Sir James Connolly.

Authors Avatar

Sir James Connolly

James Connolly was born to irish parents in Edinburgh in 1868. From an early age, he showed an interesting in history, economics and politics and spent much time reading and studying. perhaps becasue of his Irish parents, he developed and interest in the Irish struggle for Home Rule and in the land question. He spent some time in Ireland with the British army and seeing the people's struggle first nad arose his interest even further.

He returned to Edinburgh and spent some time working for a Scottish socialist, John Leslie. He taught him public speaking and effective hand writing, two skills which were to become invaluable to Connolly. He joined the Scottish Socialist Federation and the Independent Labour Party and was blacklisted by the employers of Edinburgh and so was foced to move to Dubln. Here he set up the Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1898. Its agenda was a combination of his two interests - nationalism and socialism. He published a newspaper called the Workers Republic in which he expressed his ideas. He soon became noted world wide and was invited to American to lecture on socialist topics. He returned to Belfast in 1911 after almost ten years in America and he became the local organiser of the new trade union, the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, at the request of Jim Larkin. Because of his interest in Nationalism, he worked to reconcile Catholic adn nationalist workers with their Protestant and Unionist counterparts, and the dock strike of 1911 where they stood side by side showed that he certainly had some success. However, his insistence that Unionists should support the demand for an Irish Parliament ended the co-operation between nationalists and unionists. By 1913, Connolly was a major figure in the ITGWU, and he moved to Dublin which had become the centre of trade union activity. This activity culminated in the strike and lock-out of 1913-1914. Connolly and Larkin had both hoped that British trade Unionists would stage a cympath strike. When this didn't happen, their hopes were dashed and they struggled to maintain the pace of the strike with the little funds they had. When workers were shipped in from London and England there was little they could do about it. The Irish workers were too weak after months of starvation for a stand-off between the two groups. The strike failed and the workers drifted back to work. Connolly was forced to re-examine the Marxist idea of supra-national class unity.

Join now!

The outbreak of World War I added to his disillusion with class theories. In congress after congress, the international socialist had denounced war as a device used by capitalists to control their workers, yet when the war broke out, all the great socialist parties across Europe called on their members to fight for their respective countries. Connolly, on the other had, called ont he Irish working class not to join the army. his plea was largely ignored, and poverty, patriotism and propaganda enticed tens of thousands to enlist. Clearly international socialism was a spent force, and if Ireland's workers were ...

This is a preview of the whole essay