MEMBERS OF THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC
Born on 5th of June 1868 – Died on 12th May 1916
Was a Scottish Born Irish Republican, Socialist, and Trade Union Leader, Executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising Against Bristish Rule in Ireland. He remains an important figure both for the Irish Labour Movement and for Irish Republicanism.
Born in Cowgate, Edinburgh, Scotland and died ages 47 years of age in Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin, Ireland Being executed by firing squat.
ORGANIZATION:
Industrial Workers of the World 1905-1910
Irish Transport and General Workers Union 1910-1916
POLITICAL PARTY:
Scottish Socialist Federation/SDF 1892-1904
Irish Socialist Republican Party 1896-1904
Socialist Labour Party of America 1903-1908
Irish Socialist Federation 1904-1910
Socialist Party of Ireland 1910-1914
Irish Labour Party 1912-1916
Spouse- Lillie Connolly (m. 1890)
Children 7
Buried in Arbour Hill Prison Cemetery Dublin
MILITARY SERVICE:
Service/ Branch: Bristish Army, Irish Citizen Army, Irish Republic
Years of Service:
British Army 1882 to 1889
Irish Citizen Army 1913 to 1916
Rank – Commandant General
Unit: Kings’s Regiment ( Liverpool) and 2nd Battalion of the Royal Scots Regiment
Battles / Wars: Easter Rising
He became an active socialist in Scotland, where he had been born in 1868 From Irish Parents.
On moving to Ireland in 1896, he established the country’s first Socialist Party the Irish Socialist Republican Party. It called for an Ireland Independent not only from Britain’s Crown and Parliament, but also of British ”capitalists, landlords and financiers.
From 1905 to 1910 he was a full-time organiser in the United States for the Industrial Workers of the World, choosing its syndicalism over
the doctrinaire Marxism of Daniel DeLeon’s Socialist Labor Party of America, to which he had been initially drawn. Returning to Ireland, he deputised for James Larkin in organising for the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, first in Belfast and then in Dublin.
In Belfast, he was frustrated in his efforts to draw Protestant workers into an all-Ireland labour and socialist movement but, in the wake of the industrial unrest of 1913, acquired in Dublin what he saw as a new means of striking toward the goal of a Workers’ Republic. At the beginning of 1916, he committed the union’s militia, the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), to the plans of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and the Irish Volunteers, for war-time insurrection.
Alongside Patrick Pearse, Connolly commanded the insurrection in Easter of that year from rebel garrison holding Dublin’s General Post Office. He was wounded in the fighting and, following the rebel surrender at the end of Easter week, was executed along with the six other signatories to the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.