‘In many ways he [Connolly] was the master intellect of them all among the master intellects of his people, (yet) his mind often produced results that were bewilderingly disproportionate to the intricate process by which they had been created.’

Darrell Figgis Recollections of the Irish War, 1927

ENDPAPERS

1. James Connolly

2. Michael Collins

3. Bernadette Devlin

4. Ian Paisley

5. Patrick Pearse

6. Bobby Sands

7. Gerry Adams

8. Eamon De Valera

9. Jim Larkin

10. Constance Markievicz

11. Sean Lemass

12. William T Cosgrave

FOREWORD

by Martyn Frampton

OVER THE LAST forty years, Sean O’Callaghan has moved from being a member of the IRA to become a fierce critic. He has experienced the allure of Irish Republicanism and been appalled by it. There are few who have studied it so closely, with an eye for fine-grain detail and an understanding of the passions it can generate. As a result, there are few better placed than Sean to reflect on the life and legacy of James Connolly.

This is an important book for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is part of a general willingness in today’s Ireland to look anew at some of the most ingrained myths of the nation’s history. The spirit of ‘revisionism’, which entered the academy several generations ago, now enjoys a popular constituency. As reflected by the debates around how to handle the 1916 Easter Rising commemorations, nothing is now considered ‘off limits’ to the sceptical, inquiring mind.

Beyond this, however, it is fascinating to have someone of Sean’s background and experience reflect on the meaning of Connolly. When Sean joined the Provisional IRA in 1970, few could have predicted that the organisation’s armed struggle would outlast the Soviet Union and the Cold War. Perhaps the core driver of Irish Republican militancy throughout that period was a particular reading of history. Ruairi OBradaigh, one of the founders of the Provisionals, liked to speak about ‘údarás an staire’ (the mandate of history), which in his view made IRA violence legitimate.

What he meant by this was the powerful sense that moved within the IRA, that its members were the true heirs to an Irish Nationalist and Irish Republican tradition that dated back centuries. The ‘Green Book’ that the movement produced in the mid-1970s – an ideological primer for new recruits – spoke of ‘800 years of oppression’ dating back to the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169. Thereafter, a powerful narrative of historical injustice connected latter-day Republicans with countless generations of Irish men and women who were said to have asserted their right to nationhood by force of arms. The events of the 17th century loomed especially large. As Sean describes here, the plantation changed everything in Ireland for ever. It left a wellspring of division and grievance that would echo down through the centuries.

It was followed by new chapters in the Irish Nationalist story: the rebellion of 1641 and the brutal reprisals of Cromwell; the rise of Jacobitism and the events of the Boyne; and, of course, the 1798 Rising of the United Irishmen. Thereafter, a line of succession could be constructed, taking in Robert Emmet, Young Ireland and the Fenians. Finally, it arrived at Easter 1916 and the Proclamation of the Republic. The makers of that Rising self-consciously positioned themselves within history, casting backwards but also looking forwards. Connolly’s comrade Patrick Pearse, who did so much to shape the spirit of 1916, spoke of his desire to ‘lay down a book of law for Irish Nationalists’. In his inimitable, poetic and quasi-mystical style, Pearse offered ‘the four gospels of the new testament of Irish nationality’ as a canon for future generations. He envisaged an ‘apostolic succession’ passing down the flame of Irish Nationalism ‘from the nation’s fathers’, until Irish independence was achieved.

This was the project with which James Connolly associated himself when he led his Irish Citizen Army to the GPO building on Easter Monday 1916. One of Sean’s goals in this book is to explain how it was that Connolly arrived at this point. Often, there has been a tendency to see Connolly’s presence among the leaders of the Rising as a quixotic, enigmatic move. Many have been baffled by the decision of Ireland’s foremost Marxist to hitch his star to a wagon painted in the spiritual and poetical colours of Patrick Pearse. Was this a move born of frustration? A mad, reckless gamble out of keeping with everything Connolly had come to represent?

Sean offers a resounding ‘no’ to such questions. Rather than seeing Connolly’s involvement in 1916 as an aberration, he sees it as the natural fulfilment of his career to that point. In his view, Connolly was a committed and fierce revolutionary for whom ‘normal life’ mattered little. At the personal level, that life had been defined mostly by failure. Connolly struggled to hold down any job and his passion for his cause exacted a heavy toll on his long-suffering wife and children. Yet he was, in Sean’s view, a ‘born activist’ who dedicated everything to the revolution that he hoped to see in Ireland. From an early stage, Connolly was prepared to accept that this revolution might require violent methods and, certainly, he came to believe that the path to socialist salvation would be paved with blood.

Inspired by the works of Eric Hoffer, Sean presents here the story of Connolly the ‘true believer’, for whom 1916 brought the martyrdom he craved. During the Rising he mixed a curious naivete (believing that a capitalist army like that of the British would never shell private property in central Dublin), with a clear conviction that death awaited (he expected they would be ‘slaughtered’). What mattered most was the fact that the manner of his death elevated Connolly into the pantheon of Irish Nationalist heroes. Above all else, he and his comrades became Irishmen suffering at the hands of wicked England. Self-consciously they offered their lives to set ablaze what Sean calls the ‘emotional ethnic nerve endings’.

The remembrance of the Rising has been put to different uses. It was quickly adopted by the state and men like Pearse and Connolly were revered as the founding fathers of the newly independent Ireland that emerged after 1921. With the passing of the years it became ever easier for the Establishment to lay claim to the memory of the Rising. In 1966, for example, at the fiftieth anniversary of that seminal event, the symbolic geography of central Dublin was reconfigured with the renaming of Connolly and Pearse railway stations (formerly Amiens Street and Westland Row stations respectively). As Sean recounts here, that same year saw RTE, the national broadcaster, produce a deeply influential docu-drama series, which celebrated the rebellion under the revealing title Insurrection.

At the same time, the state struggled to control the meaning of 1916. Ever since the Rising, the memory of what occurred has been used to justify the actions of anti-state physical-force Nationalists. Within a few years an organisation had been brought into being, the Irish Republican Army, which was pledged to make ‘real’ the Republic that had been declared by Pearse and Connolly. Over the last ninety or so years the IRA has split and changed course; it has passed through a variety of incarnations. But always there has been a group, no matter how small, laying claim to the title and the right to engage in armed struggle for the sake of the Republic.

Moreover, the memory of Connolly in particular has long cut in different directions. He has truly been all things to all men. On the one hand, his involvement in 1916 ensured that he was recognised officially as a venerable part of the Nationalist pantheon upon which the state based its legitimacy.

At the same time, Connolly became an icon for those who wished to see change in the Ireland of the 1950s and 1960s. Under de Valera it became easy to caricature Ireland as clinging to the ideals of Pearse. Successive governments invested a fortune in trying to revive the Irish language and Gaelic culture. They governed an insular, socially conservative society in which the Catholic Church wielded great power.

Connolly by contrast spoke a different language. To many self-avowed radicals, he embodied a desire for change. His Marxism and internationalism, his commitment to women’s rights, these all seemed modern and to point the way to the future. To many, this was Ireland’s answer to Mao, Castro or Che Guevara. Sean recalls that reading Connolly set his ‘brain on fire’.

He was not alone in being so moved. A new generation both north and south of the Irish border drew encouragement from the words of Connolly. From the students of People’s Democracy to the Irish Taoiseach Sean Lemass, Connolly was a reference point for those seeking change. He has remained so ever since; indeed, he is the acceptable face of radicalism for (mostly bourgeois) revolutionary wannabes.

Equally, Connolly has continued to inspire the apostles of militant, armed Republicanism. When the ‘Troubles’ came to Northern Ireland in 1968–9, his name was never far from the lips of those committed to ‘armed struggle’ in the name of the Irish nation. After he had joined the Provisional IRA, Sean records his belief that he was fighting for Ireland and for socialism, just as his hero James Connolly had done. He was not alone. Hundreds, if not thousands, of others felt the same. Some joined the Provisionals, some joined the Official IRA; still others entered the Irish National Liberation Army, described here by Sean as ‘pure Connollyism’.

All of them proclaimed their reverence for the spirit of 1916 and their devotion to the teachings and praxis of James Connolly. So it continues to be the case today. Though the conflict in Northern Ireland has mostly been brought to an end, armed groups remain at the margin, ready to challenge the status quo. And although small, today’s dissidents – whether in the Real IRA, Continuity IRA or any other formation – continue to lay claim to the memory of Connolly. As the Irish state approaches the hundredth anniversary of the Rising, it faces the challenge of trying to honour that event without legitimating the narrative of those still committed to emulating its example.

More broadly, as Ireland struggles to come to terms with the demise of the Celtic Tiger and the economic hardships of the last decade, those who wish to see radical change are once more invoking the name of James Connolly. To many, as Sean observes, his words and writings have never seemed more relevant; in today’s Ireland, ‘Connolly is alive with virility.’ It is thus more important than ever that there is space to reflect on the kind of man he was and the meaning of his life. With this book Sean makes a critical contribution to a debate that Ireland needs to have about how best to understand and deal with the legacy of 1916.

As someone whose life was decisively shaped by a particular reading of who Connolly was and what he represented, Sean is uniquely placed to tackle his subject. As always, what he has to say makes for stimulating reading. What follows is a provocative and challenging journey through the life and legacy of James Connolly.

INTRODUCTION

ON THE MORNING of 24 April, Easter Monday 1916, James Connolly, a 47-year-old Edinburgh-born Marxist and former British soldier, stood at the top of the stairs in Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, in Dublin.

Watching him was his friend, comrade and benefactor Constance Markievicz, born Gore-Booth of a rich Anglo-Irish family. She later wrote: ‘I had never seen him happier than on Easter Monday morning when he came downstairs with the other members of the Provisional Government of the Republic. We parted on the steps of Liberty Hall for the last time. He was absolutely radiant, like a man who had seen a vision. The comrade of Tone and Emmet, he stood on the heights with them, his spirit one with theirs. The rapture that comes only when the supreme sacrifice is made intentionally and willingly in a man’s heart was his. His life of the flesh was over for him. The spirit life had begun.’¹

At the bottom of the stairs Connolly stopped to speak with his trade union colleague William O’Brien.

‘Bill, we are going out to be slaughtered,’ said Connolly.

‘Is there any chance?’ asked O’Brien.

‘None whatsoever,’ and with that Connolly marched out to take his place at the head of the men and women who would shortly occupy the General Post Office and set in train the Easter Rising of 1916.

Alongside him going out to be slaughtered on that fine April morning was his fifteen-year-old son, Roddy. Markievicz and Roddy would survive the Rising, but Connolly, as he fully expected, would not. After the unconditional surrender of the Irish Volunteers he was tried in the hospital wing of Dublin Castle and executed in Kilmainham prison yard on 12 May 1916.

Unable to walk, having been badly injured during the fighting, he was carried on a stretcher to his place of execution, then put on a chair, his head tilting backwards, and shot dead by soldiers of the British Army, the army he had once served in. It is a scene that has haunted Nationalist Ireland and its hinterland ever since. ‘The Ballad of James Connolly’, which continues to be sung by Irish people across the world, recounts that ‘James Connolly fell into a ready-made grave.’ It is my belief that Connolly willingly dug that grave for himself.

At least 450 people were killed and 2,500 injured during the Rising, and nine reported as missing. One hundred and sixteen of the dead were soldiers, twenty-two of them Irish, plus sixteen armed and unarmed policemen, all Irish. Sixty-four Volunteers, out of a total of just over 1,500 who played some role in the Rising, were also killed. The results are clear: 205 combatants died, alongside 245 wholly innocent civilians. The dead were mostly Irish, mostly civilians, mostly Dublin’s poor, killed for a cause they hardly understood or supported.

There is a simple reason why most of the dead and injured were innocent civilians. The leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood chose the battleground, then took over buildings that were mostly in the city centre, and invited attack. Dublin was a small city and some of its most densely populated slums were within a stone’s throw of its centre. Did the leaders give any consideration to this? I cannot find one reference anywhere to suggest that they took it seriously.

Connolly appears to have believed that British capitalists would not bomb their own property, and this seems to have become a view common to the leaders. For instance, the sceptical Desmond FitzGerald was breezily assured by Thomas MacDonagh (one of the executed leaders) that ‘the British would not shell the city, as by doing so they would be injuring their own supporters.’² Yet none of them could have been unaware of the geography of central Dublin. Connolly and the members of his Irish Citizen Army were intimately familiar with the area and must have known that it would be Dublin’s poorest who would suffer disproportionately. Most of the civilians were killed by machine-gun fire, incendiary shells and artillery, so although it was the British forces that were directly responsible for most of the casualties, they did not choose the battleground.

It is just as well for us that two of Connolly’s closest friends and comrades were there to testify first-hand to his words, actions and demeanour that morning. As I wrote those words it was difficult not to feel an emotional shiver of admiration, for it was those events that inspired my boyhood dreams. But those events also opened the door to the War of Independence between 1919 and 1921, the sectarian savagery in Northern Ireland during the same period, the Treaty with Britain that led to the Irish Free State and dominion status for twenty-six of Ireland’s counties, the disgusting Civil War that followed, and the slaughter and moral degeneracy that was the so-called Long War in Northern Ireland.

So, for me, reflex sentimentality is quickly and coldly replaced by a hard affirmation that what I am about to write is necessary and urgent.

This is not a traditional biography. I am not by training or inclination a historian, academic or intellectual. This is about my relationship with the man and the myth that is James Connolly, it is about the politics of violent extremism and the blood-soaked legacy of what often passes for Irish Republicanism, and it is about the kind of individuals who are willing to sacrifice everything, including their lives, for a holy cause.

It is also inevitably about my own complicated relationship with Ireland, which is raw, visceral and gives no quarter, and is about as objective as it is possible not to be. I really am capable of hating the place as much as I love it. The fact that I can never live there again does not do much for my objectivity.

I was eleven in 1966 when we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising, which was when I first became consciously aware of Connolly and developed some sense that he was different from the other Irish patriots we learned about. Prior to 1966, the revival of interest in Connolly himself and his Marxist writings owed much to the Connolly Association, formed in England in 1938, and to Desmond Greaves’s biography of Connolly in particular. As early as the 1950s Greaves himself championed the establishment of a civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and, in the 1960s, he and former members of the Association played a significant role in promoting the socialist policies adopted by the leaders of the Republican Movement. There was also, it has to be said, a desperate desire by many disparate sections of Irish society to break free of the tyrannical legacy of 1916, the de Valera years and Irish Catholic Nationalism. In a slightly perverse way Connolly spoke to all of that.

Across the world today there is no shortage of what I have come to call true believers: young men and women who, like myself in the 1970s, are prepared to kill and be killed. Young men and women brought up in the heart of Western society who are prepared to fight and die for the most primitive kind of theocracy, who are searching for a cause that will fill the emptiness and the lack of self-worth.

This is the legacy of James Connolly, the son of Irish immigrants, who was brought up in an Edinburgh slum and found his holy cause in his peculiar blend of Marxism and Irish Nationalism – and died a martyr’s death because of it.

Sean O’Callaghan
November 2015

Chapter 1

BLOOD AND EARTH:
The Plantation of Ulster and its
Aftermath

BETWEEN FAIR HEAD in Northern Ireland and the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland, Ireland and Great Britain are only eleven miles apart. Throughout its history Ireland has been both protected and dominated by its much bigger and closest neighbour. Ireland’s desire for independence and Britain’s desire for control is, I think, best seen in this simple context. I believe that this approach has much to recommend it, and for the purpose of this book it cuts to the chase.

Between 1579 and 1798 there were a number of foreign interventions in Ireland, ranging from Papal and Spanish alliances in the 16th century to interventions by revolutionary France in the 18th century. In the wake of the Reformation, the Protestant English were ever fearful that their European enemies would launch attacks on their soft underbelly; a still largely hostile Catholic Ireland. Unsurprisingly in this light, the Irish were seen as a threat to be countered and pacified.

Displacing indigenous peoples with outsiders of a similar religious or cultural background to the conqueror had long been a well-used strategy. In his 1532 treatise The Prince, Machiavelli wrote about it at some length: ‘One of the best, most effective expedients would be for the conqueror to go and live there in person … The other and better expedient is to establish settlements in one or two places; these will, as it were, fetter the state to you. Settlements do not cost much, and the prince can found them and maintain them at little or no expense.’¹ And the Elizabethan and Jacobean conquerors of Ireland knew their Machiavelli: Edmund Spenser, himself an English planter in Ireland and an advocate of such settlements, quotes Machiavelli in his own 1596 treatise, A View of the Present State of Ireland.

After the surrender of the Ulster Gaelic chieftains in 1603 and their brief attempt to live with the new dispensation, over ninety of them went into exile in 1607 and their lands were confiscated by the Crown. King James I of England began his organised colonisation of the Irish province of Ulster, intending it as a ‘civilising enterprise’ that would settle Protestants in a province that had hitherto been mainly Gaelic-speaking and of the Catholic faith.

The fact that at least half these settlers were Scots was also significant. James I had been king of Scotland and he needed to reward his Scottish subjects with land in Ulster to assure them they were not being neglected now that he had moved his court down south to London. Settling a previously hostile land with subjects loyal to the Crown and to the prevailing religion must have seemed the ideal solution, particularly as the Scots had been migrating to Ulster for many centuries, and likewise the Irish to Scotland.

But the success of the plantations of the early 17th century was limited. Machiavelli might have approved the strategy of establishing settlements among the conquered, but he would have frowned at its implementation in Ireland. ‘Men must be either pampered or crushed,’ he wrote, ‘because they can get revenge for small injuries but not for fatal ones.’²

Judged by this standard the conqueror was always going to have problems. The native Irish may have been defeated but they were not defeated fatally, and were capable of revenge; indeed, at times they appeared to think of little else. The conqueror, on the other hand, was ever watchful and fearful of the revenge of ‘the black-browed tribes whose remnants linger still / with random beacons on insurgent hill’.³

However one looks at it, the consequences of the partition of Ulster were to echo down the centuries, leading inexorably to unrest, bitter hatred and a divided society segregated between native Roman Catholics and settler Protestants.

And trouble was not long coming. In 1641 the Ulster Catholics staged a rebellion, resulting in the deaths of more than 10,000 Protestant settlers. While the revolt was serious further south in Leinster, it was bloodiest in Ulster. According to A.T.Q. Stewart it was here that the Protestant siege mentality was born, ‘as the warning bonfires blazed from hilltop to hilltop, and the beating drums summoned men to the defence of castles, and walled towns were crowded with refugees’.⁴ For the next year or two the rebels enjoyed considerable success, and by February 1642 most of Ireland, with the exception of Protestant Ulster and a portion of Cork, was in rebel hands. The rebels were a coalition of the native Irish who wanted their lands back and the Old English who were loyal to Charles I. They set up a provisional government in Kilkenny and became known as the Confederate Catholics of Ireland.

Their unity and independence did not last long. In August 1649, determined to assert his authority and punish the rebels, Oliver Cromwell landed in Ireland. Cromwell was merciless in his pursuit of success, and for many in Ireland his name has become a byword for wanton cruelty. His methods mirrored military tactics common at the time, and by the summer of 1652 the whole country had submitted to his rule. Yet even then Ireland remained far from settled.

When William of Orange landed in England in 1688 to seize the throne, his father-in-law, James II, fled first to France and then to Ireland, where he prepared to launch a counter-attack to reclaim his crown. However, other than holding a parliament in Dublin and transferring land to the native Irish, James was largely inactive in Ireland – until William landed in Carrickfergus in 1690 and James decided to confront him at the River Boyne. The subsequent victory for William at the Battle of the Boyne is still celebrated annually by many thousands of Protestants, mainly in Northern Ireland and Scotland. In 1691 Irish resistance largely came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Limerick.

In the years that followed there was little appetite for further revolt in Ireland and many Jacobites (supporters of James II and his heirs) left to join Continental armies, especially in France, where it has been estimated that at least half a million Irishmen joined the French Army between 1691 and 1791.

Ireland’s peaceful 18th century was brought to an end by the wave of instability unleashed by the French Revolution. Events in Paris had a considerable impact on Irish public opinion and raised hopes of religious freedom and an extension of the franchise. Most significantly the Society of United Irishmen was formed in Belfast in 1791, mainly by Presbyterian and Anglican intellectuals such as Wolfe Tone. Inspired by the French example and preaching of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, it hoped to unite Catholic, Protestant and Dissenters under the common name of Irishmen to break the connection with England, and in 1798 a new rebellion was launched.

Famously, they were defeated, and Wolfe Tone, the Anglican leader of the United Irishmen, was captured on Lough Swilly awaiting a French expeditionary force. Regarded as the founder of Irish Republicanism, he committed suicide in his prison cell rather than face the ignominy of death by hanging.

More broadly, the rebellion of 1798 was a disaster for Ireland. The mainly Presbyterian (or Dissenter) leaders of the United Irishmen may have been true believers in their revolutionary ideals, but others within their movement were animated by rather less lofty sentiments. The primarily Catholic peasantry looked to Catholic France as the enemy of Protestant England. They also wanted to destroy their landlords, most of whom were Protestant. As Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote: ‘These are conditions in which it is hard to tell class war from religious or tribal war, and hard even for those involved to be sure which it is that they are at.’⁵

The events of 1798 left the non-sectarian principles of the United Irishmen in tatters. In County Wexford, for example, the rebellion was little more than a nakedly sectarian confrontation. In one incident more than 100 Protestants were burned to death in a barn at Scullabogue; in another, on 20 June in Wexford town, seventy Protestants were executed on a bridge spanning the River Slaney.

The rebellion was eventually savagely suppressed; about 30,000 people died and atrocities were committed on both sides. The United Irishmen were destroyed and their lofty ideals discredited, the result of which was that the existing divisions of race and faith within Ireland were deepened.

In spite of this, a belief in the utility of violent insurrection did not die with the failures of 1798. In 1803 there was a tiny and hopelessly bungled rebellion led by Robert Emmet, a kind of postscript to the events of five years earlier, and Emmet himself was duly hanged.

By the time of the abortive rising of 1803 Ireland’s constitutional position had been transformed in that, ironically, the actual result of the 1798 rebellion was almost the exact opposite of what it had intended. Rather than securing the separation of Ireland from England, the rebellion helped to pave the way for the Act of Union in January 1801. The Irish parliament, known as Grattan’s Parliament, was abolished (in truth, it had held little real power), and Ireland was incorporated formally into the new state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. From now on Ireland would be represented at Westminster by 100 MPs and thirty-two peers.

Originally the Act of Union was to be accompanied by a bill of emancipation for Catholics. Long-established legal provisions that discriminated against them and made them second-class citizens were to be abolished. Unfortunately, however, this part of the Union project proved stillborn, and as time went by Catholics continued to face various disadvantages. In the early years of the 19th century, for example, Catholics could still not sit in Parliament, even though Catholic votes now sent many representatives to Westminster; neither could they hold senior positions in the military, civil service or judiciary.

The arrival of the Irish lawyer Daniel O’Connell on the scene began the process that changed all that. Using a mix of non-violent protest and parliamentary pressure O’Connell succeeded in forcing the government to introduce the Roman Catholic Relief Act in 1829. In 1841 O’Connell, now an MP and totally opposed to bloodshed, decided to launch another campaign for the repeal of the Union between Ireland and England. This time he met with implacable government opposition. Rather than risk violence O’Connell backed down and thus lost face, particularly with the younger radical elements represented by the Young Ireland movement. The writings of a fringe member of this group, James Fintan Lalor, on the land question would greatly influence James Connolly.

Between 1845 and 1849 Ireland was devastated by the Great Famine in which a million people died and a million more emigrated, almost all of whom (the dead and the migrants) were Catholics. Depressed by the failure to break the Union and enraged by the Famine, the leaders of the Young Irelanders tried to stage a rebellion in 1848, but it was a hopeless disaster. The Famine also served to greatly increase hatred of British rule, both among those left in Ireland and those who made it to America, where, if anything, it strengthened in intensity as the folk stories handed down from generation to generation grew ever more lurid.

In my opinion, the road that was to lead to the 1916 Rising and beyond belonged as much to America as it did to Ireland. On St Patrick’s Day 1858 the Irish Republican Brotherhood was formed in Dublin by James Stephens, a veteran of the Young Ireland movement. A secret-oath-bound revolutionary society, it is best known by the name it adopted in America: the Fenians. A rising was attempted in 1867, but the authorities moved early, arresting many of the leaders, and it turned out to be yet another damp squib. In military terms they were utterly unsuccessful, but some of their leaders were bright, imaginative and determined, among them John Devoy in America (the Irish-American lynchpin of the 1916 Rising) and Michael Davitt in Ireland, who along with Charles Stewart Parnell moved their focus on from direct action and helped create the New Departure, a socio-political movement of astonishing effectiveness. Launched in the late-1870s, the mass formation of this movement became the Irish National Land League, which was to be another major influence on James Connolly and his generation.

At the same time, the lure of political violence was never far away. Not everyone in the Fenian movement was ready to embrace purely peaceful means. The 1880s witnessed the first sustained campaign of terrorism waged against the British mainland by those who claimed to speak for Ireland. Public buildings, among them Scotland Yard, and other utilities were targeted for dynamite attacks. From across the Atlantic these ‘skirmishers’ were encouraged and funded by the growing community of Irish-Americans and Irish exiles. The voice of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa was one of the loudest, demanding relentless attacks on the English enemy. In 1882 a shocking act of violence saw the slaughter, by knife, of Lord Frederick C. Cavendish, newly appointed chief secretary for Ireland, and Thomas Henry Burke, the permanent under-secretary, as they were walking through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The perpetrators were arrested and hanged. But the murders marked another grim milestone in the fight for Irish independence.

Looking back on this necessarily potted history several things stand out. One is the enduring appeal of violent methods to those Irishmen who wished to break the connection with England. Equally it is hard not to see that such endeavours only ended in failure and, indeed, tended to bring consequences almost diametrically opposed to the objectives of the rebels.

Why was this? From 1798 onwards no separatist movement or conspiracy in Ireland enjoyed anything like majority support for violent revolt against British rule. The Plantation of Ulster had also changed life in Ireland for ever, ending Catholic Gaelic hegemony in the north-east of the province where the dominant political, economic and numerical power was now held by people of a fundamentally different religion, fealty and culture. Mainly Protestant and loyal to the Crown, they were to become ever more wary and fearful of revenge attacks from the dispossessed Catholics, who perhaps understandably resented them deeply.

‘Since those distant days,’ Cruise O’Brien writes, ‘the outlines of the problem have shifted many times, but the 17th-century settlement was so massive and vital a fact that its original character continues to dominate every aspect of the life of the region affected, and to permeate the politics of the whole island.’⁶

An experience of my own illustrates this. In 1974 I was standing with an old farmer on a hillside in County Tyrone while he pointed out Protestant farms ‘stolen from us by them black bastards’. Here, I understood, was the emotive power of blood and earth.⁷

Chapter 2

A DEFEATED PEOPLE

JAMES CONNOLLY WAS born in Edinburgh of Irish parents on 5 June 1868. John Connolly and Mary McGinn, were both Irish Catholics from County Monaghan in Ulster. Like many others they left Ireland in the years after the Famine to seek a new life elsewhere. Because of its proximity to Ulster, Scotland was almost certainly the easiest and cheapest place for them to go, and the records show that they were married by Father O’Donnell in Edinburgh on 20 October 1856.

By the time James Connolly was born the couple already had two boys, John and Thomas. We will hear more of John, the eldest, whose footsteps the younger James would often follow. Of Thomas there is very little recorded. Home was the Cowgate, known locally as ‘Little Ireland’, an Irish-Catholic ghetto in the Old Town, within walking distance of Edinburgh University. In 1868 it was a festering, disease-ridden slum of over 14,000 mostly Irish immigrant Catholics who were not entirely loved or wanted in the city of John Knox. In 1866 John Symington wrote: ‘The atmosphere is fouly tainted, and rendered almost unendurable by its loathsomeness at those periods when offal and nuisance require to be deposited on the streets.’¹

John Connolly was employed for much of his life in Edinburgh as a manure carter, which meant he collected human and household waste for the city corporation. An event in 1861 may have later been recounted to James by his father. That year the manure carters threatened strike action unless their conditions were improved. After a hastily convened meeting of the relevant council section it was agreed that their demands should be met. It appears that this successful action by unskilled Irish-Catholic workers became the stuff of near legend in Cowgate. It is not known whether John Connolly played a major role, but stories such as this would have inspired James and his elder brother John to take up rebellious causes themselves. Both would later become active in socialist politics in Scotland.

Their father’s position was full time, but after an accident in his mid-fifties he was put in charge of a public toilet. Mary Connolly suffered very poor health for much of her adult life, and this may explain the long gaps between the births of the three brothers. According to C. Desmond Greaves in his biography of James Connolly, she fell ill with chronic bronchitis following the birth of her first child on 31 January 1862 which she suffered from until her death thirty years later. Suffering from chronic bronchitis in the appalling conditions of Cowgate in the mid nineteenth century, and for over thirty years, must have been a horrible way to live and die.

We have only what is, in my view, the unreliable testimony of James Connolly’s daughter Nora as to his relationship with his father. Did he ever speak or write of his parents in any detail? It would appear not. Until Greaves was able to prove that Connolly was born in Edinburgh and served in the British Army, many accounts of his early life were a fiction, and included claims that he was born in County Monaghan and never enlisted in the army. Connolly added to the confusion by stating on a 1901 census form in Dublin that County Monaghan was his birthplace, and he never openly admitted to his service in the British Army, partly because he was a deserter but also because most of his service had been in Ireland.

What is certain is that all three Connolly brothers left not only Cowgate but Scotland itself as soon as they could. This might reflect unhappiness at home, or a need to improve their lives, a desire for adventure, or a combination of all these factors. None of this is known because Connolly never wrote about his early life.

Are these things important? To understand the motivations behind many of Connolly’s subsequent decisions and actions, I would say yes. He demanded a lot from others, not least his wife and family, and from those who followed him, as well as those who didn’t but died none the less on the streets of Dublin in 1916. I believe it is legitimate to ask hard questions of James Connolly. Anyone who demands great sacrifice from others must surely expect their record to be judged at some time in the future.

There can be no doubt that growing up in Cowgate branded both class consciousness and Irish Nationalism into Connolly’s soul. It was a time and place of terrible degradation, poverty and daily humiliation. The one thing that distinguishes Cowgate from run-of-the-mill poverty in other working-class areas is that it was also an Irish-Catholic slum with a collective sense of injustice that was not solely class based. Sectarian attacks on the inhabitants of ‘Little Ireland’ were not uncommon in the earlier part of the 19th century, although they seem to have run their course by the time the young James came along.

These Catholic Irish were a defeated people who had left their homes to seek a new life in the land of the conqueror. The songs, the stories, the exaggerated or invented tales of power and influence at home festered and called for revenge against the oppressor. Their living conditions were terrible, their lives were hard and, with a chronically ill mother, the Connollys had it tougher than most. But the father had employment and his sons worked too. Before too long John and James enlisted in the army, and Thomas emigrated, having acquired, it would seem, the rudiments of a trade in the printing world. How bad was it growing up and living in Cowgate? Without written evidence we can only speculate, although he bore physical reminders from that period: a squint, acquired by his own account from reading by the light of burning embers; and bow legs, most likely caused by childhood rickets, and a stutter, which he all but conquered in adult life. These scars were an embodiment of the sense of powerlessness and resentment which were to drive Connolly for the rest of his life.

But life in Edinburgh was little different in material terms from the poverty of working-class Dublin, London or Manchester. I say this because we Irish have a tendency to regard ourselves as the ‘most oppressed people ever’, an acronym coined by Professor Liam Kennedy of Queen’s University as the MOPE syndrome. That Connolly suffered uniquely as a child of Cowgate and that this inevitably set him on the road to rebellion and eventual execution may be a myth, but it has added potency to a story of ethnic resentment which has bedevilled Nationalist Ireland for generations.