James Connolly – the Scot who died for Ireland and freedom

Wounded in the leg during the Rising, and probably already dying from shrapnel wounds, Connolly was tied to a chair and shot by a firing squad in Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin on May 12, 1916.

Thus died a martyr for the cause of Irish freedom who is revered in that country to this day, and always will be. Yet the country of his birth tends to ignore him because he was – how to put it? – difficult, as a revolutionary socialist and Irish nationalist. And that is sad because James Connolly was by birth and formation a Scotsman first and Irishman second, and he first supped the intoxicating brew of socialism and revolution in his native city of Edinburgh.

He was born at 107 Cowgate in central Edinburgh on June 5, 1868, the son of Irish immigrants John Connolly and Mary née McGinn from County Monaghan. Both his father and grandfather were labourers and the deeply Catholic family worshipped at St Patrick’s Church.

Connolly’s formal education ended at the age of 11, but he was already a voracious reader and would remain an autodidact all his life.

The facts of his early life are bare: after a succession of labouring jobs Connolly joined the British Army, following in the footsteps of his elder brother John. He gave a false name and age and enlisted at 14.

He served in Ireland with the Royal Scots and while there he met the love of his life, Lillie Reynolds, a Protestant who came home to Scotland with Connolly where they were married in April, 1890. They would have six children in all, the eldest, Mona, dying at 13 after a domestic accident saw her sustain unsurvivable burns.

He followed his brother in another sense – John Connolly was a committed socialist and after life in the army and seeing the relentless poverty all around him, so did James. Indeed he succeeded his brother as secretary of the Scottish Socialist Federation.

Connolly moved to Ireland to become the secretary of the Dublin Socialist Club for £1 per week. He had learned something of the printing trade in one of his early jobs and now he became writer, publisher and printer of many socialist pamphlets and publications. By now fully conversant with the works of Karl Marx and other socialist writers, Connolly gained a reputation as a serious thinker on socialism and was one of the founders of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, seeing no conflict with the cause of Irish nationalism.

He always intended it to be a mass movement, writing: “No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression.

“Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant, singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement, it is the dogma of a few, and not the faith of the multitude.”

He was still dirt poor, however, and took his family to the US to seek a better life in 1903. They stayed there for seven years during which time Connolly was very active in socialist and trade union circles. Back in Ireland in 1910, Connolly joined activist Jim Larkin in establishing the Irish Transport and General Workers Union.

Connolly’s oratory and writing was coming to the fore. He summed up socialist philosophy in a sentence: “Our demands most moderate are, we only want the earth.”

In one speech he stated: “Yes, friends, governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.”

He was also an internationalist as well as an Irish nationalist: “Under a socialist system every nation will be the supreme arbiter of its own destinies, national and international; will be forced into no alliance against its will, but will have its independence guaranteed and its freedom respected by the enlightened self-interest of the socialist democracy of the world.”

Connolly was also a proto-feminist, writing long before female emancipation: “The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.”

Though he and “Big” Jim Larkin made a strange pairing – Larkin towered over Connolly and they were never close – they jointly founded the Irish Labour Party in 1912.

Events came to a head in 1914. The great industrial uprising that led to the famous Dublin Lockout of 1913 – tens of thousands of strikers were removed from their workplaces – saw mass police brutality against strikers and Connolly along with another ex-soldier, Captain Jack White, formed the Irish Citizen Army to defend workers.

THEY adopted the plough and stars as their flag, Connolly saying: “The Irish people will only be free, when they own everything from the plough to the stars.” That statement later inspired the play The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey.

The volunteers were well trained by White and Connolly and they stayed united even after the blacklisted Larkin left for the US in 1914, the year in which the Irish Home Rule bill was postponed after the outbreak of World War One.

By now Connolly was in full flow against the British Empire. He once wrote: “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 will be in vain. England will still rule you.

“She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.”

It was the war above all which made Connolly break with Britain and brought him to even greater oratorical heights: “All these mountains of Irish dead, all these corpses mangled beyond recognition, all these arms, legs, eyes, ears, fingers, toes, hands, all these shivering putrefying bodies and portions of bodies once warm, living and tender parts of Irish men and youths – all these horrors in Flanders or the Gallipoli Peninsula, are all items in the price Ireland pays for being part of the British Empire.”

The story of the Easter Rising has been well told elsewhere. Suffice to say that James Connolly was one of the signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and, with his background as a soldier, he became Commandant General of the joint Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army.

The world knows how the Rising ended. The shameful courts martial followed by swift executions are a stain on British honour to this day. Connolly was one of the last to be shot.

Connolly’s daughter, the late Nora Connolly O’Brien, variously a senator of Ireland and graduate of the Sorbonne in Paris, recalled her last sight of her father almost 50 years later. She spoke on a television documentary about him in 1965, saying: “We got in to see my father, and he said, ‘Well Lillie, I suppose you know what this means.’ She said, ‘Oh no, no that’ and he said, ‘Yes Lillie.’ She broke down then and said, ‘But your beautiful life James, your beautiful life,’ and he said, ‘Wasn’t it a full life Lillie, isn’t this a good end?’ She was crying so he looked at me and said, ‘Please don’t cry, you’ll unman me.’ So she tried to control herself, and I was trying to control myself, too.”

Connolly was determined to make his point to the last. Nora continued the story: “Then he said to me, ‘Put your hand down on the bed,’ so I put my hand down on the bed, and he said, ‘That’s a copy of my statement to the court martial, try and get it out.’”

The statement included the following declaration: “We went out to break the connection between this country and the British Empire, and to establish an Irish Republic. We believed that the call we then issued to the people of Ireland was a nobler call, in a holier cause, than any call issued to them during this war, having any connection with the war. We succeeded in proving that Irishmen are ready to die endeavouring to win for Ireland those national rights which the British Government has been asking them to die to win for Belgium. As long as that remains the case, the cause of Irish freedom is safe.

“Believing that the British Government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland, the presence, in any one generation of Irishmen, of even a respectable minority, ready to die to affirm that truth, makes that Government forever a usurpation and a crime against human progress.

“I personally thank God that I have lived to see the day when thousands of Irish men and boys, and hundreds of Irish women and girls, were ready to affirm that truth, and to attest it with their lives if need be.”

At dawn the following morning, he faced death like a soldier. He was just 47.

Connolly’s body and the bodies of all who had been executed were thrown into a mass grave. But that was not the end of the story – indeed he might have adopted the motto of Mary, Queen of Scots: “In my end is my beginning.”

Perhaps Connolly had a foresight of what would happen to him. In 1910 he had written: “Men perish but principles live.”

HE was so right, for it was a huge mistake by the Westminster Government to kill Connolly and the other leaders of the Rising, and after the huge crowd outside the prison dispersed, word spread throughout Dublin and eventually all of Ireland about what had been done to a true working-class hero.

His martyrdom, for that is what it was, inspired many more people to flock to the cause of Irish freedom, and even in Westminster they had to take note of the revulsion caused by the execution of Connolly in particular – Prime Minister Herbert Asquith personally ordered an end to the executions.

Thank the heavens that none of us who believes in the cause of Scottish independence has had to suffer the fate of Connolly and his colleagues. Ours is a peaceful, inclusive and determined campaign for a nation-state run by the people of Scotland for the good of Scotland and all its people.

Is there a lesson from Connolly for us today? The late great Scottish journalist Ian Bell, great-grandson of Connolly’s brother John, believed so. He wrote: “Once upon a time in Europe, a pair of ideals, socialism and nationalism, were not everywhere inimical, or regarded as such. Once upon a time, James Connolly seemed to assert that internationalism without an acknowledgement of national identity is a forlorn, empty gesture.”

Ian Bell died six months before the EU referendum in 2016, so he did not know the insanity that now surrounds Westminster, all of Ireland and Scotland, so Connolly speaks to us perhaps in a European context, for the right-wing Brexiteers seem determined to ignore both the Irish Republic and Scotland as they press ahead with their madness.

Now more than ever, the two countries of James Connolly must take a stand against perfidious Albion’s lunacy. The Empire is long gone. Get over it.