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PART II

IRISH CITIZEN ARMY

First floated as an idea by George Bernard Shaw, the training of union men as force to protect picket lines and rallies was taken up in Dublin by “Citizens Committee” chair, Jack White, himself the victim of a police baton charge.

In accepting White’s services, Connolly made reference to the national question: “why”, he asked “should we not train our men in Dublin as they are doing in Ulster”. In the north, the Unionists, labour men among them, were forming the ranks of the Ulster Volunteers. The Irish Citizen Army (ICA) began drilling in November 1913, but then, after it had dwindled like the strike to almost nothing, in March 1914 the militia was reborn, its ranks supplemented by Constance Markievicz’s Fianna Éireann nationalist youth.

After the return to work, the command of the ICA divided on the militia’s future, and in particular on policy toward the Irish Volunteers, the much larger nationalist response to the arming of Ulster Unionism (and of which Markievicz was also a member). Secretary to the ICA Council, Seán O’Casey, described the formation of the Irish Volunteers as “one of the most effective blows” that the ICA had received. Men who might have joined the ICA were now drilling – with the blessing of the IRB – under a command that included employers who had locked out men trying to exercise “the first principles of Trade Unionism”. When it became apparent that Connolly was gravitating towards an IRB strategy of cooperation with the Volunteers, O’Casey and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, the Vice President, resigned, leaving Connolly in undisputed command.

On 4 August 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. The Home Rule Bill received royal assent, but with a suspensory act delaying implementation for duration (and with the reservation that the question of Ulster’s inclusion had still to be resolved). Leader of the IPP, John Redmond, then split the Irish Volunteers by urging them (in the hope of securing Britain’s good faith) to rally to the British Army’s colours.  The vast majority heeding his call – some 175,000 men – reformed themselves as the National Volunteers. This left 13,500 to reorganise under the nominal command of Eoin MacNeill of Gaelic League but, in key staff positions, directed by undercover members of the IRB’s Military Council: Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett.

Urges ”revolutionary action”

In October 1914, Connolly assumed the presidency of the Irish Neutrality League (chairing a committee that included Arthur Griffith, Constance Markievicz and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington), but not as a pacifist. He was urging active opposition to the war and acknowledged that this amounted to “more than a transport strike”. Stopping the export of foodstuffs from Ireland, for example, might involve “armed battling in the streets”.  In the Irish Worker he had already declared that if, in the course of Britain’s “pirate war upon the German nation”, the Kaiser landed an army in Ireland “we should be perfectly justified in joining it”. A further editorial in the ITGWU paper betrayed his exasperation with the “jingoism” of the British labour movement.  It suggested that insurrection in Ireland and throughout the British dominions might be required “to teach the English working class they cannot hope to prosper permanently by arresting the industrial development of others”.

In December, the Irish Worker was suppressed and in May 1915 Connolly revived his old ISRP title, Workers’ Republic. Accompanied by the martial-patriotic poetry of Maeve Cavanagh, Connolly’s editorials continued to urge Irish resistance, and on the express understanding that this could not “be conducted on the lines of dodging the police, or any such high jinks of constitutional agitation”.  He cautioned that those who oppose conscription (the prospect that was drawing crowds to the meetings, the marches and parades of the Irish Citizen Army and of the Volunteers) “take their lives in their hands” (and, by implication, that they should organise accordingly). In December 1915, Connolly wrote: “We believe in constitutional action in normal times, we believe in revolutionary action in exceptional times. These are exceptional times”.

In February 1916, Connolly proposed, that with “thousands of Irish workers” volunteering to fight for British Crown and Empire, only the “red tide of war on Irish soil” would enable the nation to “recover its self-respect”.

Relations with IRB

Connolly was aware of, but not privy to, discussions within the IRB on prospects for a National Rising. Patrick Pearse cautioned his colleagues on treating with Connolly: “Connolly is most dishonest in his methods. He will never be satisfied until he goads us into action, and then he will think most of us too moderate and want to guillotine half of us”.

By the New Year, believing the Irish Volunteers were dithering, Connolly was threatening to rush Dublin Castle, around which he had already deployed his ICA on nightly manoeuvres. Determined to safeguard their plans for an insurrection at Easter, Seán Ó Faoláin claims that the IRB had Connolly “kidnapped”.  A unit of Volunteers had been mobilised to arrest Connolly had he refused to meet with the IRB Council, but Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke and the other IRB leaders resolved matters by finally taking Connolly into their confidence.

Connolly was conscious that his new allies had, for the most part, been silent during the lock-out in 1913.  Labour was not their cause, so that when he himself had proposed a programme for the Irish Volunteers in October 1914, he had confined it to political demands: “repeal of all clauses of the Home Rule Act denying Ireland powers of self-government now enjoyed by South Africa, Australia or Canada”.  According to Desmond Greaves, a week before the Rising Connolly advised his 200 ICA volunteers that, as they were “out for economic as well as political liberty”, in the event of victory they should “hold on to” their rifles.

Easter Week 1916

On 14 April 1916, Connolly summoned Winifred Carney to Dublin where she prepared his mobilisation orders for the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). Ten days later, on Easter Monday, with Connolly commissioned by the IRB Military Council as Commandant of the Dublin Districts, they set out for the General Post Office (GPO) with an initial garrison party from Liberty Hall. Carney (armed with a typewriter and a Webley revolver) served as Connolly’s aide de camp with the rank of adjutant. She was seconded in that role, for the first two days, by Connolly’s 15 year-old son Roddy.

From the steps of the GPO, Patrick Pearse (President and Commander-in-Chief) read the “Proclamation of the Irish Republic”. Connolly had contributed to the final draft, which declared “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland” and, in a phrase that he had often been used, a “resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts”.  In a further symbolic gesture of labour’s stake in the rebellion, Connolly sent the Starry Plough flag, the symbol of Irish labour, to be hoisted by his men over the Imperial Hotel, owned by the man who had organised their defeat in 1913, William Murphy.

By some accounts the rebel strategy of occupying the GPO and other public buildings in the city centre, had been informed by Connolly’s belief that the British were unlikely to rely on artillery, that a regular bombardment of the city would have been possible only if, abandoning their businesses and property, the section of the population loyal to the government was outside insurgent lines.  Connolly’s biographer, Samuel Levenson records an exchange between Volunteers after a British gunboat began shelling their positions from the Liffey: “General Connolly told us the British would never use artillery against us”. “He did, did he? Wouldn’t it be great now if General Connolly was making the decisions for the British”.

Leading men on the street and supervising the construction of barricades, he was twice wounded on the Thursday. Carney refused to leave his side, and was with him the following day, Friday 29 April, when, carried on a stretcher, he was among the last to evacuate the GPO to Moore Street. There Pearse issued the order for the ICA and Irish Volunteer fighters, now under constant British to ”lay down arms”.

As he was being returned to a stretcher to be carried toward the British lines, Connolly told those around him not to worry. ”Those of us that signed the Proclamation will be shot. But the rest of you will set free. ”

Court Martial and Execution 

Connolly was among 16 republican prisoners executed for their role in the Rising. Executions in Kilmainham Gaol began on 3 May 1916 with Connolly’s co-signatories to the Proclamation, Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke and Thomas McDonagh, and ended with his death and that of Seán Mac Diarmada on 12 May. Roger Casement, who had run German guns for the Rising, was hanged at Pentonville Prison, in London, on August 3. Unable to stand because of his combat injury, Connolly had been placed before a firing squad tied to a chair. His body was placed, without rite or coffin, with those of his comrades in a common grave at the Arbour Hill military cemetery.

Site of Connolly’s Execution at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin

In a statement to the court martial held in Dublin Castle on 9 May, he proposed offering no defence, save against “charges of wanton cruelty to prisoners”, and he declared:

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 endeavoring 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.

The night before his execution, he was permitted a visit by his wife Lillie and their 8-year-old daughter, Fiona (whose abiding memory of her father was to be his laughter). He is said to have returned to the Catholic Church in the few days before his execution.  A Capuchin, Father Aloysius Travers administered absolution and last rites. Asked to pray for the soldiers about to shoot him, Connolly said: “I will say a prayer for all men who do their duty according to their lights.”

There was disquiet at Connolly’s execution. In Parliament the government was pressed as to whether there was “precedent for the summary execution of a military prisoner dying of his wounds”. But at the time, the greater outrage was over the executions of William Pearse, put to death, it was thought, simply because he was the brother of the rebel leader, and Major John MacBride who played no part in planning the Rising but had fought against Britain in the Boer War.

Despite the initial public hostility toward the rebels and the destruction they had brought upon Dublin, after the first executions of Pearse, Clarke and MacDonagh, John Redmond warned the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, that any further executions would make his position, and that of any other constitutional party or leader in Ireland, “impossible”.

The nature of Connolly’s socialism, and its role in his decision to join the IRB in the Easter Rising, was disputed by his Socialist contemporaries in both Europe and the United States. It is the central point of contention in the extensive literature that has developed since on his political life and thought.

Writing in 1934, Seán Ó Faoláin described Connolly’s political ideas as:

an amalgamation of everything he had read that could, according to his viewpoint, be applied to Irish ills, a synthesis of Marx, Davitt, Lalor, Robert Owen, Tone, Mitchel and the rest, all welded together in his Socialist-Separatist ideal. He favoured Industrial unionism as the method of approach to what he called variously, the Workers’ Republic, the Irish Socialist Republic, the Co-operative State, the Democratic Co-operative Commonwealth… [The unions] would be he means of popular representation in the Workers’ Parliament; and they would be the power controlling the national wealth … In a word he believed in vocational representation combined with “all power to the Unions”.

While he never had the opportunity to apply and test his principles even on a small scale, Connolly “at least [had] a point of view” and a “definite idea of what he meant by such terms as ‘a Republic’, ‘Freedom’, ‘Emancipation’ [and] ‘Autonomy'”.But Ó Faoláin argues that in the end Connolly’s social-emancipatory ideas proved to be secondary to his nationalism. The night before he was shot, Connolly said to his daughter Nora: “The Socialists will not understand why I am here; they forget I am an Irishman“. For Ó Faoláin this was an admission that “he had, in point of fact, gone over to nationalism and away from socialism”.

Some of Connolly’s contemporaries suggested that there was no inconsistency: Connolly’s socialism was itself merely a form of militant nationalism. Invoking Connolly at the inaugural meeting of Fianna Fáil in 1926, in support of his protectionist programme for national development, Éamon de Valera implied that Connolly’s principal purpose in calling for a worker’s republic was to complete the break with England. Constance Markievicz was also to interpret Connolly’s socialism in purely national, purely Irish, terms. Seizing on Connolly’s portrait of Gaelic society in The Reconquest of Ireland, she summarised his doctrine as the “application of the social principle which underlay the Brehon laws of our ancestors”.

At the same time, there were writers who, convinced that “Connolly’s Irish Catholicism had not been irrevocably blemished by atheistic Marxism”,  found parallels between his commitment to industrial unionism and the corporatist doctrines Pope Leo XIII enunciated in his encyclical Rerum novarum (1891).

In a last statement of his credo, The Re-conquest of Ireland (1915), Connolly affirmed that the outcome of this struggle, the worker’s republic, it not an overweening state. Rather it is an industrial commonwealth in which “the workshops, factories, docks, railways, shipyards, &c., shall be owned by the nation, but administered by the Industrial Unions of the respective industries”.

An early compiler of his ideas, notes that Connolly “nowhere attempts to explain how the general interests of the State, as distinguished from specific interests of the Industrial Unions, are to be provided for”. It was only certain that Connolly was not a “state socialist”. Connolly was, himself, confident that his:

… conception of Socialism destroys at one blow all the fears of a bureaucratic state, ruling and ordering the lives of every individual from above, and thus gives assurance that the social order of the future will be an extension of the freedom of the individual, and not a suppression of it.

In his last six years, Connolly had devoted his energies almost entirely to the ITGWU and to the Irish Citizen Army. A “pairing of union and militia” is central to syndicalist scenarios for social revolution. But Connolly knew that “his union, the ITGWU . . ., weakened by the industrial struggles of 1913-14, was not up to the effort of seizing docks, railways, shipping etc.”.  He made no attempt, prior to or during the Rising, to appeal to workers to join the insurgency. In an address published just one week before the Rising on the forthcoming congress of the Irish TUC, there is no intimation of the impending action. In reference to the war, Connolly’s only advice was that the congress should proceed in August as planned.

A two stage-struggle

At the beginning of 1916, Connolly drew “a crucial distinction between the struggle for socialism and for national liberation”.  In the Irish Worker (23 January) he wrote:

Our programme in time of peace was to gather in the hands in Irish trade unions the control of all the forces of production and distribution in Ireland . . . [but] in times of war we should act as in war. . . . While the war lasts and Ireland still is a subject nation we shall continue to urge her to fight for her freedom. . . . The time for Ireland’s battle is NOW.

His calculation was not based alone on the strategic opportunity presented by Britain’s engagement in France. Connolly had described John Redmond’s pact with the government as “the most gigantic, deep-laid and loathsome attempt in history to betray the soul of a people”.At the beginning of February 1916, he acknowledged that the pact was delivering the working class, and not least by means of simple bribery:

We have said that the Working Class was the only class to whom the word “Empire” and the things for which it was the symbol did not appeal . . . [and] therefore, from the intelligent working class could alone come the revolutionary impulse. . . . But if the Militant Labour Leaders of Ireland have not apostatised the same cannot be said of the working class as a whole . . . . For the sake of a few paltry shillings per week thousands of Irish workers have sold their country in the hour of their country’s greatest need and hope. For the sake of a few paltry shillings Separation Allowance thousands of Irish women have made life miserable for their husbands with entreaties to join the British Army.

In Erin’s Hope (1897), Connolly had claimed that socialists would succeed where the Fenians, and the Young Irelanders before them, had failed, in preparing “the public mind for revolution”.  For this, they would rely on the militant organisation of labour, neither seeking nor accepting the cooperation of men whose ideals were not their own, and with whom they might therefore “be compelled to fight at some future critical stage of the journey to freedom”. To this category, Connolly assigned “every section of the propertied class”.  John Newsinger argues that such talk was now put aside. Connolly embraced “the conception of revolution that prevailed in the inner circles of the IRB: that a small minority must be prepared to sacrifice itself in order to save the soul of the nation”. It was, he suggests, the “politics of despair”. Austen Morgan similarly concludes Connolly “collapsed politically as a socialist. Unable to sustain his faith in proletarian action, that he died “unapologetic Fenian”.

Noting that, two weeks before the Rising, Connolly, was still affirming that “the cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour” and that the two “cannot be dissevered”, Greaves continued to insist that little had changed in Connolly’s fundamental thinking.  R.M. Fox considers the view that Connolly “allowed himself to be dragged away from his labour convictions” to be “foolish” and “superficial”, writing that under the unique conditions of World War 1 he was compelled to “force the independence issue to the point of armed struggle”. But, for Richard English, while this may have been so, it is Connolly’s failure “to persuade any but a tiny number of the Irish people” of his argument that accounts for his “gesture” in 1916. Acceding to the IRB’s “inclusive, cross-class approach to the nation”, his hope was only of an “eventual” vindication of his belief that, once national rebellion had secured “the national powers needed by our class”, social revolution would follow.