁt of the propertied classes Thus,
Connolly concluded, economic conditions determine consciousness and morality,
and institutions such as religion had acted to support that consciousness

Regarding the question of the compatibility of Catholicism and socialism,
Connolly was unequivocal. If, as Kane had claimed, socialism was simply the

belief in the ownership of the means of production by the state, then other beliefs

147
were not logically precluded Connolly pointed out that Kane himself had to
admit that logically, there was no mutual exclusion of Catholicism and socialism,
(even "militant socialism“) and Connolly alluded to the growing group of Catholic
socialists to support this position At another point, Connolly was more explicit
in his denial of any logical preclusion of socialism from Catholicism:64
...And if it is permissible according to Catholic doctrine that Democracy should
be applied to the government of countries, it cannot be immoral for Catholics to
advocate the democratic ownership of workshops, ﬁelds, mills, and factories If
this is conceded—and it cannot logically be refused—then my Socialism is
consistent with my Catholicism..
In fact, according to Connolly, socialism was often more Christian than the
Catholic Church.

Connolly was very careful to emphasize that politics and religion concerned two
separate and distinct spheres of inﬂuence in human affairs Just as it would be
wrong for socialism to interfere with an individual’s religious freedom, the Church
had no rights in the secular sphere, and any attempt at encroachment by the
Church, or any assertion of a right to do so, was simply to be regarded as a false
doctrine Any attempt to direct the laity in secular issues was to be ignored,
according to Connolly. Socialism, on the other hand, was a matter for the
stomach, not the soul Connolly saw socialism as logical, scientiﬁc, and inevitable
It was based on the ”facts” of historical materialism, did not share the revealed
nature of scriptures, and had no claims to people’s spirituality.

Still, Connolly was convinced that, although they were two distinct areas, any

intelligent person who studied the facts would see, as Connolly did, that the

 

64 Catholic Times, 11-8-1912.

148
logical place for the true Christian was the socialist movement It was likely that
individual socialists, such as Connolly, could see in their religion a justiﬁcation for
their socialist activities and their individual socialist philosophies Owen Dudley.
Edwards claimed that ”Connolly perceived, as few men by his time had done, an
essential inter-dependence of Catholicism and Socialism.‘6s But generally,
revealed religion could not offer a factual basis for scientiﬁc socialism as a whole
Socialism welcomed, but did not need, religiously motivated activists, according to
Connolly. So, in addition to his belief that socialist organizations should not
interfere with an individual’s religious freedom, Connolly felt that any attempt to
sectarianize socialism, as had been the case in Ulster, was also wrong because it
alienated workers of other religions who could aid and beneﬁt from the socialist
movement But Connolly did not blame the sectarianization of the labor
movement, a factor most prevalent in Ulster, squarely on Protestant capitalists
In addition to Connolly’s challenge to William Walker, the Protestant labor
leader in Ulster, Connolly also condemned the sectarian tactics of the Catholic
political boss of Belfast, "Wee J oe" Devlin, a Home Rule MP. A “conscienceless
politician” (as far as Connolly was concerned), Devlin drew Connolly’s wrath
particularly for his active support for British recruiting efforts during the First
World War, but also for contributing to the sectarianization of the Ulster working

class with denominational-based political tactics66

 

‘5 0.1). Edwards, 1971,29.
‘6 WR, 8-28-1915.

149

But out of concern for the purity of the Catholic Church, an institution which
he claimed was liable to criticism in secular affairs, Connolly had to challenge its
misguided policy regarding socialism: "It is about time in their own interests that.
the clergy began to study what socialism really is'67 Criticism of socialism was
only indicative of a lack of understanding of socialist theory and goals Morally,
the Church should stop acting in the interests of the exploitative ruling classes. If
the Church was going to take a stand on social issues, it should act against the
injustices in society, not simply by reforming an inherently unjust system, but by
helping to abolish it

Although Connolly personally saw a logical connection between these two
distinct spheres, in restricting religion to private, individual values, he seemed to
de-emphasize the existence of any motivation to social justice inherent in
Christianity, and he did not explicitly characterized the relationship between the
two. However, at several signiﬁcant points, Connolly did point to a positive,
rather than a neutral relationship between Catholicism and socialism In one of
several verbal spats with Jesuit priests, for example, he concluded his defense of a
previous criticism of the role of the Catholic Church in the oppression of the Irish
throughout their history with the declaration: "As individual Catholics we claim it
as our right, nay, as our duty, to refuse allegiance to any power or social system

whose authority to rule over us we believe to be grounded upon injustice"68 At

 

5" Harp, 10-1908.

63 Catholic Times, 11-8-1912 It should be noted that Connolly was explicitly
referring to ”individual” believers, and thus reafﬁrming his beliefs that the Church,
as an institution, was prone to take the wrong side, and that the laity should resist
inappropriate directives from the hierarchy.

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150
another point, in The Re-Conquest Of Ireland (Dublin, 1915), Connolly claimed
that “the earnest teacher of Christian morality sees that in that co-operative
commonwealth alone will true morality be possible".69 His views on progressive.
action by Catholics put him well ahead of his contemporaries, particularly in the
clergy, and his synthesis has long been unappreciated in Ireland‘70 In his views
he was similar to other Christians, such as those in the evangelical movement of
the 19th century and the Liberation Theology of the 20th, who claimed that there
is a moral necessity, because of the teachings of Christ, for Christians to be
involved in public, progressive action with the goal of social justice.

In claiming that a Catholic can also be a militant socialist, Connolly did not say
whether or not a Catholic must be a militant socialist, applying the Catholic
Church’s theory of a Just War to the antagonisms arising from the social
injustices of economic oppression Finally, Connolly never explicitly found a
place for Christianity in Marxist theory. If it is just a part of the superstructure-
that is, it has grown out the economic conditions that change society’s institutions
and consciousness-then it is de-valued If it is part of the substructure—exerting
an inﬂuence on society’s consciousness—and has only been perverted by economic
conditions, then it could offer a separate means of achieving a just society to
Marxists But although Connolly argued that socialism and religion were two
separate spheres in life, both his socialism and his religious beliefs shared a moral

basis

 

69 The Re- Conquest Of Ireland, 332.
70 0.1). Edwards, 1971,32

a _J

151

Connolly’s treatment of religion is signiﬁcant because he helped to establish
the groundwork for later Christian socialists who saw more of a direct connection
between Christianity and socialist thinking He advocated a position that,
although it had to be related to nationalism in the case of Ireland, viewed
socialism as the most accurate manifestation of Christian beliefs regarding the
search for human justice. Connolly recognized that both Christianity and
socialism had similar ends in many respects, and he denied any divine mandate

for an economic system which bred inequality.

Connolly hoped to use his socialism to pull Irish nationalists and the Catholic
Church away from their acceptance of, and support for, the social status quo.
“6th the former group, he envisioned an alliance of convenience The
nationalists’ goal of ending British political domination in Ireland coincided to
some degree with Connolly’s goal of ending British economic imperialist control
of Ireland, and Connolly hoped that cooperation in the direction of a national
revolution would lead to a social revolution, in which elements of the nationalist
forces might participate Wrth the later group, Connolly hoped to convince the
Church to end its unfair attacks on Ireland, and to consider the moral principles
mutually held by Christians and socialists, in the hopes of forging an alliance
based on these principles

Connolly’s work in shaping socialism to the conditions and history of Ireland
brought a distinctly national variety of socialism to the Irish workers By

portraying capitalism as a importation violently imposed on Ireland by foreign

A [—1.

152

oppressors, and socialism as an inherently Irish phenomenon, evident in earlier
Celtic civilization, Connolly promoted an intemationalistic ideology to a ﬁercely
nationalistic country. In following in the steps of some Fenians, such as Charles .
Kickham, in denying the right of the clergy to dictate to the laity in political
matters, he was a leader in the attempt to overcome the obstacle of the religious
prejudice of the Catholic Church against socialism, so that Christianity and
socialism could work together towards shared goals in Ireland, and elsewhere.
His method of combining the different philosophies paralleled his approach to
challenges in his political and labor activities Since many of his ideas were
based on his moral principles, he emphasized the points of agreement shared by
the different concepts: the search for justice in both socialism and Christianity, or
the hope held by Irish nationalists and Irish socialists of creating a better (more
Irish, or communal-Irish) way of life for the Irish people, for example Any
disparities that arose from these integrations were, for Connolly, indicative of the
tendency of bigoted sectarians, manipulative capitalists, and atheist-socialists to
deviate, intentionally or inadvertently from the true central principles of their
professed philosophies: religion, Irish nationalism, or socialism

In evaluating Connolly’s priorities, it is difﬁcult to conclude if he was ﬁrst a
nationalist, a socialist, or a Catholic, because all of these things were very
important to him. A good case could be made for each of the three at different
periods of his life, when one seemed to be more of an end and the others merely
the means But in examining the event in which he intentionally sacriﬁced his
life, the Easter Uprising of 1916, we can perhaps ascertain what was the supreme

goal for Connolly. Connolly, along with Pearse, created a situation in which their

153

military defeat was guaranteed According to F.X. Martin, the two men had
concluded that the circumstances in Ireland required that their lives be sacriﬁced
for the redemption of the nation, and used the Christian imagery of a messianic -
'blood-sacriﬁce” as justiﬁcation for this idea?1

Connolly’s participation in the Rising seemed to have essentially nationalistic
tones to it to observers both then and now. But such a conclusion can only come
from a short-sighted reading of his career. The “redemption” of Ireland would
still be incomplete without a genuine social revolution, according to Connolly’s
theory, and Connolly went to his execution defending his belief that he could be a
Catholic and a Marxist without contradiction So therefore, this event was only
meant to be a catalyst for a progressive chain reaction in which socialism,
nationalism, and Christianity were all to play a role. All three were parts of an
equation which, for Connolly, was larger than any one of its parts, and its goal

was the advancement of justice.

 

71 F.X. Martin, ”The Evolution or A Myth-The Easter Rising, Dublin 1916'
in Nationalism, Eugene Kamenka, editor, (Canberra, 1973).

CHAPTER FOUR

W

Considering the relative weakness of the Irish socialist movement in this century,
Connolly’s inﬂuence has been remarkably broad and deep, yet sporadic, and quite
often a misrepresentation of his original ideas Starting almost immediately after
his execution, James Connolly’s ideas and principles were plundered by various
groups, factions, and individuals who were too often quite willing to twist his
theories and refer selectively to his writings in order to receive his posthumous
endorsement of their particular programs This tendency has signiﬁed an
incomplete understanding of the man and his ideas (However, in all due fairness
to the various parties that competed or are competing for his image, the meaning
of his life, and particularly the motivations for his participation in the 1916
Rising, are still debated by scholars today.) Streets and buildings are named after
James Connolly: the nationalist hero. Leftist organizations and movements have
claimed the name of Connolly: the socialist thinker and activist. But it is
undeniable that his country has never become what Connolly envisioned as an
independent "workers’ republic".

Connolly’s ideas have come to modern generations through several channels;

some obvious, some more obscure. His family carried on many of his labor

154

155

activities and published some of his writings as well as interpretations of his life
and work Two of his daughters published biographies of their father,l and his
son, Roddy, was very active in the socialist and labor movements, and Was in
contact with Lenin and the Bolsheviks2 The ideas of Connolly’s co-conspirators
in the 1916 Rising suggest the impact of his thinking Some politicians, poets,
and (to a lesser extent) priests have embraced and gloriﬁed his image, while
others have viliﬁed him. In both cases many of his ideas have been
misrepresented, watered down, sanitized, qualiﬁed, or simply ignored Scholars
have analyzed him, often trying to cram his broad contributions into one narrow
category or another. Activists and revolutionaries have claimed his intellectual
creations for guidance, while frequently degenerating into doctrinaire idolization,
and relying on the stagnant, strict, and dogmatic extraction of quotations from his
work, often out of context But, at least until the late 19605, his ideas-with the
notable exception of his nationalism—had been largely forgotten outside of some
sections of the labor movement, academics, and small radical groups

In examining the inﬂuence of his syntheses, it is convenient and useful to study
the various individuals he impressed and inspired, and the institutions and
movements he shaped—or at least those that claim him as a shaping force In
order to examine the impact that Connolly’s ideas had on his fellow Irishmen, the
following sections outline and assess the claims to his image made by some of the

key individuals and groups in 20th century Ireland, and look for his reﬂection in

 

l N. Connolly O’Brien, (1935) 1975; Ina Heron Connolly, James Connolly-A
Biography, in Liberty, eight installments, (Dublin, March-October, 1966).

2 M. Milotte, 1984, 2

156
the ideas and actions of others. Under this scrutiny, it becomes apparent that his
ideas are claimed by many, including some substantial groups such as the Labour
Party and the IRA/Sinn Fein, and some peripheral groups like the CPI and the -
IRSP, but clearly understood by few. His impact has often been ambiguous and
peripheral in Irish society, while it often has been more relevant and central to
the many groups (often themselves quite peripheral) that, accurately or not, claim
him. Connolly’s inﬂuence can be seen most clearly in the period, quite obviously,
towards the end of his career; and to a lesser, but potentially more relevant
extent, since the re-emergence of the violence in Northern Ireland in the late

1960s

Early Inﬂuence

One of the earliest groups to be inﬂuenced by Connolly was the Irish
intelligentsia Starting particularly with the 1913 Lockout, Connolly’s cause
attracted much sympathy from the writers, poets, and playwrights involved in
Dublin’s spectacular literary renaissance, which was centered on the Abbey
Theatre, and included a very strong Irish nationalist element Although the
Lockout, in the ﬁnal analysis, was a blow to organized labor, it did serve to focus
the attention of such ﬁgures as W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and George
Russell ("AB“) on the plight of the workers Furthermore, Connolly developed
personal relationships with progressive nationalists such as Countess Constance
Markievicz, Maud Gonne (MacBride), and the emerging writer, Patrick Pearse,

around the time of the Lockout

157
Russell used his own name and reputation to support his stand as one of the
most outspoken supporters of the workers In a speech in London during the

Lockout, Russell described the miserable conditions of the Dublin slums—among-

the very worst in Europe at the time-and railed against the Home Rulers:3

Many of these dens are so horrible, so unsanitary, so overrun with vermin, that
doctors tell me that the only condition on which a man can purchase sleep is that
he is drugged with drink...For ten weeks the miserable creatures who
misrepresent them in Parliament kept silent When they were up for the ﬁrst
time in their lives against anything real they scurried back like rats to their hole
These cacklers about self-govemment had no word to say on the politics of their
own city... Democratic control of industry will replace the autocracy which exists
to-day. We are working for the co-operative commonwealth to make it the Irish
policy of the future, and I ask you to stand by the men who are beginning the
struggle.

Russell had been very critical of the role of the employers, "an oligarchy of four
hundred masters deciding openly on starving one hundred thousand people,”
because of their insistence on the continued exploitation of “the cheapest labour
market in these islands, with a labour reserve always hungry and ready to accept
any pittance."4 Russell warned them:5
The fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the fate of the aristocracy
of the land if you do not show that you have some humanity still among you...and
your class will be cut off from humanity as the surgeon cuts the cancer and alien
growth from the body.

Finally, in a letter to the citizens in which he acknowledged the unpopularity of

his own views, Russell defended Larkin and Connolly’s movement, and

 

3 AB, "A Speech delivered in the Royal Albert Hall, London, November 1,
1913, to an audience of 12,000 persons“ reprinted in The Dublin Strike, (Dublin,
no date: probably 1913) 2-3.

4 AB, "All Open Letter To The Employers" (10-6—1913), reprinted in The
Dublin Strike, 5, 4.

5 Ibid, 6.

 

158

desperately repeated his warning that the owners were forcing the workers away

from any reasonable solution6

At the beginning of the Lockout, Connolly was still relatively unknown outside.
of labor circles However, his role in the resistance to the Lockout, as one of the
two leaders "beginning the struggle", won him the admiration of such ﬁgures as
Russell Connolly and Russell developed a relationship of mutual respect and
admiration for each other. Within a few years, Russell’s poetry was to glorify
Connolly as a leader of the Easter Uprising, and suggested AE’s appreciation for
Connolly’s theories, in addition to their friendship:7

The hope lives on age after age,

Earth with its beauty might be won

For labour as a heritage,

For this has Ireland lost a son.

This hope unto a ﬂame to fan

Men have put life by with a smile,

Here’s to you, Connolly, my man,

Who cast the last torch on the pile.
Connolly, conversely, credited the “great genius" of Russell with educating urban
workers to the beneﬁts of co-operation as practiced by Irish peasants8

Through his close friendship with Maud Gonne—an intellectual partner,
sometime ﬁnancial supporter, family friend, and Abbey Theatre actress—Connolly

also encountered W. B. Yeats, although their relationship was not always as

 

6 AB, "All Appeal To Dublin Citizens" (11-13-1913) in The Times, reprinted
in The Dublin Strike.

7 AE (George Russell), “To the Memory of Some I Knew Who are Dead
and Who Loved Ireland“ in Owen Dudley Edwards and Fergus Pyle, editors,
1916, The Easter Rising, (London, 1968) 220-1.

8 The Re-Conquest Of Ireland, 330-1.

159

appreciative as Connolly’s and Russell’s Connolly occasionally attended the
Abbey Theatre, which was run by Yeats, and they periodically participated in
activities with and for each other, but Connolly was also quite critical of the
conceited Celtic nationalism which Yeats championed9 But in the aftermath of
the 1916 Rising, Yeats, along with George Bernard Shaw, led the opposition to
the consequent repression In his poetry, Yeats wondered if his works were
responsible for inspiring the Easter Rising, and then, with a line from one of the
Rising’s participants, decided: ”Because I helped to wind the clock/I come to hear
it strike"10 But despite their common Irish nationalism, Yeats was not very
political, much less radical Still, in perhaps his most famous verse on the
subject, "Easter 1916', Yeats insightfully and prophetically hinted at the mutable
nature of the martyrs’ images:11

I write it out in a verse-

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born
But, although Yeats may have helped to inspire the Rising, his inﬂuence does

more to underscore the romanticism and theatrical ﬂair of many of the

participants: Pearse and his brother William, Joseph Plunkett, and Thomas

 

9 Harp, 3-1908

10 W.B. Yeats, "The O’Rahilly" in Roger McHugh, editor, Dublin 1916,
(London, 1966) 333-4.

1‘ W.B. Yeats, "Easter 1916' in n McHugh, 1966, 335-7.

160

MacDonagh all had close ties to the Abbey Theatre 12 Although Connolly had a
relationship with Yeats that displayed the clash of socio-economic values, it also
highlighted the openness and variety of Dublin’s dynamic intellectual milieu at . .
the time 13 Connolly was quite interested in the theatre, as a poet, songwriter,
and author of two plays (one of which is extant), and also for the propaganda
value it held One observer praised Connolly’s ”piercing analysis” of productions,
and his "feeling for the theatre".14 Furthermore, when he was not rubbing elbows
with the likes of George Bernard Shaw, J.M. Barrie, and the political elite in
Ireland at the theatre, Connolly was very much involved in the effort to persuade
Yeats to make his National Theatre more functional for, and appealing to, the
common people 15

Cultural nationalists such as Yeats were very aware of the revolutionary
elements in Dublin, and often, enthusiastically or not, accepted them Dublin’s

intellectual community was a thriving potpourri of conﬂicting and complementing

ideas For his part, Connolly was quite willing to work with these people, and

 

12 Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh (as told to Edward Kenny), The Splendid Years,
(Dublin, 1955) 145-55. Eamonn Ceannt’s family, to a lesser extent, also had ties
to the theatre community. (p. 161)

13 Harp, 3-1908.
‘4 Gerard Fay, The Abbey Theatre, (Dublin, 1958) 75.

15 Ibid, 65, 74. Pay mentions one particular night when "Mr. Wyndham, the
Tory Secretary of State for Ireland, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, leader of
the opposition, Lord Aberdeen, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Mrs Humphry Ward,
Bernard Shaw, J.M. Barrie, and (although not noted by any of the gossip writers)
James Connolly" enjoyed a production (p. 74) However, on 26 March 1904, the
date given by Fay for the performance, Connolly had already emigrated to the
United States This is a factor which, in addition to the fact that Connolly was
not in the social circles on which the gossip writers reported, could explain their
tactless oversight of his attendance

161

employ them and their tools for the advancement of his own cause Countess
Constance Markievicz offers a good example of Connolly’s inﬂuence with this
crowd Although she and her husband had been very involved in the social and .
professional life surrounding the Abbey, and she had been very active in the
cultural nationalist movements, she became increasingly involved with Connolly’s
activities with the founding of the Irish Citizen Army. At the time of the Easter
Rising she was a lieutenant in that organization, and was imprisoned and
condemned to death for her participation in the insurrection After having her
sentence commuted because of her gender, she became active as one of the most
outspoken socialists in Sinn Fein, and denounced the Anglo-Irish Treaty as a
capitalist attempt to keep control of Ireland

One other ﬁgure who needs to be mentioned in this context is Sean O’Casey,
the famous playwright who was also an early member of the Irish Citizen Army,
and who eventually took a more critical view of Connolly. It is hard to
characterize O’Casey’s political views, since his ideas evolved over time At
different points in his life, he was a revolutionary, a socialist, a paciﬁst, a non-
socialist, a nationalist, and a communist. His views on Connolly were most noted
for his attack on what he saw as Connolly’s abandonment of socialist principles in
the Easter Rising Perhaps more signiﬁcantly, O’Casey strongly disagreed with
Connolly regarding the role of the ICA. O’Casey took the radical-elitist view that
it should be more of a revolutionary vanguard engaged in guerrilla warfare and
sabotage, as opposed to Connolly’s conception of a more open and defensive
military body. O’Casey opposed any cooperation between the ICA and the Irish

Volunteers, bitterly attacked the Volunteers, and resigned from the ICA after

162

trying to force Markievicz from that organization for her dual memberships

O’Casey’s later career as a writer offered him the opportunity to publicize his
dislike for Connolly. In his ﬁrst literary endeavor, The Story Of The Irish Citizen.
Army, O’Casey pulled no punches in his portrayal of Connolly. Although the
work starts out as primarily a vehicle for O’Casey’s hero—worshipping of labor’s
”Leader“ at the time, Jim Larkin, O’Casey turned his attention to Connolly to
criticize him on several points O’Casey started by unfairly claiming that
Connolly had never displayed much interest in the ICA up to the time that
Larkin left for the United States, and be portrayed him as one of the moderating
forces in the organization because of his failure to involve himself in the verbal

16

antagonisms between the ICA and the Irish Volunteers O’Casey was correct in

his characterization of Connolly as the leading catalyst for a rapprochement

between the ICA and the Volunteers, but he claimed that this was due to an

“almost revolutionary change that was manifesting itself in Connolly’s nature'”

O’Casey wrote:18

The Labour movement seemed to be regarded by him as a decresent force, while
the essence of his Nationalism began to assume the ﬁnest elements of his
nature...Jim Connolly had stepped from the narrow byway of Irish Socialism to

 

‘5 P. 0’ Cathasaigh (Sean O’Casey), The Story Of The Irish Citizen Army,
(Dublin, 1919, 1971) 51. Such an assertion by O’Casey regarding Connolly’s
supposed lack of interest in the ICA was unfair because, according to John W.
Boyle, it ignores not only Connolly’s essential role in the creation of that
organization, but also his activities on other fronts at the time. These include his
political forays into the Home Rule debate, attacks on the Irish Parliamentary
Party, union activities, and his continued writing

John W. Boyle, "Connolly, The Citizen Army And The Rising“ in The Making
Of 1916, edited by Kevin B. Nowlan, (Dublin, 1969) 57-8, 62

17 P. 0’ Cathasaigh, 1971,52.
‘3 lbid

163

the broad and crowded highway of Irish Nationalism...The high creed of Irish
Nationalism became his daily rosary, while the higher creed of international
humanity that had so long bubbled from his eloquent lips was silent for ever, and
Irish Labour lost a Leader.
Because of Connolly’s apparent retreat, O’Casey concluded that the ICA became.
no more than "the militant Left W‘mg of the Irish Volunteers", and thus it was
Francis Sheehy-Skefﬁngton, rather than Connolly, who carried the true ideas of
pure socialism, and was therefore the ﬁrst true martyr of Irish socialism 19

In one of his most famous of many plays, ”The Plow And The Stars”, O’Casey
ignited a controversy and scandalized Dublin, in part because of prudish moralist
opposition, but more signiﬁcantly because he ridiculed the national heroes by
portraying the leaders of the Rising as self-serving, ambitious, and cowardly
buffoons In 1926, during the play, Maud Gonne and Francis Sheehy—
Skefﬁngton’s widow, Hannah, led protests outside the Abbey Theatre which
required the intervention of the police. However, in his later years, O’Casey
showed signs of appreciation for Connolly’s work as he became more sympathetic
towards world communist ideas

In more recent times, writers have returned to Connolly as a model for the
modern progressives Leftist activist and writer Margaretta D’Arcy collaborated
with her playwright husband John Arden on a series of six plays collectively called
”The Non-Stop Connolly Show".20 With this project, D’Arcy and Arden gloriﬁed

Connolly by following in his footsteps in using the theatre for propaganda and

 

19 Ibid, 53, 63-4.

20 First presented in a 24 hour performance in Liberty Hall, Dublin, at
Easter, 1975. Published as: Margaretta D’Arcy, The Non-Stop Connko Show: A
Dramatic Cycle 0f Continuous Struggle In Six Parts, (London, 1986).

164
educational purposes. They attempted to show Connolly’s commitment to the
struggle for justice through nationhood, and to help Connolly achieve his
appropriate place among other European and American radical leaders of the .
time. Furthermore, by portraying the Easter Rising as a prerequisite to
nationhood, they hoped to combat what they call ’Conor Cruise O’Brien historical
revisionism": the trend among scholars, led by Dr. O’Brien, which claims that
Irish independence would have been achieved through parliamentary means, and

21 A second notable contribution is the

therefore sees Easter 1916 as unnecessary.
more recent Saints And Scholars, by Terry Eagleton22 In this fantasy, Connolly
temporarily evades execution in order to express his ideas with other thinkers at
the time Both of these works suggest Connolly’s continuing signiﬁcance for the
literary community, and particularly underline his value as subject material, albeit
controversial, for writers from the period immediately following 1916 up to the

present time.

Connolly And Pearse

Related to the intelligentsia in some ways, but clearly a distinct force, the IRB
also felt Connolly’s inﬂuence, particularly after the start of the First World War.
Both Joseph Plunkett and Eamonn Ceannt respected and admired Connolly, and

defended his intellectual integrity. But although the former cooperated with

 

21 Ibid, v.
22 Terry Eagleton, Saints And Scholars, (London, 1987).

165

Connolly in planning the Rising, and respected his advice, and the latter even
defended Connolly from Arthur Grifﬁth’s anti-Labour attacks, neither ever really
embraced Connolly’s socialist theories

One of the main channels by which Connolly’s inﬂuence reached this group, as
well as later generations, was his impact on Patrick Pearse, the spiritual founder
of the Irish Republic. Connolly’s relationship with Pearse, although more limited
than his previous dealings with Larkin, was generally more positive It was
through Pearse that Connolly made his most lasting impression on Irish
nationalism But Pearse was no ﬂaming radical waiting for Connolly’s spark
Pearse was a highly respected nationalist (primarily cultural in persuasion) as well
as a writer and the founder and head of St Enda’s College Pearse incorporated
proto-fascist tendencies in his nationalism, particularly with his fascination with
militarism and gloriﬁcation of war. Pearse was also very interested in people of
action, such as Larkin According to Douglas Hyde (who did not look as
favorably on organized labor as Pearse eventually did), Pearse noted:23
...he (Larkin) at least he (Pearse) said was doing something, he was making
history....lt was characteristic of Pearse that he never stopped to enquire if the
something that Larkin was doing was good or bad It was sufﬁcient that he was
doing something.
While one of Pearse’s associates, Desmond Ryan, claimed:24
From the ﬁrst Jim Larkin attracted him and in spite of much adverse criticism, he

insisted on keeping the latter’s son and name-sake at Sgoil Eanna. "Larkin is a
man who does things,“ he used to say. 'He has done more in six months than the

 

23 Quoted from Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph 0f
Failure, (London, 1977) 182; (Hyde’s italics, my parentheses).

24 Desmond Ryan, The Man Called Pearse, (Dublin, 1923) 112. “Sgoil
Eanna' is the Irish spelling of Pearse’s school

166
politicians and ourselves with all our talk"
This attraction to men of action would later bring Connolly to Pearse’s attention
at the height of the Lockout in 1913, when Connolly stepped out from under
Larkin’s shadow.

Up to the time of the 1913 Lockout, Pearse was not interested in the social
side of the national question which consumed him to such a great degree But
with the clash of the Lockout, Pearse, like many of his countrymen, was forced to
consider the social issue In a column in October be compared Dublin to Marie
Antoinette’s France, and taunted Dublin’s middle classes”
I would like to put some of our well-fed citizens in the shoes of our hungry
citizens, just for an experiment...l am quite certain that they will enjoy their
poverty and their hunger...when their children cry for more food they will smile;
when their landlord calls for the rent they will embrace him; when their house
falls upon them they will thank God; when policemen smash in their skulls they
will kiss the chastening baton...They...may come to see that there is something to
be said for the hungry man’s hazy idea that there is something wrong somewhere.
Pearse even went so far as to support the extremism of the Lockout: "If the
workers must have strikes, I agree that their strikes should be thorough and
terrible."26 However, this vague and moralistic sense of social injustice was not
yet well developed or directed, much less connected to the nationalist issue
Through his essentially professional relationship with Larkin, Pearse came to
know the theoretician behind Larkin’s movement, James Connolly. Although he

and Connolly had previously been aware of some of each other’s activities—Pearse

in particular had been impressed by a speech Connolly had made supporting

 

25 P. Pearse, “From A Hermitage” (IO—1913) in The Collected Works Of
Padraic H. Pearse, 172-4; see also R.D. Edwards, 1977, 182-3.

26 D. Ryan, 1923, 111.

167

women’s rights—it was at this time that Pearse started to learn about Connolly’s
speciﬁc ideas on the socialist-nationalist synthesis27 He read Labour In Irish
History several times, started to follow Connolly’s ideas in The Workers’Republic,
and developed a strong interest in Connolly’s hero, James Fintan Lalor.

According to their mutual associate, Desmond Ryan, by early 1914 the two
men had embarked on an intellectual relationship.28 They discussed “the relative
priorities of nationalism and socialism until they joined together in insurrection: it
was Pearse who gave most ground in the battle".29 As far as concerted activities .
at this early stage in their relationship, however, both men took some initiative
with their respective organizations As early as November of 1913, Pearse was
making vague noises pertaining to a type of nationalist front, headed by his
cultural nationalists, but which would embrace "Young Republican Parties,
Labour Organisations, Socialist Groups, and what not" in promoting ”the Irish
Revolution’30 As noted above, Connolly basically had kept himself out of the
verbal feud between the ICA and the Volunteers With the emigration of Larkin,
and Connolly’s assumption of the leadership of the ICA, he initiated a period of
cooperation between the two bodies Because of the drastically altered situation
that came with the First World War, Connolly perceived a need for concerted

action between the nationalist republicans and the socialists He started to make

 

27 Ibid, 117.
23 Ibid
29 RD. Edwards, 1977, 184.

3” P. Pearse, ”The Coming Revolution" (ll-1913) in The Collected Works Of
Padraic H. Pearse, 94.

168

arrangements in the hopes of achieving such a force. Pearse, meanwhile was also
pushing for such a meeting, or at least facilitating its arrangement31 Although
Connolly’s initial overtures were met with some suspicions by the traditionalists. .
within the IRB leadership, his impatience for a Rising manifested itself within the
Military Council of the IRB largely due to Pearse’s intercessions It was agreed
that cooperation would be sought, and contact would be made with Germany
through John Devoy and the Clan na Gael in New York This was possibly done
through Connolly’s daughter, Nora.32 Their relationship continued in this manner
until the Rising, with Connolly being the impatient revolutionary, agitating for
some form of military action against Britain while the war was still going, and
Pearse supporting and promoting these ideas within the IRB and Volunteer
circles Connolly had accepted Pearse’s emotional argument that Ireland could
only be redeemed through the shedding of blood33

With the Rising, Pearse was named President of the Republic, and Commander
of the rebel forces Connolly was Commander of the Dublin district, and by all
accounts, took charge of the direction of the insurrection, with Pearse’s approval
At the end of the week of insurrection, Pearse’s admiration for Connolly stood
out in his praise of the rebel forcesz34
They have redeemed Dublin from many shames, and made her name splendid

among the names of Cities If I were to mention names of individuals, my list
would be a long one I will name only that of Commandant General James

 

31 Letter from Pearse to Joseph Plunkett (8-24-1914) in Seamas O’
Buachalla, editor, The Letters 0f P. H. Pearse, (Gerrards Cross, 1980) 328.

32 N. Connolly O’Brien, 1975, 209-218.
33 Wk, 2-5-1916.
3‘ Manifesto (4-28-1916) in s. 0’ Buachalla, 1980, 372.

169

Connolly, Commanding the Dublin division He lies wounded, but is still the
guiding brain of our resistance.

Connolly’s impact on Pearse’s thinking ”was profound and marked", and is

35 Pearse seems to

particularly apparent in several of Pearse’s speciﬁc writings
have embraced Connolly’s synthesis of social issues with the national question
most distinctly in his later career. This is especially apparent in two works, ”The
Sovereign People"; and the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic. The ﬁrst of these
works concluded Pearse’s last series of pamphlets, which started with ”The
Separatist Idea" and “The Spiritual Nation“, and was published in the months
right before the Rising In ”The Separatist Idea“, published 1 February 1916,
Pearse established the premise of his argument that Tone, Davis, Lalor, and
Mitchel "have chieﬂy developed the conception of an Irish nation“, which he and
his collaborators sought to promote.36 With "The Spiritual Nation", published
almost two weeks later, Pearse examined Thomas Davis to show that ”Davis was
the ﬁrst of modern Irishmen to make explicit the truth that a nationality is a
spirituality?” This was also the idea on which Pearse based his career, and for
which he is most remembered

After laying this groundwork, Pearse launched in to what was probably his most
progressive writing, “The Sovereign People", published 31 March 1916. Desmond

Ryan claimed that this work was inﬂuenced by Connolly’s Labour In Irish History,

 

35 D. Ryan, 1923, 108.

36 P. Pearse, ”The Separatist Idea" (2-1-1916) in The Collected Works Of
Padraic H. Pearse, 263.

37 P. Pearse, ”The Spiritual Nation" (2-13-1916) in The Collected Works Of
Padraic H. Pearse, 303.

170
and to a lesser degree, Connolly’s more recent The Re-Conquest Of Ireland
(published in December of 1915).38 In "The Sovereign People”, Pearse argued
three points: that the governing and economic systems are to be decided upon by
the nation; that the common people are the truest elements of the nation; and
that James Fintan Lalor, whose ideas came to Pearse through Connolly (and, by
extension, were Connolly’s in many respects), correctly recognized that the land
issue-and not O’Connellite/Home Rule repeal—was of the deepest concern to the
common people.

Pearse commenced this argument with the claim that the nation must control
39

all wealth, as well as the means of production He summarized his logic in this

way:40

1. The end of freedom is human happiness

2. The end of national freedom is individual freedom; therefore, individual
happiness

3. National freedom implies national sovereignty.

4. National sovereignty implies control of all the moral and material resources of
the nation

Mth this, Pearse accepted Connolly’s idea of ”the material basis of freedom".
Thus, since 'No class in the nation has rights superior to those of any other class”,
and the ”right to the control of the material resources of a nation...resides in the
whole people“, it is the right of the nation to decide the place of the institution of

private property.41 Although Pearse did retreat from any outright disavowal of

 

3" D. Ryan, 1923, 122.

39 P. Pearse, ”The Sovereign People" (3-31-1916) in The Collected Works Of
Padraic H. Pearse, 333.

4° Ibid, 337.
41 Ibid, 338, 339.

171
the institution of private property, be simultaneously accepted Connolly’s version
of a communal system in ancient Ireland42 This idealization of the past was
even more attractive for the romantic Pearse than it was for its creator, the semi-
romantic Connolly.

Hence, although Pearse distanced himself from outright socialism, he clearly
allowed for such a choice by the nation, accepted a proto-socialist basis for his
own version of nationhood, and, furthermore, attacked capitalism as being too
arbitrary a system for running a nation Pearse claimed that the “possession of
capital” was comparable to the "possession of red heads, or having been born on
a Tuesday“ as a rational measure of leadership to run a nation, and predicted that -
the people would be no more likely to choose a government based on capital
than they would based on hair color or day of birth.43 Pearse went on to accept
Connolly’s emphasis of Tone’s "numerous and respectable class, the men of no

44

property” as the true repository of Irishness He concluded that his own brand

of nationalism came from Tone, through Lalor—and therefore, implicitly through

Connolly. In this endeavor, he quoted Lalor extensively, to show that Lalor”

held in substance that Separation from England would be valueless unless it put
the people—the actual people and not merely certain rich men-of Ireland in
effectual ownership and possession of the soil of Ireland..

This idea was only one step behind Connolly’s assertion that46

 

‘2 Ibid, 340, 339.

43 Ibid, 341-2

44 Ibid, 344-5.

45 Ibid, 350.

‘6 Shan Van Vocht,1-1897.

172

If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green ﬂag over Duan
Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the socialist republic your efforts
would be in vain England would still rule you. She would rule you through her
capitalists, through her landlords, through her ﬁnanciers..
It also highlights Pearse’s romantic orientation towards rural Ireland, following
Lalor, as opposed to Connolly’s focus on the industrialized sections of Ireland
Thus, Lalor, Connolly, and Pearse adhered to the same principle regarding the
inadequacy of mere political independence from Britain Wlth Pearse looking
back to Lalor’s work in a rural Ireland, and Connolly emphasizing the
industrialized society of the future, their difference on this issue was partly one of
geographic emphasis, but primarily one of social perspective Pearse concluded"
Tone is the intellectual ancestor of the whole modern movement of Irish .
nationalism.. Davis is the immediate ancestor of the spiritual and imaginative part
of that movement, embodied in our day in the Gaelic League; Lalor is the
immediate ancestor of the speciﬁcally democratic part of that movement,
embodied to—day in the more virile labour oganisations; Mitchel is the immediate
ancestor of Fenianism, the noblest and most terrible manifestation of this
unconquered nation...l who have been in and of each of these movements make
here the necessary synthesis
This was Pearse’s last public statement before the Rising, and he prefaced his
"examination of the Irish deﬁnition of freedom“ conclusively: "For my part, I have
no more to say."48

But he did say more, with the Proclamation of the Republic in April 1916. In
this document, written almost entirely by Pearse, Connolly’s inﬂuence is again
apparent It is perhaps the most signiﬁcant example of Connolly’s impact on

Pearse because, although Pearse did not expect the Easter Republic to lead

 

47 P. Pearse, "The Sovereign People”, 370-1.
43 Ibid, 333.

173
directly to an independent Irish State, he certainly recognized the romantic value
of his actions, the Proclamation being probably the most momentous (Although
the initial reading of the Proclamation from the steps of the General Post Ofﬁce
was said to be extremely anti-climactic because of the ambiguous reaction of the
small crowd of on-lookers) Pearse allowed for the extension of political rights to
women, a cause championed by Sheehy-Skefﬁngton and Connolly, but not,
initially, by Pearse Furthermore, Connolly’s assertion, previously explained in
1914 in The Irish Worker, that it was “the right of the people of Ireland to the
ownership of Ireland,"49 was directly borrowed by Pearse, who then elaborated:
...The republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal
opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness
and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children
of the nation equally and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an
alien government...

But despite their close intellectual relationship, there were still some notable
differences between the ideas of Connolly and those of Pearse Connolly
appreciated Pearse as a representative of advanced Irish nationalism, but
generally saw middle-class and parliamentary nationalism as inherently bound to
Britain by its very nature as a creation of British capitalism, and therefore
doomed to failure on the question of independence Pearse, who was more
accepting of other forms of nationalism than Connolly was, was afraid of some
aspects of socialism, particularly the internationalism of socialist thought, which

contrasted with his own strong sense of nationalism Pearse idealized pre-

capitalist and pre-urbanized Ireland, to the point where he can be described as

 

‘9 The Irish Worker, 10-31-1914.

174
reactionary.50 Connolly, on the other hand, accepted industrialization, and hoped
to use material progress in his future society. Pearse also rejected the paciﬁsm
associated with some elements of the socialist and labor organization, such as that
of Sheehy-Skefﬁngton Connolly, although not a paciﬁst himself, did not glorify
violence as Pearse did For example, in December 1915, while referring to the
mass destruction of the First World War, Pearse wrote:5 1
The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe
Heroism has come back to the earth...It is good for the world that such things
should be done The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red
wine of the battleﬁeld Such august homage was never before offered to God as
this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for the love of country.
To this—and probably unaware of the identity of the author —Connolly
respondedzs2
No! We do not think that the old heart of the earth needs to be warmed with
the red wine of millions of lives We think anyone who does is a blithering idiot.
We are sick of such teaching, and the world is sick of such teaching
In fact, Connolly was careful to elaborate on the horrors of war before endorsing

53 and even then any cause had to meet his standards, which

any violent action,
were very comparable to the Just War doctrine of the Catholic Church. He
outlined the situation in which he would use physical force as follows: (1) the
insurgents must agree upon a goal; (2) the goal should center on the removal of

non-representative usurpers of power (the "governing“ and "possessing” class) from

 

50 D. Ryan, 1923, 118.

51 P. Pearse, "Peace And The Gael" (12-1915) in The Collected Works of
Padraic H. Pearse, 216.

52 WR,12-25-1915.
53 The Worker, 1-30-1915.

175
power; (3) constitutional and peaceful methods must be exhausted; and, (4) the
actions of the insurgents must represent the will of the majority.54 Connolly
endorsed the use of the ballot in ordinary times, but viewed the Ulster Crisis and
the World War as an extraordinary situation which presented a unique

opportunity and responsibility to his generations 5

Connolly also did not accept
Pearse’s blood-sacriﬁce idea until almost immediately before the Easter Rising
As late as 16 April, Connolly was giving indications that he still expected the
Rising to succeed, and it was only after the secretive meeting which followed
Eoin MacNeill’s countermanding orders that Connolly admitted to associates that
he expected the rebels to be slaughtered

Still, it is apparent that Connolly had a great impact on Pearse Although
Pearse never became a socialist, it must be remembered that their relationship
lasted only two short (and very hectic) years Most signiﬁcantly, Connolly
persuaded Pearse to accept “the material basis of freedom“ which was so evident

in Pearse’s ﬁnal writings Their mutual acquaintance, Desmond Ryan, concluded

that Pearse’s social gospel was ”startlingly similar to James Connolly’s own“, which

 

54 WR, 7-22-1899. Connolly wrote this outline to contrast his views of force,
as a minor question of methods, with the physical force tradition of Irish
nationalism, which relied on force as a guiding principle His prerequisites
resemble those of the Catholic Church, as expounded by Saint Augustine, except:
Connolly did not require a legal government to declare war—but rather a moral
government; Connolly did not mandate a reasonable chance of victory—as was
evident in the Easter Rising; Connolly did not explicitly distinguish between
soldiers and civilians; Connolly did not explicitly prohibit the humiliation of the
vanquished; and Connolly did not claim that the means had to be in proportion
to the ends However, these exceptions are understandable in view of the fact
that Connolly was dealing with a social /civil and national equation, rather than
simply with an easily demarcated situation of nation against nation

55 WR, 7-22-1899, and 1-22-1916; Forward, 3-14-1914.

176
is more a reﬂection on the force of Connolly’s argument than the weakness of

Pearse’s56

The Labor Movement And Politics

Another participant in the Easter Rising, Michael Collins, represented a much
more typical reaction to Connolly’s synthesis of nationalism and socialism
Collins, who made his reputation by organizing and directing the Irish forces in
the Anglo-Irish War, was one of the leaders of the Free State and its forces
before being killed in the Irish Civil War. During the Rising, Collins was
fascinated with Connollyz57

Of Pearse and Connolly I admire the latter most. Connolly was a realist, Pearse
the direct opposite There was an air of earthy directness about Connolly. It
impressed me. I would have followed him through hell had such action been
necessary. But I honestly doubt very much if! would have followed Pearse—not
without some thought anyway.

However, this admiration for Connolly’s military and organizational abilities did
not guarantee similar support for Connolly’s political ideas Collins was in the
process of organizing some of his ideas just before his sudden death. These
unﬁnished notes, published as The Path To Freedom, display the failure of
Connolly’s ideas to be understood and embraced by one of many leading
nationalists In these writings, largely an attack on the anti-Treaty (republican)

forces in the Irish Civil War, Collins paid some lip service to the Irish labor

 

5‘ D. Ryan, 1923, 106—7.
57 RD. Edwards, 1977, 281-2

177
movement, probably in an effort to separate any labor support from the
republican forces Collins claimed that the Irish nation should recognize no class
distinctions, and he allowed for a limited role for labor~.58
Labour will be free to take its rightful place as an element in the life of the
nation..the new government starts with the resolve that Irish labour shall be free
to play the part which belongs to it in helping to shape our industrial and
commercial future
Collins even accepted Connolly’s interpretation of Irish history. He idealized an
old ”democratic Gaelic social system”, and concluded that, ”economically we must
be democratic, as in the past."59 Furthermore, he claimed that it was The English
economic interest in Ireland that led to the economic and cultural subversion of
the English conquests60 But Collins explicitly supported private property rights
and wanted capital to be used in a positive manner.61 Thus, Collins is a prime
example of Irish nationalism’s tendency to admire Connolly, the nationalist hero,
and ignore or invalidate Connolly’s social message This trend started almost
immediately after Connolly’s death and grew quickly thereafter.

Another participant in the Rising, Eamon de Valera, also went on to great
fame in politics But unlike Collins, de Valera had a long public career which
gave him the opportunity (or necessity) to attempt to claim Connolly for his own
political purposes In addition to his repeated praises of Connolly, the nationalist

hero, de Valera sought to use Connolly, the labor leader, to build his own party,

 

53 Michael Collins, The Path To Freedom, (Cork, 1968) 25, 26
59 Ibid, 49, 102.

50 Ibid, 56, 95.

51 Ibid, 27, 102.

178
Fianna Fail, after he split with the militant republicans in the mid-1920s Mth
the demise of the violent attempt to reject mere Free State status, de Valera
opened the founding meeting of his renewed political efforts by quoting.

Connolly’s famous passage on the importance of social justice for the Irish

people:62

Ireland, as distinct from her people, is nothing to me; and 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 the suffering, the shame and
the degradation brought upon the people of Ireland—aye, brought by Irishmen
upon Irish men and women-without burning to end it, is, in my opinion, a fraud
and a liar in his heart...

In perhaps his most blatant appeal to potential labor support, in 1932-the year

he came to power in the Free State—dc Valera invoked the memory of Connolly

in a speech addressing the problem of unemployment:63

We saw that the economy of this country had in the past been dictated not for
the advantage of the people here, but for the advantage of people across the
water....I am quite willing to admit that, during my whole time in struggling for
the freedom of this country, I had only one object and that was to get free so as
to be able to order our life for the beneﬁt of our own people I never regarded
freedom as an end in itself, but if I were asked what statements of Irish policy
was most in accord with my view as to what human beings should struggle for, I
would stand side by side with James Connolly...and when I differed with the
Labour Party after the Treaty it was because I thought that that party was making
a mistake and that they did not see what James Connolly saw, and what he told
me he saw, that to secure national freedom was the ﬁrst step in order to get the
workers of Ireland the living that they were entitled to in their own country.

 

62 WR, 7-7-1900; quoted by de Valera in Dublin (5-16-1926) in: Maurice
Moynihan, editor, Speeches A nd Statements By Eamon De Valera, I91 7- 73,
(Dublin, 1980) 140. De Valera also referred to this passage in his
commemoration of the Easter Rising on the 17th anniversary of the event, at the
graveside of the leaders, and again on 7 February, 1949; (pp. 237, 525).

53 M Moynihan, 1980, 203.

179

This statement was uttered by a man who led Ireland for approximately one-third
of the 20th century without ever establishing anything that resembled Connolly’s
”workers’ republic”. The speech offers a good example of the way in which
Connolly’s ideas were twisted after his death to ﬁt political needs The Connolly
with whom de Valera wanted to stand side by side was transformed from a
theoretician who claimed that the ”ﬁrst duty of the working class of the world is
to settle accounts with the master-class of the world”, to a nationalist hero who
would reform the government to ease the plight of the workers once they had
freed their country.64

But an even more signiﬁcant example of the failure of Connolly’s ideas to take
hold is with his own labor movement During the executions which followed the
Rising, while Larkin and labor groups in the US. were agitating against his
execution, Irish labor was basically silent Often during his lifetime, Connolly was
viewed as too extreme and confrontational by many in the Irish labor movement
In addition to its desire not to irritate the powers that be, the ITUC and Labour
Party, "mindful that its only industrial base was in Protestant Ulster, stood aloof
from the synthesis which Connolly was forging between the ITGWU and
nationalism'65 By August of 1916, at the Irish Trade Union Congress in Sligo,
the ITUC and Labour Party distanced itself from the Rising and from Connolly,
and the ITGWU disowned the ICA The ICA, which together with the

Volunteers had been transformed into the early Irish Republican Army, quickly

 

5‘ The Irish Worker, 11-29-1913.

65 E. Rumpf and AC. Hepburn, Nationalism And Socialism In Twentieth
Century Ireland, (Liverpool, 1977) 12-3.

180

declined without Connolly’s leadership. (It was revived the following year, with
limited success, but, signiﬁcantly, was later absorbed by the anti-Treaty forces in
the Irish Civil War.) The two men who rose to leadership of the labor .
movement, William O’Brien and Tom Johnson, kept Connolly’s syndicalism, but
downplayed any revolutionary socialism This de-emphasis of Connolly’s
radicalism set the pattern for Connolly’s usefulness to later labor politicians, and
caused Ulick O’Connor to lament:66
Connolly’s socialism and his writing on the control of the forces of production
should have been eagerly debated in a post-revolutionary society. But he was
shanghied by an alleged socialist movement, many of whose most recent leaders
have lost credence because having moved in on the party crying havoc to the
privileged classes, they quickly acquired ministerial posts, collected their pensions ,
and went back to their expensive residences secure from revolutions and cutbacks

Although Connolly had made labor a signiﬁcant factor in nationalist politics, as
evidenced by the Proclamation of the Republic, this inﬂuence had declined within
a few years of his death. Johnson and O’Brien oversaw a steady retreat of Irish
labor from its previous political inﬂuence.67 “0th the threat of conscription in
1918, these two men participated in the opposition to it, but not on the socialist
basis that Connolly had so eloquently established and explicitly developed
Instead, labor looked at Connolly as a nationalist, and joined in the opposition to

conscription that was based almost exclusively on Irish nationalist values During

the 1918 elections, the Labour Party, fearing it could harm the national cause

 

66 Ulick O’Connor, in Dermot Bolger, editor, 16 On 16: Irish Writers On The
Easter Rising, (Dublin, 1988) 21.

67 For a speciﬁc organizational genealogy which traces all of the factionalism
of the labor lsocialist groups after Connolly’s death, see: M Milotte, 1984,

especially chapters 2-4.

181
with class-based politics, withdrew all of its candidates in deference to Sinn Fein,
and thereby made the election a clear-cut referendum on nationalist-
republicanism versus Home Rule /partition (and Unionism in the north). Thus,- .
they removed the socialist question from the national liberation cause, a link
Connolly had attempted to solidify.

Apparently, labor’s most shining success during this period was the ﬁrst Dail’s
1919 adoption of the Democratic Programme, written by Tom Johnson The
document’s most radical language, including promises of worker control of
industries and uncompensated nationalization, was deleted before it was passed
Still, the document carried some of Connolly’s ideas:68
We declare that the nation’s sovereignty extends not only to all the men and
women of the nation, but to all the material possessions of the nation; the
nation’s soil and all its resources; all the wealth and wealth-producing processes
within the nation; and we afﬁrm that all right to private property must be
subordinated to the public right and welfare of the nation...we...declare the right
of every citizen to an adequate share of the produce of the nation’s labour.
Despite the deletion of the radical language, I ohnson was very pleased with its
acceptance. But even this limited success was hollow, as it never had a chance of
real implementation Kevin O’Higgins, the Free State Minister, summarized the
attitude of most politicians when he dismissed the programme as ”pure poetry".69
Sean O’Faolain criticized the document because of its ”purely pious and general

nature that committed nobody to anything in particular...".70 A year later, the

Dail explicitly condemned labor strife as a sectional distraction from the national

 

f 68 Democratic Programme of the 1919 Dail Eireann
‘9 R.D. Edwards, 1977, 340.
70 Henry Patterson, The Politics Of Illusion, (London, 1989) 16.

 

182

liberation struggle because ”the present time when the Irish people are locked in
a life and death struggle with their traditional enemy, is ill chosen for the stirring '
up of strife among our fellow countrymen”71

The labor movement was encountering a vague split in terms of a divergence
of interests at this time The rank and ﬁle were interested in an activist program
which could take advantage of the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War, but
”Connolly’s heirs were more intent on maintaining the union machine and its
bulging coffers".72 Following the example of the Bolsheviks in Russia, Irish
soviets were proclaimed in many areas between 1919 and 1922, with the great
majority of them being set up in the end of this period The most notable
example, though, was the Limerick soviet of 1919, which was started as a
challenge to the British. Although this was the type of worker-oriented political
and social action which Connolly had advocated, his successors failed to offer any
endorsement or support for these actions

With the establishment of the Free State and the tension between pro-Treaty
and anti-Treaty forces, the labor leadership was conciliatory to the non-republican
government, while ignoring the militancy of lower-level labor. O’Brien and
Johnson headed the ﬁrst group to petition the Dail after it had accepted the
Treaty. In doing this, they ignored Connolly’s warnings of an incomplete
revolution, and thereby gave implicit support and validation to the Free State

government in order to obtain some inherently limited reforms The partition of

 

7‘ Ibid, 145.
72 M. Milotte, 1984, 26.

 

183

Ireland which came with the Treaty was also therefore implicitly accepted by
labor leaders When Larkin returned to Ireland in 1924, he tried to reassert
leftist control over the ITUC, but his challenge was effectively opposed by the .
more conservative O’Brien 73

One notable follower of Connolly who went against this trend was William
McMullen, an Ulster Protestant labor activist Connolly had written much
explicitly on the subject of partition McMullen, who was sent to Parliament from
a Catholic area of Belfast, was ”a convinced advocate of Connolly’s synthesis of
the national and social questions”, and thus indicates the trust Catholic workers
had for a Protestant who opposed partition on a class basis74 But the leaders of .
the labor organizations substantially failed or refused to recognize, much less
harness, the widespread radicalism among many of the workers

During the 19305, republicans-both of the nationalist and socialist varieties-
claimed Connolly. The early 19305 saw a red scare inspired by the Catholic
Church and the government in reaction to radical elements within the republican
movement. During the Spanish Civil War, republicans and socialists were again
divided on how to apply Connolly’s socialist-republican philosophy. His memory
inspired progressive republican volunteers, constituting the Connolly Battalion of

the International Brigade, to ﬁght Franco’s forces. (Almost one-half of the

hundred-plus contingent of Irish volunteers died in Spain)

 

73 K. Kelley, 1982,54.
7‘ E. Rumpf and AC. Hepburn, 1977, 198.

184

In 1912, Connolly founded the Independent Labour Party Of Ireland Later
that year, he pushed the ITUC to take a more active political role, and the
groups were joined as the Irish Trade Union Congress and Labour Party,
remaining together until 1930. After Connolly’s death, this organization was
rivaled by the Socialist Party of Ireland, which attracted many of its members
until the early 19205 when the SP1, led by Roddy Connolly, became afﬁliated with
the Comintern. At that time, the SP1 became the Communist Party of Ireland,
and expelled ”reformist” labor unionists This group has remained on the scene in
Ireland as a tiny, yet steady force, but has been plagued by internal squabbles
associated with the tensions in the international socialist camp, as well as over the.
issue of support for the IRA’s violent activities” Meanwhile, the Labour Party
has remained as a signiﬁcant force in Irish politics By rejecting (or ignoring)
Connolly’s revolutionary radicalism it has operated much more in the mainstream
of Irish politics than the CPI has However, the modern Labour Party is more
accurately rooted, ideologically speaking, in the 1918-1922 period, when it worked
with Sinn Fein in the national liberation effort, than in Connolly’s career.76 Still,
the Labour Party claims Connolly and Larkin as its founding fathers, despite the
”cautious, reformist nature” that has pervaded much of its existence According to
Michael Gallagher, ”Labour’s identiﬁcation of 1912 as its foundation date owes

more to an emotional (and political) desire to claim Connolly and the early

 

75 Michael Gallagher, Political Parties In The Republic Of Ireland,
(Manchester, 1985) 97.

76 Ibid, 68-9.

 

185
Larkin than to historical accuracy.”77 As a driving force, the working class
radicalism which ”had eluded Irish Labour since the days of Larkin and Connolly”
was not reclaimed by the Labour Party until the 1960s78 So intimidated was the.
Labour Party by the anti-socialist stance of the powerful Catholic Church in
Ireland that it was not until after the death of Pope John XXIII that ”its leaders
felt safe to declare that the Labour Party was in favour of socialism and a
workers’ republic”.79 In the meantime, de Valera’s Fianna Fail used Connolly’s
national image to attract working-class support, and to keep the anti-partition
hopes alive But the Labour Party was able to revive Connolly as a party hero
when he was rejected by Fianna Fail in the mid-1960s In a speech for the
Golden Jubilee of the Easter Rising, Fianna Fail Taoiseach Sean Lemass
distanced himself from Connolly:80
During this commemoration year many people will ask what the leaders of 1916
would think of the Ireland of today... I think they would be astonished by the
changes which have taken place in economic and social conditions, and in the
outlook of our people in these matters, because these would represent
developments beyond their expectations.. Even many of the views of James
Connolly, revolutionary though they were considered to be in his time, seem out
of date in the circumstances of today.
Besides its signiﬁcance for the Labour Party, which was then free to claim
Connolly, this speech is signiﬁcant for two reasons Regardless of the accuracy of

Lemass’s assessment of modern Ireland, he recognized Connolly’s radicalism,

(although he declared it to be obsolete); and he admitted that the modern Irish

 

77 Ibid, 69; (Gallagher’s parentheses).

78 E. Rumpf and AC. Hepburn, 1977, 157.

79 Tim Pat Coogan, The I.R.A., (London, 1970) 18

3° Speech by Sean Lemass (2-18-1966), quoted in o. D. Edwards, 1971, 5.

186
State does not fulﬁll Connolly’s conception of a workers’ republic. Whether
Lemass was correct or not, his speech disowned Connolly, and thereby made
Connolly’s image available to more radical groups that were eager to present
Connolly, the revolutionary socialist, to Ireland, just in time for the re-emergence
of the troubles in Ulster.

In the late 19605 and early 19705, Connolly’s ideas were moved from the
classroom to the streets Up to this time, various scholars, along with small
groups of leftist activists, kept Connolly’s most radical social ideas alive. In
particular, Desmond Ryan, who had been in the General Post Ofﬁce with
Connolly and Pearse, edited and published three volumes of Connolly’s writings
between 1948 and 1951. However, Connolly’s ideas on partition, revolutionary
warfare, and a national socialist republic attracted activists when the civil rights
movement in Northern Ireland sparked off the recent, extended period of
violence The revival of his ideas has also led to a re-evaluation of his theories

by modern radical scholars

Connolly A nd The Irish Republican Army

The Irish Republican Army has used, and in many instances, continues to use (or
misuse) Connolly’s ideas to justify its violent attacks in Northern Ireland, as well
as (to some extent) against manifestations of what it sees as neo-imperialism by
British and American capitalism in the Irish Republic. For many members of the
IRA, the revolution in Ireland has been incomplete, according to Connolly’s way

of thinking, because political independence is incomplete without economic

187
sovereignty and social revolution Thus, the modern IRA claims Connolly’s ideas
as its guiding force for its social ideology.

The term ”Irish Republican Army” was initially used by Pearse during‘the
Rising in reference to the combined forces of the Irish Volunteers who had taken
up arms (even the traditional pikes) under the leadership of the IRB Military
Council, and Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army.81 The military failure of this force
and the consequent repression guaranteed its demise after the Rising The ICA
re-emerged as a minor force the next year. In an Ireland that had been
”thoroughly radicalized” by the example of the insurgents and the apparently
brutal reaction of the British, the Irish Volunteer movement was popularized, and.
was recognized by the ﬁrst Dail Eireann, run by Sinn Fein, as the Irish
Republican Army in 1919 at the start of the Anglo-Irish War.82 This set the
precedent for the nearly constant relationship between the political Sinn Fein and
the military IRA as the organizations of republicanism in Ireland

One of the leading members of the movement at this time, Liam Mellows, who
was a founding member of the Volunteers, was working for that organization
from the United States, where he escaped to after the 1916 Rising Although his
short life was to end just a few years later when he was executed by the Free
State in 1922, Mellows was signiﬁcant in that he acted as the channel for giving
the post-1916 republican movement its core of social ideology; and his philosophy

was basically Connolly’s His execution by the pro-Treaty government guaranteed

 

81 During Easter Week, this force was also called the ”Army of the Irish
Republic”.

32 K. Kelley, 1982,33.

 

 

188
his entrance into the pantheon of republican hero / martyrs, and gave weight to his
writings Although his social writings were sparse, consisting mostly of notes he
drew up while imprisoned by the Free State, they were characterized by. a heavy.
dose of Connollyism In particular, Mellows was inﬂuenced by Connolly’s Labour
In Irish History, with its dual portrayal of capitalism as a foreign import and
ancient Celtic society as the model of Irish socialism83 Thus, through Mellows,
Connolly was to maintain a constant, although not always dominant, inﬂuence on
the republican movement in the 20th century. .

The Mellows legacy combined with the inﬂuence of Markievicz to maintain a
leftist factor within the republican movement throughout the 1920s Markievicz, _
as one of the few blatantly socialist members in Sinn Fein at the time, held some
inﬂuential positions in the organization, but her views were not accepted by all
elements within that organization Competing with the socialist-republican
tradition was the nationalist-republican tradition The latter was more related to
the nationalism of the IRB variety, which took a decidedly apolitical stance on
future forms of government in Ireland, concentrating instead on complete political
independence form Britain However, both of these ideologies combined in
leading the IRA to oppose the Treaty, and, consequently, the Free State forces in
the Irish Civil War. Furthermore, republicans generally accepted elements of
Connolly’s ideas by basing the republican social philosophy on the acceptably
vague outlines of their legendary predecessors: the 1916 Proclamation and the
1919 Democratic Programme But as the 19205 progressed, even this watered-

 

” J. Bowyer Bell, The Secret Army: The IRA, 1916-1979, (Cambridge, Mass,
1980) 52; H. Patterson, 1989, 20.

189

down version of social theory declined to some extent in terms of inﬂuence

De Valera, former president of Sinn Fein, split with Sinn Fein IIRA in 1926 to
take a purely political approach, thereby rejecting the continued militariSm of the
traditional republicans Many other republicans followed this approach. The
remaining IRA /Sinn Fein was re-energized by a new generation of social-
republicans who, according to one of the new social-republican leaders, Michael
Price, felt that the Labour Party had ”betrayed the Connolly teaching and
tradition in 1922”, and therefore Price hoped to claim Connolly exclusively for the

republican movement.84

Connolly’s image was venerated more in the republican
camp than in the labor organizations, which were descendants of Connolly’s
original creations, but were far removed from his original ideas, and ”which in an
era of creeping conservativism apparently felt uneasy with the wild phrases of
revolutionary socialism”85
Another of the new social-republican leaders, Peader O’Donnell, founded the
Saor Eire group in 1931 to work towards Connolly’s conception of a workers’
republic through the IRA and Sinn Fein When de Valera assumed power in the
Free State government in 1932, he began to chisel away at the republican
movement by offering positions and pensions to its veterans O’Donnell was
creating a distinctly social-republican alternative to de Valera, but his
organization was strongly condemned by the Irish Catholic Church, which, along

with the government, effectively checked the growth of Saor Eire and social-

 

“ H. Patterson, 1989, 60.
35 J. Bowyer Bell, 1980,69.

190
republicanism with the red scare of the early 1930s By 1937, when de Valera
proposed his Constitution, republicans offered an alternative that, although
similar to de Valera’s in many respects, tended to resemble Connolly’s ideas to a.
greater degree Dedicated to the Holy Trinity, the document went on to state:86
All the national possessions of the Republic of Ireland, the nation’s soil and all
its resources, all the wealth and all the wealth-producing processes within the
nation belong of right to all the citizens Private property is sanctioned as a
natural right, but shall be subordinate to the public right and welfare.
Leftist republicans did their best to defend themselves from the attacks of the
Church by using Connolly’s arguments in Labour, NationalityAnd Religion that
socialism and Catholicism were, in fact, compatible, and that the clergy had no
special power in political matters But the overwhelming inﬂuence of the Church.
in Ireland isolated the radicals Social-republicans who followed Connolly’s ideas
mourned the fact that ”after his death his teaching was never the basis for
Republican activities"87 Afraid that the republican movement’s nationalist-
republican elements were leading the movement towards fascism, O’Donnell then
founded the radical Republican Congress in the mid-1930s This short-lived
group attempted to compete with de Valera and Fianna Fail for the soul of the
IRA. Although it helped to keep Connolly’s type of social-republicanism alive, it
failed to have any signiﬁcant impact on the IRA.88 With the demise of the

Republican Congress, intellectuals and radical labor activists formed the Connolly

 

86 This proposed constitution was written by Mary MacSwiney; quoted in
Sean Cronin, The McGarrityPapers, (Tralee, 1972) 149.

87 George Gilmore, The Irish Republican Congress, (New York, 1935).
33 K. Kelley, 1982, 59.

191

Association, which remained an isolated but constant voice With sections in
Britain and Ireland, including the Connolly Club of London (which included
veterans of the Connolly Battalion from the Spanish Civil War) this organization.
worked to undermine the British presence in Northern Ireland by leading the call
for civil rights into the 1960s89 The IRA, which had seen its campaign of
violence against Britain in the late 19305 eclipsed by the Second World War, was
aided in its ”Border Campaign” of 1956-62 by the Connolly Association, which
appealed to the British government against the internment of republicans

At the beginning of the 19605, the republican movement still admired Connolly
as a nationalist militant, but the general feeling that the IRA should be apolitical
kept the movement away from most of Connolly’s socialism However, ”in
reaction to the defeats of what came to be seen as an apolitical and purely
militaristic republicanism” with the failure of the Border Campaign in 1962,
Connolly’s ideas were re-emerging as a prominent force within the IRA.90 By the
time of the 1962 Republican Army Convention, many members of the movement,
including the young generation of republicans, had begun ”to deﬁne the mystical
Republic in everyday terms, to analyze the possible strategy and tactics for a real,
multifaceted revolutionary movement, more akin to the ideas of Connolly than
the poetry of Pearse”91 Since it seemed to some that an inﬂux of intellectuals

such as Conor Cruise O’Brien into the Labour Party was failing to radicalize that

 

39 H. Patterson, 1989,85.
9° Ibid, 5.
9‘ J. Bowyer Bell, 1980, 340.

192

organization along Connolly’s militant lines, large sections in the IRA were
seriously considering Connolly’s ideas as a guiding ideology.92 However, since,
with the notable exception of Saor Eire, ”socialism was not a prominent feature. .
of the IRA until the 19605, although it was nearly always present”, the emergence
of this rival to the traditional national-republicanism caused much dissension
within the republican ranks, and eventually precipitated a major split in the IRA
and Sinn Fein93

The growing group of social-republicans in the IRA /Sinn Fein movement took
a more political approach to republican goals In 1967, at the Sinn Fein Ard
Fheis (convention), the leadership set that organization on a course for achieving .
a parliamentary majority by 1972.94 However, the more traditional physical force
adherents, associated with national-republicanism, opposed the de-emphasis of
their principle of violence for the overthrow of British control in Ireland Thus,
when the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland sparked the most recent
phase of the civil violence, the IRA /Sinn Fein membership was essentially
deadlocked over the physical force versus political force issue. The perceived
lack of coherent activity by the republican forces in the new circumstances in
Ulster, an unacceptable retreat according to the nationalist-republicans, led to the

split with the ”Ofﬁcial” IRA /Sinn Fein, and the creation of the ”Provisional”

version of those groups in 1969. Ostensibly, the split was over the priority given

 

92 H. Patterson, 1989, 103.
93 Joanne Wright, TerroristPropaganda, (New York, 1990) 65.
9‘ Ibid, 28.

193

to socialist, as opposed to purely nationalist, ideology. In the IRA, this
disagreement was epitomized by the decision to seek political progress by
recognizing Westminster, the Dail, and Stormont. With the Sinn Fein, the
ideological differences were symbolized by the vote to end Sinn Fein’s
abstentionist policy, the tactic ﬁrst used to create the 1919 Dail Eireann, and,
consequently, used to oppose the ”illegitimate” successors to the ﬁrst Dail since
the Free State was founded. But the political approach taken by the IRA I Sinn
Fein leadership seemed inappropriate to the physical force national-republicans
considering the opportunities arising in the north. Although Connolly’s ideas
were more deﬁned, the Provisionals were more interested in Pearse’s Gaelic
Republic achieved by force than in Connolly’s plans for an Irish Socialist
Republic, particularly if it was achieved through political means.”

The Ofﬁcial Sinn Fein was made up of the more radical and younger
republicans, who emphasized the socialist ideology that had been revived over the
previous decade, and de—emphasized the traditional nationalism of republicanism.
The Ofﬁcial Sinn F ein reconstituted its political efforts as the Workers’ Party, and
embraced the ”stages” theory by attempting to promote the development of the
working class and its unity in order that Connolly’s vision could be achieved at a
later date. Although it is organized in both the north and south, the Workers’
Party has had only limited success in the political arena. Links with its
counterpart, the OIRA, were unofﬁcially maintained, although that organization

no longer exists as a substantial presence, if at all. The Ofﬁcial Sinn Fein—as it is

 

95 1c Kelley, 1982, 132-3.

194
very rarely referred to anymore—still embraces Connolly, and has re-published
some of his works

In 1974, yet another group split off from this one, reconstituting itself‘as the . -
Irish Republican Socialist Party (a variation on Connolly’s Irish Socialist
Republican Party, founded in 1896). This new group, opposing the Ofﬁcials’
unilateral cease-ﬁre in the north and their emphasis of the socialist struggle, tried
to put the republican and socialist struggles on equal footing: to ”end imperialist
rule in Ireland and establish a 32-County Democratic Socialist Republic with the
working class in control of the means of production, distribution and exchange. ”96
This group quickly formed its own military wing, the Irish National Liberation
Army, and engaged in a bloody conﬂict of assassinations with the OI RA before
its political demise.

The Ofﬁcials believed that the continuation of civil strife in Northern Ireland
was only dividing the working class along religious lines, and therefore playing
into the hands of British imperialism’s usual divide-and-rule tactics among the
Ulster working class. The Provisionals’ participation was symptomatic of a
reactionary nationalism that was only counter-productive in the drive towards
working class unity. However, the Provisionals also quickly claimed Connolly’s
ideology as a guiding force. They see Northern Ireland as an attempt by the
British to keep an imperialist presence in Ireland.” Thus, they are one of a very

few groups to take an active stance on the partition of Ireland.

 

9‘ M. Gallagher, 1985, 11s
97 J. Wright, 1990, 52.

195

The PIRA claims to be the present manifestation of the true tradition of Irish
republicanism, from Tone, Young Ireland, and the Gaelic League Connolly ﬁts
into their version of this lineage as ”a model for the use of force against English .
capitalists and against partition, which he saw as supportive of capitalism.”98 In
addition to this precedence of physical force, the PIRA ISinn Fein (since the mid
to late-1970s, the term ”Sinn Fein” usually refers to the Provisionals) came to
include Connolly in its ideology through the continued reliance on the vague
principles set forth in the 1916 Proclamation and the 1919 Democratic
Programme. The Provisionals claim the ”socialism of James Connolly, the
idealism of Patrick Pearse, and the unrepentant Republicanism of Tom Clarke” as

their ideological foundations”

By 1979, Provisional leader Gerry Adams was
signifying the Provisionals’ willingness to resurrect social-republicanism and the
political initiative: ”We must ensure that the cause of Labour becomes the cause
of Ireland, a task neglected since Connolly’s time.”100 Connolly’s condemnation
of an incomplete revolution was thus revived, mandating a social and political ”re-
conquest”, since the British conquest had been on both social and political levels
Connolly’s socialist analysis of British imperialism in Ireland has become a central
tenet of Provisional ideology. Furthermore, in addition to his ideas, Connolly’s

martyrdom was used to give a moral and historical precedent to the republican

hunger strikers in the early 19805.101 The Provisionals have based their

 

93 Ibid, 69.

99 Ibid, 54.

100 Eamonn McCann, War And An Irish Town, (London, 1980) 174.
“"1. Wright, 1990, 209.

196

opposition to Ireland’s participation in the European Community on Connolly’s
ideas, portraying it as a ”European capitalist bloc”. 102

In response to condemnation of their activities by the Catholic Church, ”the .
major inﬂuence on Irish social and political life”, the Provisionals have claimed
Connolly’s synthesis of socialism and Catholicism as ”a primary ideological
inﬂuence.”103 Speciﬁcally, the PIRA uses Connolly’s argument in Labour,
NarionalityAnd Religion, that the Church has always been on the wrong side of
revolutionary movements throughout Irish history, to deﬂect attacks by the
Church. However, in recent years, the Provisional Sinn Fein has reconsidered its
push towards Connolly’s socialist republic, and has suggested a broader movement
working towards complete Irish self—determination, modeled on the African
National Congress and the Freedom Charter. 104

Despite this recent change, the PIRA still bases its existence on the use of
physical force against the British involvement with Northern Ireland However,
Joanne Wright argues that their continued reliance on Connolly in this respect ”is
not historically consistent”. 105 The PI RA uses Connolly’s advocacy of physical
force to justify the central principle in its own organization, the continuation of
violent opposition in Ireland. In fact, Connolly was explicit in his denial of

violence as a principle. 106 Instead, Connolly allowed for violence only as one of

 

"’2 Ibid, 53.

‘03 Ibid, 61.

10‘ H. Patterson, 1989, 189.
105 J. Wright, 1990,52.
10‘ WR, 7-22-1899.

197
many possible methods, and even then set restrictions on situations where
violence could be used In the situation that the PIRA is in, the will of the
majority of people of Ireland to oppose violence at this time is not respected by .
the PIRA, nor is a goal agreed upon by the republicans Whether or not all legal
and peaceful means have been exhausted is debatable.

Although ”there is an historical tradition of socialism within the Republican
movement from Tone onwards,” Wright maintains that ”the Provisionals are not a
linear representation of it.”107 Still, it is undeniable that Connolly’s social-
republicanism has been, and still is an inspiration to many within the republican
movement Members of the IRA in Belfast trace their own republicanism to the ,
time when Connolly lived and worked in that city. 108 His actions have been used
(or misused) as a model for later republican activities, and his ideas are still
claimed by signiﬁcant elements within the national-republican and, even more so,
the social-republican traditions. However, the traditional and continuing tension
between social-republicanism and national-republicanism, as well as the
disagreements over the physical force approach as opposed to the class-based
political approach is symptomatic of an unresolved conﬂict over the ideas of

Connolly and their relevance to modem-day republicanism

 

‘07 J. Wright, 1990,65.

108 Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie, The Provisional IRA, (London, 1987)
112-3.

198
In the current situation in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, Connolly’s
image and ideas are still a signiﬁcant force. Connolly’s ideological descendants-
those who claim his heritage, either correctly or not-cover a wide area: from the.
Labour Party to the CPI, from middle-class Catholic nationalists to working-class
Protestants, from the trade unionists to the violent revolutionaries, and from the
scholars to the unemployed laborers Regardless of the validity of their claims,
these claims are signiﬁcant in that they demonstrate the relevance of what
Connolly represented with his syntheses The fact that a man’s ideas are still
highly respected and still contested for by so many different groups several
generations removed from the context of his original writings says something
about the man and his ideas In particular, the apparent importance of his ideas,
as evidenced by the competition for his image, speaks to the continuing
importance and applicability of the principles upon which those ideas were based
up to a century ago, as well as to the static nature of many of the antagonistic
forces in Ireland over the last century. The fact that so many different groups
can still try to claim his ideas suggests either vague explanations by Connolly, or a

substantial degree of misinterpretation by his descendants

CONCLUSION

Summary

Despite his pronounced radical social-republicanism, Connolly represented a
conﬂuence of several distinct traditions of Irish nationalism. The genealogy of his
social ideology, as he saw it, was from ancient ”communal” Ireland, through Tone,
Lalor, and, to a lesser extent, some elements of the Fenian movement (although I
the accuracy of the ﬁrst two is debateable). To this list, although Connolly did
not include him, could be added Michael Davitt, who took a different approach
than Connolly’s, but with similar conclusions regarding the connection of the
social issue to the land issue. Connolly’s views on Irish nationalism drew ideas
from a wide variety of predecessors. Originating with radical elements of the
Volunteers, Connolly’s type of nationalism, based on the need for an inclusive
Irish republic, was shaped by Tone and certain members of Young Ireland, and
maintained by the Fenians through the era of parliamentary nationalism.
However much he may have detested the idea, Connolly’s nationalism was at
least supplemented by the middle-class traditions of cultural and Home Rule
nationalism. To some extent, Connolly also received his hopes for a broad, extra-
parliamentary movement from the precedents of the Volunteers, O’Connell, and

the Land League. O’Connell and the Land League, in particular, relied primarily

199

200

on moral force, as opposed to the physical force traditions within Irish
nationalism. Although Connolly did not oppose physical force tactics in his own
activities, he preferred to reach his goals through persuasion and the ballot box, -
and would only endorse violence under certain conditions

To a great degree, Connolly’s religious ideas were his own. But precedents can
be seen in the non-sectarianism of the United Irish program, Young Ireland, and
the Fenians In a time of Home Rule crisis in Ulster, and rising fear and
militarization throughout Ireland, Connolly’s non-sectarianism was a refreshing
but lonely plea in, of all places in Irish society, the labor/ socialist movement.
Despite vigorous attempts to win support among Ulster’s Protestant workers,
Connolly’s efforts met the same fate as those of O’Connell and Davitt, who had
also tried to make common cause with the Orangemen. While resisting the split
of Irish labor along denominational and geographical lines, Connolly not only
faced the fears of Catholic and Protestant workers in Ulster, but constant
harassment and open attacks by his own co-religionists In this battle, Connolly
beneﬁted from the attempts by the Fenians to separate the Catholic Church from
political leverage. Connolly afﬁrmed the Fenian claim that the Church had no
special place in purely political matters

In the area of tactics and organization, Connolly’s activities were foreshadowed
by almost all of the groups mentioned above. The extra-parliamentary military
force of the Volunteers was reﬂected in the ICA and the IRB. The United Irish
groups worked both openly and underground Their overtures to revolutionary
France were similar to Connolly’s agitation within IRB circles to contact

Germany. O’Connell’s combination of a moral force movement with implied

201
(albeit empty) threats of violence mirrored Connolly’s combination of appeals to
reason and calls to action. Like O’Connell, Connolly believed that there could be
no justice for Ireland as long as it was united to, and thus ruled by, Britain.
Young Ireland offered a true precedent (more so than Tone) for social-
republicanism, through Lalor. The F enians, still an essential force in Connolly’s
day, represented pure, although limited, Irish nationalism that resisted the
reformism of parliamentary nationalism, and drew its support from the lower
orders of society. Davitt did what Connolly tried to do by combining a broad-
based social movement with a potent political force. And Connolly’s limited
respect for cultural nationalism, as the modern resurgence of certain aspects of .
his idealized ancient Gaelic society, indicated an admiration for their ability to
appeal to and mobilize vast numbers of people.

In varying degrees, Connolly drew upon all of these traditions evident
throughout Irish history in formulating his ideas on the dynamic relationships
between socialism, nationalism, and religion. He saw models and precedents for
his ideas in Ireland’s past, and tried to shape those concepts within the context of
his own day in order to help create the society of the future. In doing this, he
created a speciﬁcally Irish socialism, which he traced to Ireland’s ancient past,
and tried to combat the dominance of the ”un-Irish” import from Britain:
capitalism. Thus, the British imperialist conquest of Ireland, evident on social,
political, and (as Connolly emphasized) economic levels, had to be reversed on
all of these levels So, using his socialism, Connolly tried to enlighten nationalists
and churchmen as to the viability of socialism as an anti-imperialist and

inherently Irish force.

202

However, almost immediately after his death, Connolly was gloriﬁed as a
national hero on the level of Patrick Pearse, rather than as a socialist This
tendency has had a lasting impact on his popular image. Even among his own . .
labor organizations, his revolutionary image was de—emphasized The republican
movement, although rarely dominated by social-republicanism (as opposed to
national-republicanism), kept many of Connolly’s ideas alive through the interest
and advocacy of small, radical elements Within both the republican organizations
themselves, and associated writers, labor organizations, political groups, and
activists Over the last three decades, his socialist ideas have received more
Widespread attention, as indicated by the number of groups which now compete .
to claim his image as their own. However, this struggle for his legacy and the
pressures of contemporary forces have led to distortion of his ideas in the effort

to possess and explain him.

As was noted at the beginning of this thesis, there has not been a concrete
manifestation in Ireland of Connolly’s ideas, which would have enabled observers
to make an evaluation of his thinking based on the actualities of his ”Workers’
Republic” or ”Co-operative Commonwealth”. However, Connolly’s ideas on the
integration of socialism and nationalism, as well as socialism and Christianity, did
not deal only with development of a socialist state in Ireland, but with the
struggle against capitalist and imperialist exploitation. In this conﬂict, his

syntheses were to play an essential role. Thus, his ideas can be assessed in the

203
context of this conflict in 20th century Ireland since his death.

Connolly’s syntheses were in many ways a blending of what were, for him at
least, parallel principles with tactical opportunities His method of harmonizing. ~
ideas was similar to his tendency to cooperate with people who did not
completely share his views. (They were not hard to ﬁnd considering his
radicalism, and the dynamic intellectual environment in Ireland at the time.)
Connolly developed relationships with Pearse, despite Pearse’s middle-class
cultural nationalism and proto-fascist tendencies; with Sheehy-Skefﬁngton, despite
his pronounced paciﬁsm; and with Arthur Grifﬁth, despite the Sinn Fein leader’s
distaste for socialism. In all of these examples, Connolly de—emphasized some
substantial ideological differences with these ﬁgures in order to pursue a greater
goal, and in the process enjoyed mutually beneﬁcial and intellectually stimulating
relationships with such ﬁgures (Although on balance, it seems that Connolly
usually inﬂuenced others more than he was himself swayed)

As with these three ideologies, which are often in conﬂict with each other when
advanced by advocates who are less broad-minded than Connolly (but which he
blended together), he found common ground in thought and action with people
and ideas that he might otherwise have attacked He then emphasized the points
of agreement and acted upon them. He was tolerant and thoughtful, but he
deﬁnitely wanted to promote progress towards solutions to human problems, and
was therefore passionate, determined, insistent, and persuasive. He was able to
blend his socialism with his Catholicism because they were both based on the
principle of seeking social justice. He combined socialism and nationalism

because, not only did he deny the incompatibility of the two ideologies, which

204
many others saw at the time, but he saw a tactical and logical connection between
the two.

Although the primary basis for Connolly’s socialism was his moralism, the
central political expression of Connolly’s socialism was anti-imperialism. The
oppression and exploitation of one group of people by another, exercised on
political, social, and economic levels in the case of British imperialism in Ireland,
had to be stopped This injustice could be resisted through Irish nationalism, and
Connolly embraced that force as a catalyst, but not a complete answer, for solving
Ireland’s problems. Thus, he hoped to make anti-imperialism an essential part of
socialist thought, and, as in the case of labor movements in both Ulster and
Britain, as well as in his own social-republican organizations, he unequivocally
and enthusiastically argued his position. Although he succeeded in basing 20th
century Irish socialism on the anti-imperialist issue, he failed to persuade
socialists outside of Ireland, and even many of those in Ulster, of the validity of
anti-imperialist socialism in the Irish context. He laughed at himself for having
more success in ”interpreting Socialism to the Irish” than in ”interpreting the Irish
to the Socialists”. 1 This anti-imperialist basis for socialist analysis and action
makes his arguments relevant in Ireland and other parts of the world today.
Connolly recognized that throwing the ”British out of Ireland” was an overly
simplistic solution because of the complexities of economic penetration and, to a
lesser extent (according to Connolly), the pro-British sentiments of much of the

Protestant community in Ulster. This warning could be learned by some of the

 

1 Forward, 5-3-1913.

205
present anti-British elements in the Irish republican movement.

However, his use of nationalism, which he treated as a means to a just society
in Ireland, has been inordinately stressed by many. This emphasis of ”the
nationalist” Connolly brings into question the advisability of his willingness to use
nationalism to the extent that Irish nationalism (a tactical consideration), instead
of his ethically-based socialism, became the cause with which he is most
identiﬁed, particularly in light of the Easter Rising.

In the middle to late 1920s, in a pamphlet for Chicago’s ”Little Red Library”
series of radical literature, G. Schuller wrote:2
Irish bourgeois nationalists and British Socialists sought and seek still in vain for
an explanation of Connolly’s leadership of the Easter rising. Much as these latter
sympathized with Connolly as a labor leader and Socialist they could not
understand how he could take part in such an act and thus we see the strangest
endeavors to explain, or rather to excuse Connolly’s attitude during the Red
Easter of 1916.

Socialists have always been puzzled by Connolly’s decision to sacriﬁce his life in
the Easter Rising Although this puzzlement suggests a failure to understand
Connolly’s synthesis of socialism and Irish nationalism, there is some validity to
their concerns regarding the degree to which Connolly allowed himself to be
viewed as a nationalist. O’Casey was initially right in his prediction that ”Jim
Connolly’s earlier ideals will be covered by an ever-rising tide of militant
Nationalism” in post-1916 Ireland3 Perhaps through a miscalculation on

Connolly’s part, his radical social-republicanism was quickly ignored soon after his

 

2 G. Schuller, ”Jim ”Connolly And Irish Freedom, (Chicago, no date; probably
1925 or 1926) 23.

3 P. 0’ Cathasaigh (s. O’Casey), 1971, vi.

 

206
death. Connolly’s socialism was overshadowed by nationalist-republicanism in the
republican movement until it was rediscovered in the 1960s.

However, O’Casey’s criticism is based on the interpretation that Connolly
changed from a socialist / labor activist to essentially an Irish nationalist around
the time of the start of the First World War. In fact, Connolly did not discover
Irish nationalism in 1914, but simply revived it as a focus of his activities after a
long period in the US and of involvement in labor activities The situation in
Ireland had changed, and Connolly was willing to change with it. Labor had been
defeated, or at least set back with the 1913 Lockout; Ulster was militarizing along
sectarian lines, and the rest of Ireland was starting to do likewise; Larkin had left
Connolly in charge of the ITGWU; and the Home Rule debate was bringing calls
for partition and the possibility of pre-empting the republican efforts Connolly
also saw the First World War as offering an opportunity to harness nationalism to
the socialist cause. Therefore, only a socialist strictly tied to doctrinaire
applications of dogma would fail or refuse to attempt to take advantage of the
new opportunities in the changing political climate, and only a narrow
interpretation, such as O’Casey’s, could ignore the evidence of Connolly’s
continued self-identiﬁcation as a socialist, rather than as primarily an Irish

nationalist.4 His ”transformation” was not a political conversion, but a change in

 

4 To charges that Connolly discarded his socialism and converted to Irish
nationalism after the beginning of the First World War, see, for example: WR, 5-
29-1915, 1-22-1916, and The Irish Worker, 11-14-1914. Although it is obvious that
Connolly did emphasize nationalism more after the beginning of the War, the
evidence that shows that he continued to identify himself primarily as a socialist
is undeniable. For a recent attempt to portray Connolly as a nationalist in his
last two years, see: Austen Morgan, James Connolly: A Political Biography,
(Manchester, 1988).

207

emphasis Connolly never rejected the principles that were so apparent for most
of his career, but simply adapted his tactics to new circumstances

It could also be argued that Connolly’s nationalist activities and participation .in
the Easter Rising suggest that he held to the theory that he was participating in
the creation of a politically independent bourgeois state. Modern socialist
revolutionaries who claim Connolly’s precedence can easily claim that Connolly’s
participation in the Easter Rising served to establish a native bourgeois state
(which would be and was still economically dependent upon imperial Britain), as
a necessary prelude to a future socialist (and thus true nationalist) revolution in
Ireland, which falls to their generation. However, there is little in his writings .
that supports this ”stages” approach. In fact, the evidence seems to support the
idea that Connolly was seeking a social revolution at the time. Just a few days
before the Rising he warned his ICA to be ready to continue the ﬁght when their

allies became satisﬁed with mere political independence5

Connolly had planned
to lead a social revolution in Ireland, which he hoped would spread across
Europe, even as he admitted that the Easter Rising itself would be crushed
Obviously Connolly was a nationalist But he never related his nationalism to
his guiding principle of social justice as he explicitly did with his socialism and, to
a lesser degree, his Catholicism. Instead, he treated nationalism as a tactical
approach to the establishment of socialism in Ireland Thus, as a guiding

principle, nationalism does not receive the moral value that socialism does in his

writings But Connolly obviously had to deal with Irish nationalism, and did so

 

5 RM. Fox, 1944, 128.

 

208

willingly. He Wisely employed the framework of the all pervasive nationalism in
Ireland as both the structure upon which to present his socialism, and as a
motivating force for social change in Ireland Still, this nationalism was'not
philosophically based, as was his socialism and Christianity, but was based on
strategy and, to some extent, tradition. As Eagleton has his imagined Connolly
saying: ”Nationalism...is like class You have to have it in order to be rid of it.
It’s not an end in itself.”6 So just as working-class solidarity is not a ﬁnal goal for
Marxists, but a tool to achieve the goal of a classless society, Connolly’s
nationalism was only a conscious decision to help establish a logical prelude to
his vision for the future: ”The internationalism of the future will be based upon
the free federation of free peoples and cannot be realized through the
subjugation of the smaller by the larger political unit ”7

Still, it must be remembered that, just as Marx was a mentor and not a
manacle for Connolly, it would be wrong to idolize Connolly, and make his ideas
into strict doctrines of political action and prophetic assertions His ideas did
contain some signiﬁcant ﬂaws Although Connolly set up a feasible conceptual
synthesis of these three factors on a theoretical level, he essentially failed, in
terms of actualities, to build a lasting manifestation of his syntheses, or to
promote his integration of nationalism and socialism, or socialism and
Catholicism in Ireland to the extent that his contributions in these areas

disappeared almost immediately after his career. He failed to respect the

 

6 T. Eagleton, 1987, 131.
7 Forward,6-lO-1911.

209

strength of the traditionalism in Irish peasantry, the adherence to
denominationalism (as opposed to class identiﬁcations) among the Protestant
community, and the anti-socialist leverage of the powerful Catholic Church in a. .
politically free Ireland In underestimating the inﬂuence of these three elements,
he showed both the orientation and weaknesses of his thinking. His ideas tended
too much towards the urban-industrial sectors of Irish society, largely ignoring the
countryside and the growing inﬂuence of the small farmers In neglecting the
land issue and the peasantry, be overlooked the fact that rural Ireland
consistently offered the only even semi-successful basis for revolutionary
movements Connolly failed to recognize or harness this, as Davitt and post-1918
Sinn Fein successfully did Furthermore, Connolly recognized that the weak Irish
working class could be united and motivated with nationalistic sentiments, but did
not expect the widespread support that it gave to non-socialist Irish nationalist
groups such as the Volunteers He tried to convince the Irish that socialism,
unlike capitalism, was distinctly and inherently Irish, but this idea has largely
failed to win acceptance, much less any motivational value in recent years Part
of the reason his linking of the nationalist issue with socialism was ignored was
that, almost immediately, he was portrayed as a radical nationalist, and therefore,
his socialism, particularly as it was linked to nationalism, was largely disregarded

He underestimated the depth and longevity of Protestant nationalism in
Ulster’s working class, as well as the established inﬂuence of the Ulster Protestant
institutions Connolly also failed to adequately assess the conservative strength of
the Catholic Church in Ireland He underestimated the inﬂexibility of the Church

on the social issue, expecting the Church to see the error of its ways If

210

Connolly’s career was measured only by the failure of the labor movement in the
early 19205 to challenge the Church’s anti-socialist inﬂuence (and the labor
movement seemed to be in constant retreat from this onslaught through the
1930s), then it seems that Connolly failed to propagate his social and religious
views even to his immediate followers It was the prejudice and close-mindedness
of the Church, in particular, that prevented his ideas on the integration of these
three subjects from realizing wide-spread acceptance.

The inordinate amount of attention given to his socialist-nationalist synthesis is
a reﬂection of the situation in Ireland in this century, but his Catholic-socialist
synthesis is perhaps potentially more explosive with the decline of the nation-state
in Europe, the decline in traditional Leninist forms of socialism, and the rise of
liberation theology, which has great implications for Ireland since some of
Ireland’s socio-political characteristics resemble the Third World in some ways
There is no apparent direct link between Connolly and liberation theology, but
Connolly was signiﬁcant as one of the people to build the groundwork for the
later acceptance of socialist ideas by progressive elements within the Catholic
Church, and, to some extent, he tried to forge a positive—rather than just neutral—
-relationship between the Church and progressive movements for social justice.
These recent groups have emulated Connolly’s ideas in many ways Connolly’s
use of Marxism, for example, as a guiding (but not binding) idea for analysis and
action, is very similar to the use of Marxist interpretations by liberation

theologians According to one theologian, who quotes Gustavo Guitierrez, the

211

father of modem-day liberation theology:8

Marxism is employed ”to reﬂect on the meaning of the transformation of the
world and the action of man in history.” Class struggle is a daily reality toward
which Christians cannot be neutral: one is either the oppressed or the oppressors
The Marxist view of history spotlights the public arena of conﬂict: ”the division of
humanity into oppressors and oppressed, into owners of the means of production
and those dispossessed of the fruits of their work, into antagonistic social
classes”...Socialism is championed as the vehicle for Latin American
liberation...”Only a radical break from the status quo, access to power of the
exploited class and a social revolution that would break this dependence would
allow for the change to a new society, a socialist society-or at least allow such a
change to be possible.”

This could have great implications for such a situation as the one in Northern
Ireland, which resembles other repressive societies in terms of structures and
ideologies9 Liberation theology represents a new departure which exercises the.
revolutionary potential of Christianity, and has caught both radical and
reactionary forces off-guard Such a theology views Christ as a revolutionary
ﬁgure, much more akin to a Che Guevara than to a more traditional religious
ﬁgure. (An Irish variant of the Bob Jones University brand of religious-political
views is Ian Paisley). Jose Miguez Bonino has described the reaction of various
groups to a Christian initiative in integrating Christianity and revolutionary
socialism in Latin America: 10
Conservative governments, classes, and ideologists see it with surprise and dismay,

as they realize the danger of losing the support of a longtime ally in the struggle
to maintain the status quo. Revolutionaries greet it also with surprise and joy,

 

8 Jose Miguez Bonino, Doing Theology In A Revolutionary Situation,
(Philadelphia, 1975) xii; (William H. Lazareth’s introduction).

9 For a view of liberation theology in another state colonized by Calvinist
settlers in the 17th century, and whose descendants have lived with a ”siege
mentality”, see: Charles Villa-Vicencio, Trapped In Apartheid:A Socio- Theological
HistoryOf The English-SpeakingChurches, (Cape Town, 1988).

10 Bonino, 1975, 42,

 

L.‘

 

212
welcoming their participation, without being able to understand this phenomenon
which runs counter to all their theories about the role of religions and religious
people! And some begin to suspect that there may be a deeper and hidden
connection between the Christian faith and revolutionary change.
Connolly also recognized a ”deeper connection” between his Catholicism and his
socialism. Despite constant attacks by the Church on his attempts to establish the
compatibility of the two conceptual systems, Connolly was able to make their
mutual foundations a subject of his writings Like Connolly, the new theology
denounces the corruption and perversion of Christian institutions in the service of
exploitation: 1 1
...it rereads the history of Christian piety, action, and thought through the means
of analysis adopted in order to unmask and expose the ideological misuse of .
Christianity as a tool of oppression: ”The alliance between Christianity and the
dominant classes explains to a large extent the historical forms assumed by the
Christian conscience.”
Despite his many attacks on the Catholic Church, it should be remembered that
he was also a great defender of the Church within socialist circles Connolly only
wanted to get the Church to cease its attacks on socialism in order that it may
have a place in the socialist society that Connolly believed was quickly
approaching. Although religious questions are not really a true central issue in
the current problems in Ireland, they did play an important role in Connolly’s
thinking As a manifestation of his ”hunger and thirst for righteousness” that
paralleled and complemented his socialism, Connolly tried to use his Christianity
in a positive manner, as opposed to the destructive uses of religion that are

apparent throughout so much of Irish history. Thus, in this context, the ”lights”

that Connolly referred to-”I’ll pray for all brave men who do their duty according

 

11 Ibid, xxvi.

213

to their lights”-just before his execution, could very easily have been inner
convictions or central principles In Connolly’s case, his ”lights”, which were
expressed through socialism, Catholicism, and to a lesser extent, nationalism,
involved justice: for the Irish people, and the Boers, and the laboring classes of
the world

Connolly is now claimed in Ireland by the Workers’ Party (Ofﬁcial Sinn Fein),
the Irish Communist Organization, the Cork Workers’ Club (which has re-
published some of his work), the Labour Party, the PIRA ISinn Fein, the CPI, and
other groups No one party can realistically claim Connolly exclusively for itself.
He was too active, and his focus changed too much and too often for his ideas to
be compressed into the narrow agendas of today’s groups Furthermore, he
himself could not build an effective party apparatus which had any longevity.
Although his ideas on integrating socialism, Catholicism, and nationalism have
substantially failed to build measurable results in the real world of Irish society
and politics, aspects of his thinking are still relevant and signiﬁcant to the extent
that he is a ﬁgure worthy of more than the footnotes of Irish and socialist
historiography. Instead, his ideas offered and, in many respects, continue to offer

a viable alternative to, and interpretation of, the state of affairs in Ireland

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

.35... .3; _ - . .,_ . ...' F'; u. -0 ..

(includes addresses, statements, letters, resolutions, programmes and manifestoes)

DAIE WES (* = incomplete article or unknown title)
ConnollyisArlicles

Catholic Times, (London).
8 Nov 1912 Rome and Irish Catholics
22 Nov 1912 The Controversy With Father MacErlean, S.J.

Daily Herald, (George Lansbury, editor).
6 Dec 1913 A Titanic Struggle

Forward, (Glasgow; paper of the Independent Labour Party).

11 March 1911 Sweatshops Behind the Orange Flag

18 March 1911 J. Redmond MP: His Strengths and Weaknesses
27 May 1911 A Plea For Socialist Unity In Ireland

10 June 1911 Ireland, Karl Marx and William Walker

1 July 1911 *Britain and the Irish working class

3 May 1913 British Labour and Irish Politicians

3 May 1913 Catholicism, Protestantism and Politics

10 May 1913 Many-Headed Opposition

7 June 1913 North-East Ulster

7 June 1913 The Awakening Of Ulster’s Democracy

14 June 1913 The Larne Strike (1)

28 June 1913 The Larne Strike (II)

12 July 1913 July the 12th

26 July 1913 The Humours of Politics

26 July 1913 The Irish Nationalist Press

26 July 1913 *agricultural laborers and socialist organizations
2 Aug 1913 North-East Ulster -

16 Aug 1913 Socialism in Ireland

23 Aug 1913 North-East Ulster

214

215

23 Aug 1913 Belfast and Dublin To-day

30 Aug 1913 Press Poisoners In Ireland

9 Sept 1913 A Forgotten Chapter of Irish History

4 Oct 1913 Glorious Dublin!

1 Nov 1913 The Children, the ITGWU and the Archbishop
2 Feb 1914 A Lesson from Dublin

9 Feb 1914 The Isolation of Dublin

14 March 1914 *physical force

14 March 1914 *rejection of strike by British labour

21 March 1914 The First Hint Of Partition

21 March 1914 Industrial Unity and Political Division in Ireland
28 March 1914 The War In Ulster

11 April 1914 The Exclusion Of Ulster

18 April 1914 The Solidarity of labour

2 May 1914 *resentment towards British labour

9 May 1914 Changes

23 May 1914 The Problems of Trade Union Organization
30 May 1914 The Liberals and Ulster

20 June 1914 Yellow Unions In Ireland

4 July 1914 Labour In The New Irish Parliament

1 Aug 1914 The Latest Massacre in Dublin

15 Aug 1914 A Continental Revolution

22 Aug 1914 A Martyr for Conscience Sake

5 Sept 1914 The Real Situation in Ireland

The Harp, (New York; monthly paper of the Irish Socialist Federation; James
Connolly, editor; Jim Larkin, Dublin editor starting in January 1910).

Jan 1908 The Coming Revolt In India (I)

Feb 1908 The Coming Revolt In India (II)

March 1908 Socialism in Ireland

April 1908 The Language Movement

April 1908 Sinn Fein and Socialism

May 1908 *Church hierarchy and oppression

June 1908 *priests and socialism

July 1908 Political Action (editorial)

Aug 1908 Michael Davitt: A Text for a Revolutionary Lecture (editorial)

Sept 1908 The Irish Masses in History

Sept 1908 ”Roman Catholicism and Socialism”

Oct 1908 *socialism and the clergy

Dec 1908 Facets of American Liberty

J an 1909 *immoral uses of religion to support capitalism

Sept 1909 Learning Their Lesson

Nov 1909 Capitalism and the Irish Small Farmers

Nov 1909 *socialism, nationalism, and famine

Jan 1910 A New Labour Policy

April 1910 Labour and Politics in Ireland

 

 

216

International Socialist Review.
Oct 1909 Ballots, bullets, or - ?
Feb 1910 Industrialism and Trade Unionism
March 1915 Revolutionary Unionism and War

The Irish Nation, (Dublin; W. P. Ryan, editor).
23 Jan 1909 Sinn Fein, Socialism And The Nation
23 Jan 1909 Socialists And The Nation

Irish Work, (Dublin; James Connolly, editor; only one issue, succeeded The Irish
Workerwhen that paper was suppressed on 4 December 1914).
19 Dec 1914 Courtsmartial and Revolution

The Irish Worker, (Dublin; started by Jim Larkin, June 1911; James Connolly,
editor 24 October to 5 December 1914).

6 July 1912 *hope in the younger clergy

30 Aug 1913 The Dublin Lockout: On the Eve

25 Oct 1913 *physical force

8 Nov 1913 Importation and Deportation

29 Nov 1913 *Britain and the Lockout

13 Dec 1913 Arms and the Man

20 Dec 1913 A Fiery Cross or Christmas Bells

14 Jan 1914 The Humours of Politics

28 Feb 1914 The Lenten Pastorals: A Challenge

14 March 1914 Labour and the Proposed Partition of Ireland

4 April 1914 Ireland and Ulster: An Appeal to the Working Class
8 Aug 1914 Our Duty in This Crisis

8 Aug 1914 The Carsonite Position

22 Aug 1914 On German Militarism

22 Aug 1914 America and Europe

29 Aug 1914 The War Upon the German Nation

12 Sept 1914 The Friends of Small Nationalities

19 Sept 1914 Ruling by Fooling: ”Home Rule on the Statute Book”
26 Sept 1914 Some Perverted Battle Lines

3 Oct 1914 Redmond Cannot Deliver the Goods

3 Oct 1914 A Matter Of Coercion

10 Oct 1914 Forward Policy for Volunteers

24 Oct 1914 The Ballot or the Barricades

31 Oct 1914 The Hope of Ireland

14 Nov 1914 Rally for Labour

18 Nov 1914 ”Disturbed Dublin”

217

L’ Irlande Libre, (Paris; Maud Gonne, editor).
1897 Socialism and Irish Nationalism

Labour Chronicle, (Edinburgh; monthly).
1 Dec 1894 Party Politicians—Noble, lgnoble and Local

The New Age, (London; A. R. Orage, editor).
30 April 1914 Old Wine in New Bottles

Rossa Souvenir, (Dublin; for funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa).
July 1915 Why the Citizen Army Honours Rossa

Shan Van Vocht, (Belfast; Alice Milligan, editor; republican monthly).
Jan 1897 Socialism and Nationalism
Aug 1897 Patriotism and Labour

The Socialist, (Glasgow).
June 1904 *the perversion of socialism

The Worker, (Dublin; James Connolly, editor; followed the suppression of Irish
Work, suppressed February 1915).
30 Jan 1915 Can Warfare Be Civilised?

(The) Workers’Republic, (Dublin; James Connolly, editor).
15 Oct 1889 *Chamberlain and Imperialism

13 Aug 1898 The Fighting Race

13 Aug 1898 The Men We Honour

13 Aug 1898 *Wolfe Tone

20 Aug 1898 The Roots of Modern War

27 Aug 1898 Labour Representation

27 Aug 1898 Peasant Proprietorship and Socialism
3 Sept 1898 British and Russian Imperialism

10 Sept 1898 British and Russian Imperialism

24 Sept 1898 The Irish Land Question

1 Oct 1898 The Language Movement

8 Oct 1898 Parnellism and Labour

10 June 1899 Let Us Free Ireland

1 July 1899 Father Finley SJ. and Socialism

22 July 1899 Physical Force in Irish Politics

5 Aug 1899 *Wolfe Tone

19 Aug 1899 The South African War (1899-1902)

26 Aug
2 Sept
16 Sept
4 Nov
18 Nov
2 Dec
12 May
23 June
30 June
7 July
7 July
15 July
28 July

March

May

1899
1899
1899
1899
1899
1899
1900
1900
1900
1900
1900
1900
1900
1903
1903

218

Law and Order

Land League

A Labour Lord Mayor

Socialism and Imperialism

The South African War (1899-1902)
*language

*socialism and nationalism

*Wolfe Tone, Home Rule

The South African War (1899-1902)
The Coming Generation

Irish Freedom

Ireland Sober Is Ireland Free?
*patriotism and labour

*language

Labour Representation

The Workers’Republic, (Dublin; James Connolly, editor; followed suppression of
The Workerin February 1915). _

29 May
29 May
29 May
5 June
5 June
5 June
12 June
12 June
19 June
19 June
19 June
25 June
3 July

3 July

12 July
17 July
17 July
24 July
24 July
31 July
7 Aug

28 Aug
4 Sept
18 Sept
2 Oct

9 Oct

30 Oct

30 Oct

6 Nov

1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915

The Dublin Lockout and Its Sequel
Moscow Insurrection of 1905
*editorial on the morality of workers
Our Disappearing Liberties

A Labour Day Speech In Dublin
Insurrection in the Tyrol

College Green: a Labour Candidate
Revolution in Belgium

After the Battle

liberty and Labour

Defense of the Alamo

War at Home

The Right to Strike

Revolution in Paris

Lexington

Coercion in England

June 1848

Street Fighting—Summary

Strikes and Revolution

The Man and the Cause

Ireland’s Travail and Ireland’s Resurrection
Wee Joe Devlin

The Party Versus The People

God Help the Poor Irish

James Keir Hardie

In Praise of the Empire

A War for Civilization

For the Citizen Army

Diplomacy

6 Nov
13 Nov
20 Nov
27 Nov
4 Dec
4 Dec
11 Dec
18 Dec
25 Dec
8 Jan

15 Jan

19 Jan

22 Jan

5 Feb
12 Feb
12 Feb
26 Feb

1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1915
1916
1916
1916
1916
1916
1916
1916
1916

11 March 1916
11 March 1916
18 March 1916
18 March 1916

25 March 1916
25 March 1916
1 April 1916
8 April 1916
1896

1897

1902

Jan 1903
Jan 1908
3OJan 1908
1910 orl911
1911

1912

1913

Jan 1913
April 1914
April 1914
1914

9 May 1916

219

Recruiting for the Irish Citizen Army
Ireland-Disaffected or Revolutionary?
The Manchester Martyrs
Conscription

”Trust Your Leaders!”

Dublin Trade and Dublin Strikes
*rebellion or constitutionalism
Economic Conscription

Two F ateful Christmas Weeks

The Volunteers of ’82

Economic Conscription

The Programme of Labour

What Is Our Programme?

*Irish soldiers for Britain

What Is a Free Nation?

Cannon Fodder for British Imperialism
The Slums and the Trenches

The Days of March

The Slackers

The German or the British Empire?
The National Festival

The Slackers

*imperialism

The Call to Arms

The Irish Flag

bun-lures um ‘iol'vs .‘t'h 4'11! I.“

Programme of the Irish Socialist Republican Party (Dublin)
Address to Workers on Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee
Address to Workers on Coronation of King Edward VII

Wood Quay Ward, Election Address (Dublin)

Declaration of Principles of the Irish Socialist Federation (N.Y.)
Letter to J Carstairs Matheson

Aims and Methods of the Socialist Party of Ireland (Dublin)
Address to Workers on Visit of King George V

Resolution: ”Belfast Labour Meeting and Home Rule Bill”
Address: ”To The Linen Slaves Of Belfast”

Belfast Municipal Election Address

Address to Workers on the Independent Labour Party of Ireland
Address to Workers: ”Ireland Upon The Dissecting Table” (ILPI)
Statement to Belfast ICA: ”War: What It Means To You”

Last Statement (to court-martial)

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W

W169
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The Irish Worker, (Dublin), James Connolly, editor; published for a single and
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Collins, Michael, The Path To Freedom; Cork: The Mercier Press, 1968.

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