Connolly, James

Connolly, James (1868–1916), labour leader. Born of Irish immigrant parents in Edinburgh, he imbibed Irish nationalism from a Fenian uncle and socialism from grim experience of working‐class life combined with avid reading of Marx and others. Ironically, he first came to Ireland as a boy soldier in the 1880s. In 1896 he was invited to Dublin to set up the Irish Socialist Republican Party. He established and edited the Workers' Republic, the party organ. A prolific political journalist and pamphleteer, his greatest works are Labour in Irish History (1910) and The Re‐conquest of Ireland (1915). Connolly's advanced socialist‐republicanism made little headway and in 1903, disillusioned with his lack of political progress, and with a growing family, he went to America. There, in the burgeoning socialist political scene, Connolly added an international dimension to his thinking.

In 1910 Connolly was invited back to Ireland to run the newly established socialist Party of Ireland (SPI). Appointed Belfast organizer of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU), he successfully organized the dockers and won a pay rise for striking seamen and firemen. Called in by women linen workers during their unsuccessful strike of 1911, he set up the Irish Textile Workers' Union. Aiming to wean the Belfast movement from the labour‐unionism of William Walker's Independent Labour Party, Connolly convened a ‘Socialist Unity’ conference in Dublin, from which emerged the Independent Labour Party of Ireland (ILP(I)). Only a few Belfast trade unionists, among them Tom Johnson, became members. Connolly, with Larkin, also played a pivotal role in establishing the more important Irish Labour Party, based on the Irish Trade Union Congress (ITUC).

At the height of the home rule crisis, Connolly achieved notoriety in a debate with Walker on socialism and the national question in the socialist paper Forward. He became unpopular with the followers of Joseph Devlin for opposing the Nationalist party's acceptance of the temporary exclusion of Ulster from home rule. His return from jail for his part in the 1913 Dublin lockout was the occasion of a hostile Unionist demonstration at the Great Northern railway station. Connolly underlined his pariah status in Belfast by openly opposing the war in 1914. Both he and his opponents were glad when he was called to Dublin as acting ITGWU general secretary, replacing Larkin, who had gone to America.

Although opposed to an imperialist war, in which the workers on all sides would be the losers, Connolly hoped to turn it with German help into an insurrection against British rule in Ireland. As commandant of the Irish Citizen Army he reached agreement, in January 1916, with the military council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood for a joint insurrection. He and his comrades duly took part in the rising of 1916, in which Pearse described him as being ‘the guiding brain of our resistance’. Connolly sustained leg wounds in the fighting and was propped in a chair to be executed by firing squad.

Although he now passed into the nationalist pantheon, the state that eventually emerged paid him lip‐service, while shunning his ideology. Nowadays, for most Irish people, his name is associated with street‐names, hospitals, barracks, and train stations. His legacy is disputed even among Ireland's small, faction‐ridden left. Labour politicians and trade unionists play down the insurrectionist side. It is only the present‐day republican movement that accords his ideas and reputation full credence.

Bibliography

Greaves, C. Desmond , The Life and Times of James Connolly (1961)
Morgan, A. , James Connolly: A Political Biography (1988)

Peter Collins