Connolly, James

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Connolly, James (1868–1916). Author and union leader, Connolly was the most important Irish socialist in an intellectual and organizational sense. Though unsuccessful in an attempt to reconcile socialism and nationalism, he remains a great influence in Ireland and Scotland. Born in Edinburgh, Connolly joined the British army. Self-educated, he became a socialist organizer in Belfast and Dublin, founding the Irish Socialist Republican Party 1896 and ‘the Workers’ Republic' 1898. From 1902 to 1910 he was in the USA, where he set up the Irish Socialist Federation and published the Harp. Returning to Ireland in 1910, he organized the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union with James Larkin and led the strike following a lock-out in 1913. Badly wounded in the Easter Rising, he was executed strapped to a chair. Irish republican socialism has never recovered from his loss and has struggled to explain his blood-sacrifice. He published Erin's Hope (1897), Labour in Irish History and Labour, Nationality and Religion (1910), and The Reconquest of Ireland (1915).

Michael Hopkinson

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