PART III
Farm-labour cooperation
Apart from what he may have witnessed as a soldier, Connolly’s only sustained experience of rural Ireland was three weeks spent in County Kerry in 1898 reporting on famine conditions for De Leon’s Weekly People. Connolly concluded that “the root cause” of the distress was not landlordism per se or an “alien government”, but rather a “system of small farming and small industry” in which the Irish peasant “reaps none of the benefits of the progress . . . [and] organisation of industry”
This was the seemingly orthodox Marxist view to which Connolly was already committed. In Erin’s Hope (1897) he had proposed that “the day of the small farmers, as of small capitalists, is gone” and that salvation lay in “the nationalisation of land in the hands of the Irish state“. From Kerry, he wrote more loosely of the Socialist Republic organising greater “co-operative effort”, but in either case it was an analysis that suggested that “the most important struggles for the Irish peasantry would occur not in the countryside, but between labour and capital in the cities”. There is no discussion of the role the rural population itself might play in the creation of the new republic.
By the time of his return from America in 1910, the combined effects of continued emigration and land reform was effecting a profound social transformation. In Labour in Irish History (1910), Connolly recalls the words of Wolfe Tone: “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.” But after the Wyndham Act (1903), the peasant “was, or else was well on the way to becoming, a freehold farmer–a man of property”. Unmoved by what Connolly supposed was their “memory of the common ownership and common control of land by their ancestors”, it was a status they would defend it with tenacity.
A “large self-confident class of farmer owners” was shifting the balance of class forces in Catholic Ireland against Connolly’s identification of the national cause with labour. Their emancipation from taxation imposed in working-class interest would be “the main economic achievement of independence”. This was not a prospect admitted by Connolly. He suggested rather a farm-labour alliance. A feature of the transition the tenancy to ownership in countryside was the establishment of creameries and other agricultural co-operatives. Participation was often reluctant, and generally failed to support broader networks, but the image was created abroad of Irish farmers as “co-operative trailblazers”. In The Reconquest of Ireland (1915), Connolly celebrates the development and, recalling the co-operative stores his union had opened in Dublin after the Lock-out, “confidently” predicts that, “in the very near future”, the labour movement will create its own “crop of co-operative enterprises”. The stage would then be set for town and country to heal their “latent antagonism” and converge on a common ideal — the “Co-operative Commonwealth”.
Ulster Unionism
In 1898 Connolly had cited “the Protestant workmen of Belfast so often out on strike against their Protestant employers and their Protestant ancestors of 100 years ago [1798] in active rebellion against the English Protestant Government” as a demonstration of what “precious little bearing” the question of religious faith has in the struggle for freedom. Later, when in Belfast for the Socialist Party and the ITGWU, he identified “religious bigotry” as the one obstacle remaining to the acceptance of Irish self-government and thus to the achievement of socialist unity on a separate all-Ireland basis. But he understood this as a political force arising, not from confessional differences, but from the deliberate recall and accentuation of ancient native-planter divisions.
As the new Home Rule bill safely progressed through Westminster, Connolly appeared to concede the objection of William Walker, the Protestant leader of the Independent Labour Party in Belfast, who argued for British Labour and British social legislation.He suggested that having “voted against the Right to Work Bill, the Minimum Wage for Miners, and the Minimum Wage for Railwaymen, [and] intrigued against the application to Ireland of the Feeding of Necessitous School Children and the Medical Benefits of the Insurance Act,[in a parliament of their own Home Rulers would likely set a bad example to “reactionists everywhere”. He also allowed religious bigotry was not alone the mark of Empire loyalists: Connolly had applauded the even-handedness of the Grand-Master of the Independent Orange Order, Lindsay Crawford, in castigating sectarian influences — both “Orange and Green”.But in an “ill-tempered and discursive” exchange with Walker, Connolly admitted no case for labour sticking with the Imperial Parliament.
Labour unionism was still unionism and, no matter how reactionary nationalism might appear under its current leadership, unionism was more reactionary still. It represented an Orange-inflected Protestantism that had become “synonymous” with what Catholicism represented in much of the rest of Europe; that is, with “Toryism, lickspittle loyalty, servile worship of aristocracy and hatred of all that savours of genuine political independence on the part of the lower classes”. Thus it was that he had encountered in Ireland’s industrial capital, not what socialist theory would have predicted, its most politically-advanced working class, but rather those he despairingly characterised as “least rebellious slaves in the industrial world”.
Walker maintained that it was as an internationalist that he supported the union with Great Britain. Connolly replied that “the only true socialist internationalism lay in a free federation of free peoples”. That the Protestant working people of Ulster could regard themselves as a free people within the United Kingdom, he dismissed, effectively, as “false consciousness”. But as it served only the interest of their landlords and employers, it could not be long sustained. Already, in 1913, in series strikes in Belfast and Larne, Connolly saw evidence of Protestant workers returning to the class struggle. He confidently predicted that suspicion of their Catholic fellow workers would “melt and dissolve”, and that their children would come to laugh at the Ulster Covenant.
In April 1912, four of the five Belfast branches of the ILP attended a unity conference called by the SPI in Dublin and agreed to form an Independent Labour Party of Ireland. But sensitive to the unpopularity of Home Rule they did not carry their commitment over, when in May, Connolly secured a resolution at the Irish Trades Union Congress in favour of an Irish Labour Party without ties to the ILP or other British groups. Instead (joined in time by Winifred Carney) they adhered to what in Belfast became, after partition, the Northern Ireland Labour Party.
Socialism and religion
In 1907, Connolly confessed that while he “usually posed as a Catholic”, he had not done his “duty” for fifteen years, and had “not the slightest tincture of faith left”. Yet he could not accept De Leon’s insistence that a socialist party be as “intolerant as science” of deviations from strict materialism. Connolly opposed clericalism. He argued that Irish Catholics could in all conscience reject their bishops’ dealings with the British authorities, and proposed that Irish schools be free of church control. But claiming “conformity with the practice of the chief Socialist parties of the World”, he declared religion a private matter outside the scope of socialist action.
Socialism, is a bread and butter question. It is a question of the stomach; it is going to be settled in the factories, mines and ballot boxes of this country and is not going to be settled at the altar or in the church.
In 1910, he published Labour, Nationality and Religion in which he defended socialists against the clerical charge that they are “beasts of immorality”. He noted, for example, that the “enormous increase of divorces [in the United States] was almost entirely among the classes least affected by Socialist teaching”. But, at the same time, he argued that there was an egalitarian and humanitarian impulse in Christianity that provided a moral bridge to socialism, and could positively contribute to its advance.
In either case, Connolly believed it was an unnecessary and strategic mistake for socialists to risk popular support by deliberately outraging religious opinion. He had refused to join De Leon in entertaining August Bebel’s ideas on polyamorous marriage. Doing so, he argued, was simply putting “a weapon” into the hands of their enemies “without obtaining any corresponding advantage”.
In a campaign to raise funds for the Dublin strikers in 1913, Connolly shared a platform at London’s Royal Albert Hall with Sylvia Pankhurst. He took the occasion to declare that he stood for “opposition to the domination of nation over nation, of class over class, or of sex over sex”. He had supported the Suffragette movement, and worked alongside women in the labour movement. His Irish Citizen Army had the distinction of giving women officer rank and duty Francis Sheehy-Skeffington was convinced that, of “all the Irish labour men”, Connolly was “the soundest and most thorough-going feminist”.
In The Reconquest of Ireland (1915), Connolly traced oppression of women, like the oppression of the worker, to “a social and political order based upon the private ownership of property”. If the “worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave”. He would have little use for any form of Irish state that did not not “embody the emancipation of womanhood?”. However, socialism would solve only “the economic side of the Woman Question”: “the question of marriage, of divorce, of paternity, of the equality of woman with man are physical and sexual questions, or questions of temperamental affiliation as in marriage,” would “still be hotly contested”. There was still a private sphere in which women themselves would complete the struggle for their own emancipation. “None”, he remarked, is “so fit to break the chains as they who wear them, none so well equipped to decide what a fetter is”.
During his 1902 election campaign in the Wood Quay ward in Dublin, in which many streets were occupied by Jewish immigrants from Russia, Connolly’s campaign became the first in Irish history to distribute leaflets in Yiddish. The leaflet condemned antisemitism as a tool of the capitalist class.
Connolly sharply criticised the overtly anti-semitic tone of the British Social Democratic Federation’s publications during the Boer War, arguing that they had attempted to “divert the wrath of the advanced workers from the capitalists to the Jews”. His own editorship, however, did not exclude the possibility of anti-Jewish tropes. In the Workers Republic readers were asked to place themselves in the position of the Boers: “Supposing your country was invaded by a mob of Jews and foreign exploiters … What would you do?”. During the Cork lock-out of 1909, Connolly’s Harp (the journal of the Irish Socialist Federation) featured an article denouncing “patriotic Irish capitalists” for importing “wholesale scab Jews to break the strike of Irish workers”.
In 1898, Workers Republic published an article “The Ideal Government of the Jew”, advocating “the establishment of an Isrealitish [sic] nation in Palestine”. But two years later, Connolly himself was to write positively about the “remarkable” development in the Russian Empire of the Jewish Labour Bund. Part of Russian Social Democracy, the Bund was anti-Zionist.
Family
James Connolly and his wife Lillie had seven children. The eldest, Mona, died on the eve of the family’s departure to join Connolly in America in 1904 at the age of 13, the result of an accident with scalding laundry water.
In Belfast, Nora and Ina (1896–1980) were active, with Winifred Carney, in Cumann na mBan and carried reports from the north to Pearse and their father the week before the rising in Dublin. Later, Nora was involved with her younger brother Roddy in efforts to promote a republican-socialist movement, but after the splintering of the Republican Congress in 1934 they went their separate ways. Roddy ended his political life as chairman of the Irish Labour Party and, the year before her death, Nora made an appearance at the Ardfheis of (Provisional) Sinn Féin.
In Belfast, Aideen (1895–1966) was also in Cumann na mBan. She married a Hugh Ward in Naas and had five children. Moira (1899–1958) became a doctor and married Richard Beech (an English syndicalist who, like Roddy, in 1920 attended World Congress of the Comintern). Connolly’s youngest daughter, Fiona Connolly Edwards (1907–1976) also married in England, was active in the trade-union, and anti-partition, movements and assisted Desmond Greaves in his biographies both of her father and of the executed anti-Treaty republican, Liam Mellowes.
Brian Samuel Connolly Heron (Brian o h-Eachtuigheirn), the son of Ina Connolly and Archie Heron, Connolly’s grandson, was an organiser for the United Farm Workers in California. He was also a founding member in the United States of the National Association for Irish Justice which, in 1969, gained recognition as the U.S. support group for the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Connolly’s great grandson, James Connolly Heron, has edited a compilation of his papers, and is active in the campaign to preserve the historical integrity of Moore Street, where Connolly and Pearse took their final stand in 1916.
In their last interview, Connolly urged his wife to return with the younger children to the United States, but she failed to secure the necessary passport. This was despite the assurance of General Sir John Maxwell that she was “a decent humble woman who would be incapable of platform oratory in America”.
Remaining in Dublin, in August 1916 Lillie Connolly was received into the Catholic Church, Fiona her sole witness. She did not make public appearances but when she died in 1938 she was accorded a state funeral.
Memorials
Ireland
In 1966, to mark 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, Connolly Station, one of the two main railway stations in Dublin, and Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown, were named in his honour.
In 1996, a bronze statue of Connolly, backed by the symbol of the Starry Plough, was erected outside the Liberty Hall offices of the SIPTU trade union, in Dublin.
In 2019, Irish President Michael D. Higgins opened the Áras Uí Chonghaile | James Connolly Visitor Centre on the Falls Road in Belfast, close to where the labour leader had lived in the city. Developed with funding from Belfast City Council and from North American labour unions, the centre offers an interactive exhibit dedicated to Connolly’s life and work. Before it stands a life-size bronze of Connolly, originally unveiled in front of the Falls Community Council offices in 2016 by the Northern Ireland Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure minister Carál Ní Chuilín, and by his great-grandson, James Connolly Heron.
In July 2023, a plaque was unveiled by the Dublin City Council at Connolly’s former residence on South Lotts Road in Ringsend.
Scotland
In the Cowgate area of Edinburgh where Connolly grew up there is a likeness of Connolly and a gold-coloured plaque dedicated to him under the George IV bridge.
United States
In 1986, a bust of Connolly was erected in Riverfront Park in Troy, New York, where he had lived on first emigrating to the United States in 1904.
In 2008, a full-figure bronze of Connolly was installed in Union Park, Chicago near the offices of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers.
Writings
Connolly, James. 1897. “Socialism and Nationalism”. The Shan van Vocht. 1 (1).
Connolly, James. 1897. Erin’s Hope: The Ends and the Means (republished as The Irish Revolution, c. 1924)
Connolly, James. 1898. “The Fighting Race”. Workers’ Republic, 13 August.
Connolly, James. 1901. The New Evangel, Preached to Irish Toilers, (first appeared in Workers’ Republic, June–August 1899).
Connolly, James. 1909. Socialism Made Easy, Chicago.
Connolly, James. 1910. Labour in Irish history (republished 1914)
Connolly, James. 1910. Labour, Nationality, and Religion (republished 1920)
Connolly, James. 1911. “Plea For Socialist Unity in Ireland”. Forward, 27 May
Connolly, James. 1913. “British Labour and Irish Politicians”. Forward, 3 May.
Connolly, James. 1913. “The Awakening of Ulster’s Democracy”. Forward, 7 June
Connolly, James. 1913. “North East Ulster”. Forward, 2 August.
Connolly, James. 1914. “Labour in the new Irish Parliament”. Forward , 14 July
Connolly, James . 1914. “The hope of Ireland”. Irish Worker, 31 October.
Connolly, James. 1914. The Axe to the Root, and, Old Wine in New Bottles (republished 1921)
Connolly, James. 1915. The Re-Conquest of Ireland (republished 1917)
Ryan, Desmond (ed.). 1949. Labour and Easter Week: A Selection from the Writings of James Connolly. Dublin: Sign of the Three Candles
Edwards, Owen Dudley & Ransom, Bernard (eds.). 1973. Selected Political Writings: James Connolly, London: Jonathan Cape
Anon. (ed.). 1987. James Connolly: Collected Works (Two volumes). Dublin: New Books
Ó Cathasaigh, Aindrias (ed.). 1997. The Lost Writings: James Connolly, London: Pluto Press ISBN 0-7453-1296-9