Ireland's OWN History

Irish History

January 2005
James Connolly Re-Assessed — The Irish and European Context
—by Manus O'riordan, Head of Research, Siptu
Strokestown Famine Museum, Co. Roscommon

Le linn Éirí Amach na Cásca i 1916 scríobh an Craoibhín dialann faoinar thug sé faoi deara agus é ag rothaíocht is ag siúl timpeall Baile Átha Cliath i rith na seachtaine sin. Do luaigh sé Séamus Ó Conghaile ag an am mar duine de cheannairí an Éirí Amach, ach cé gur thug sé ómós oifigiúil do na ceannairí céanna mar Uachtarán na h-Éíreann breis is scór bliain ina dhiaidh sin, níl 'fhios agam ar nocht sé riamh aon tuairimí faoi leith maidir leis an gConghaileach féin. Ar ndóigh, bhí tuairimí cinnte aige faoi cheannaire eile, Pádraig Mac Piarais, agus i measc na ngearán do bhí aige luaigh sé an ócáid gur chuir an Piarsach é ina shuí díreach taobh le laoch lucht oibre eile, Séamus Mór Ó Lorcáin, le linn léirsiú mór ar son na Gaeilge.

I don't know if the first President of Ireland under the 1937 Constitution — an Craoibhín Aoibhinn, Douglas Hyde — ever made a personal evaluation of James Connolly, but among his grievances against Patrick Pearse — President of the Irish Republic proclaimed in 1916 — was the occasion that Pearse had placed him sitting right beside another Labour hero, Big Jim Larkin, during an Irish language procession. Hyde wrote:

"Larkin mounted the wagonette and spoke from beside me. A tall black-haired powerfully-built man, with a great resounding voice and much fluency and energy, seeming to say a lot with great emphasis but really speaking platitudes, the gist of his speech being that if Irishmen really wanted Irish taught to their children there was no power on earth that could stop them! Patrick Pearse, who spoke also, pronounced a great eulogy on Larkin, he at least he said was doing something, he was making history. So he was, for he had closed the port of Dublin, and the workers of Dublin have not yet got over the effects of the general strike into which he plunged them... It was characteristic of Pearse that he never stopped to inquire if the something that Larkin was doing was good or bad. It was sufficient that he was doing something".

Given his 'iffy' if not 'sniffy' attitude towards Larkin, it is unlikely that Hyde would have thought much more highly of Connolly's own leading role in what was in fact the 1913 Lockout. For a more positive assessment of James Connolly I will turn to Hyde's fellow Roscommon man and his close collaborator in the work of the Gaelic League, Father Michael O'Flanagan.

In an April 1926 lecture in Glasgow, which he delivered as a tenth anniversary commemoration of the Easter Rising, O'Flanagan praised Connolly for asserting the right of the people "not merely to be political rulers of Ireland but the economic owners of Ireland as well" and hailed him as "another great Irishman who stood not merely for the right to national independence but who was in a particular sense the representative of the workers of Ireland".

Thirty years ago I commenced employment in Liberty Hall as Research Officer of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. My present office in that same building now looks out on the statue of Connolly that stands where he himself so often spoke at Labour and anti-War rallies. But James Connolly is a man with whom I have lived in some shape or form all of my life. When my parents set up home in Dublin, on the day after Big Jim Larkin's funeral in February 1947, they hung on the wall of their front room Harry Kernoff's famous woodcut of Connolly. I arrived on the scene in May 1949 and Connolly's image is part of my earliest childhood memories. Kernoff invested Connolly with a very determined if not stern expression. He was a real person to me because his daughter Ina was a family friend who always spoke to us of Connolly as "Daddy". But, as far as I was concerned, there could not have been a crosser-looking Daddy. When I would be chastised by my own parents for some misdemeanour I would have nowhere to retreat to subsequently except that front room where insult would be added to injury as Connolly glared down on me in even harsher adult disapproval. Kernoff's woodcut still hangs in my father's home, as does another copy in my own, so I will have to face that glare on the double when I return to Dublin after speaking about Connolly here today!

Given my family background, I was aware more than most other school children that Connolly was not just a 1916 leader but a life-long trade unionist and Socialist as well. My Leaving Cert year of 1966 was dominated by the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Easter Rising when more widespread recognition was achieved of the fact that Connolly was a Socialist. The following year I myself became active in the Connolly Youth Movement and its agitations in respect of Dublin's Housing Crisis and against America's War in Vietnam. It was indeed my privilege as an Executive Member of that Movement to represent it on the Irish Voice on Vietnam, chaired by that outstanding follower of Connolly, and close friend and political collaborator of Father O'Flanagan, the Donegal Republican Peadar O'Donnell.

It was during my post-graduate years in the United States from 1969 to 1971 that I completed a thesis entitled James Connolly in America: The Political Development of an Irish Marxist as seen from his Writings and his Involvement with the American Socialist Movement, 1902-1910. By examining the actual detail of what Connolly himself had written, and what in turn had been written about him by his contemporaries in the United States, I was able to construct a warts-and-all narrative of Connolly during those years.

This challenged the simplicities and evasions, as well as the misrepresentations and caricatures of Connolly's opponents, that characterised The Life and Times of James Connolly produced by C. Desmond Greaves in 1961, and hitherto accepted as Gospel. As regards the 1904 dispute that Connolly had with the Socialist Labour Party leader Daniel de Leon on the subject of "Wages, Marriage and the Church", both Greaves and I were agreed on the strength of Connolly's arguments regarding effective trade union struggle. But why had Connolly won no support in that controversy? Connolly had also charged the SLP with campaigning against religion and for "free love".

Greaves further asserted that Connolly was correct in that argument as well, and he proceeded to distort the evidence to sustain such a contention. By going to the sources I proved the contrary, that Connolly had lashed out too wildly and that by making unfounded allegations against the SLP on the issues of religion and marriage, he had alienated support on the more substantive issue of the struggle for higher wages. It was only in 1907, in the wider arena of that labour union movement known as the Industrial Workers of the World, that Connolly won hands down against de Leon with a more focused exposure of the latter's defeatist adherence to the theory of the "Iron Law of Wages".

In the meantime, back in Ireland the eruption of the Northern crisis had led to the first major re-assessment of Connolly in 1970 when a small group of people in the Irish Communist Organisation began to challenge the prevailing view on the Irish Left that Connolly provided the key for a coherent analysis of the Ulster question. In the "Irish Worker" of March 14, 1914 Connolly had argued that the partition of Ireland "would mean a carnival of reaction both North and South". Undoubtedly a powerful description and one often quoted in many an anti-partition campaign. But description is one thing and prescription another. Connolly's alternative to partition was that "Labour in Ulster should fight even to the death if necessary".

Given the fact that the majority of organised workers in Ulster were Unionist, it would be an understatement to point out that armed workers in Ulster were overwhelmingly more likely to be found in the UVF than in the Irish Citizen Army. Connolly's propaganda on Ulster was unsustainable in practice; and deep down he knew it. The last thing he would have wished to see would be Ulster workers shedding each other's blood. And that is why on the eve of the Easter Rising in 1916 he gave strict orders that not a shot was to be fired in Ulster.

Connolly was, of course, correct in pointing out the reactionary character of Orange ideology. But the opposition of practically the whole of Ulster Protestant society to Home Rule could not be ascribed solely to that reaction. When Ulster Protestants argued that Home Rule would amount to Rome Rule, Connolly could not effectively counter such fears. In line with the non-sectarian secularism that he himself forcefully expounded, Connolly had already pointed out in "The Harp" of August 1908 that the Catholic Church's defeat of Parnell had "established the priesthood in full control of secular affairs in Ireland".

It would not be until the 1990s that our democratic Republic could truly be said to have become an essentially secular one as well. And we achieved that for ourselves and by ourselves. At long last there is now a far more realistic basis for working for unity by consent along the principles of the Good Friday Agreement and for realising the objectives proclaimed in the closing lines of Connolly's own Labour in Irish History (1910), namely, that "the North and South will again clasp hands" and that the experience of a common struggle against exploitation "can make enthusiastic rebels out of a Protestant working class, earnest champions of civil and religious liberty out of Catholics, and out of both a united Social Democracy".

It was in the "Worker's Republic" of August 5, 1899 that Connolly had stated: "We are told to imitate Wolfe Tone, but the greatness of Wolfe Tone lay in the fact that he imitated nobody". It is therefore appropriate that here in Roscommon I should pay tribute to that great Sinn Féin leader, secular Republican and admirer of Connolly — Father Michael O'Flanagan — who thought out such complex issues for himself and gave his own creative application to Connolly's ethical principle that "Ireland without its people means nothing to me". For it was in "The Leader" during September 1916 that O'Flanagan argued:

"We have to come to an agreement with the Ulster Covenanters even though it be only an agreement to differ. We have begun to treat them as fellowmen. If we go a little further along the road, we may find after time that they are willing to treat us as fellow countrymen ...When we are in a position to assert that (Church/State) interference has not merely ceased but that we have provided against all reasonable possibility of its recrudescence, then we shall stand upon that clear and solid ground ... for us to educate and win Ulster ...The Ulster difficulty is a real difficulty ... but I welcome the difficulty. The Ulster difficulty is Ireland's opportunity. When we solve the Ulster difficulty we shall realise the dream of past generations of Irishmen".

Speed the day!

This, then, was perhaps the key issue where it was of the utmost importance not to be trapped in any ideological cul-de-sac on the basis of Connolly's own writings on the Ulster crisis but rather to think these issues out for oneself. Connolly should neither be deified nor have myths constructed around him. But what of other issues, such as Connolly's stand on the First World War? His principal biographer C.D. Greaves maintained that "Connolly's thought ran parallel with Lenin's". But this was simply not true. Twenty five years ago a controversy raged in the columns of the "Irish Times" during which I challenged the Greaves School on that issue and, in particular, the prevailing view that Connolly's position in respect of the First World War was one of neutrality. I pointed out that it was not Lenin who appealed to Connolly, but rather Lenin's life-long opponent, the Polish Socialist leader Josef Pilsudski. Connolly in fact applauded Pilsudski's Polish Legion for fighting alongside Germany against Russia, as a contingent in the Austrian army. (" Worker's Republic", April 15, 1916).

In 1976, while holding that the 1916 Rising was justified, I had nonetheless gone on to criticise Connolly for not ideologically differentiating himself to a sufficient degree from his allies and for violating the "pure" socialist principle of neutrality in respect of the Imperialist War. A re-assessment of Connolly on my part also involves a re-assessment of what I myself previously wrote about him. The more I re-read Connolly the more convinced I am that I got it right as to where he stood on the First World War. It was, however, when I held Connolly to have been wrong for taking that stand, that I myself got it wrong. The more I now read Connolly in conjunction with the actual history of the First World War itself the more I appreciate his reasons for rejecting neutrality in that conflict and for preferring a German victory over a British one.

Those who wish to remain convinced of Connolly's neutrality will, of course, always allude to a slogan of his — "We Serve Neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland" — which Connolly hung as a banner from Liberty Hall and used as the mast-head of the "Irish Worker" from the end of October to early December 1914. This, in my view, was little more than another example of a Connolly pose, a device which he adopted as a public stance in order to enable him to operate more effectively with a different agenda. Samuel Levenson is the biographer whom we must thank for unearthing a letter which Connolly wrote to his friend J. Carstairs Matheson in January 1908, in which he explained his reasons for adopting poses on particular issues. Connolly revealed:

"For myself, though I have usually posed as a Catholic, I have not gone to my duty for 15 years, and have not the slightest tincture of faith left. I only assumed the Catholic pose in order to quiz the raw free thinkers whose ridiculous dogmatism did and does annoy me as much as the dogmatism of the Orthodox. In fact, I respect the good Catholic more than the average freethinker". (James Connolly — A Biography, 1973).

One has only to read the detail of what Connolly actually wrote from 1914 to 1916 to realise that his supposed wartime neutrality was also a pose. An early collection of such writings, edited by P.J. Musgrove in 1941 under the title of A Socialist and War, made this perfectly obvious, even though it censored from Connolly's very first article on the outbreak of that War — "Our Duty in the Crisis" ("Irish Worker", August 8, 1914) — the following sentence:

"Should a German army land in Ireland tomorrow we should be perfectly justified in joining it, if by doing so we could rid this country once and for all from its connection with the Brigand Empire that drags us unwillingly into this War".

But what of Connolly's disregard of the issue of German atrocities in Belgium? Altogether about 5,500 Belgian civilians were deliberately killed by the German army. Connolly did not, however, accept British propaganda concerning such atrocities because that propaganda had become so wildly exaggerated as to be incredible. Pre-war photographs of Russian pogroms against the Jews were reprinted in the British press as supposed illustrations of German atrocities in Belgium. Britain also falsely accused the Germans of cutting off the hands of Belgian children. These false accusations nauseated Connolly all the more, since not only had such child mutilations not been experienced by Belgium, they mirrored in fact what Belgium itself had been inflicting on the people of the Congo.

In his article "Belgian Rubber and Belgian Neutrality" ("Irish Worker", November 14, 1914) Connolly expressed outrage at how quickly Britain had chosen to forget Roger Casement's exposure only a decade previously of Belgian genocide against the Congolese. Having had an intimate knowledge of the Congo from an earlier visit in 1886, Casement found the 1903 devastation to be truly horrific. Where he had known one particular community of 5,000, he could now find only 600 survivors. Other areas he had previously visited that had a population of 40,000, he now found reduced to 8,000. It was only in 1919 that an official Belgian Government Commission conceded that since the beginning of Belgian rule in the Congo in 1885 its population had been cut by a half, or 10 million people. Such wholesale genocide was the Belgian atrocity that most concerned Connolly.

But what of the wider issues on the European Continent? Revisionism now rides high in many Irish academic circles and newspaper columns. It has been a long time in gestation and was even to be found in the highest ranks of the Irish Government itself thirty years ago. In 1903 Erskine Childers Snr. had made a major contribution to Britain's cultural preparations for the Imperialist War against Germany with his novel The Riddle of the Sands. In a 1931 note for a new edition his widow M.A. Childers wished to enter the following caveat:

"Erskine Childers advocated preparedness for war as being the best preventive of war. During the years that followed he fundamentally altered this opinion. His profound study of military history, of politics and, later, of the causes of the Great War convinced him that preparedness induced war ... and bred in the mind of the nations concerned fears, antagonisms, and ambitions, that were destructive of peace".

In a foreword to a 1972 edition, however, the then Tánaiste and future President of Ireland, Erskine Hamilton Childers, sought to restore the full legitimacy of his father's original ideological war on Germany:

"When my father wrote the novel no one seriously believed that in eleven years the British people would be engaged in a desperate conflict with Germany and her allies ... He believed in the right of the British people to preserve their land from invasion and rule by the German empire".

Even the most pro-British of historians of the First World War would not have the audacity to go that far. Britain was not threatened by Germany and was not required to fight a War of National Liberation. Pro-British historians argue instead that Britain acted in order to prevent Germany threatening others. Connolly, on the contrary, argued in his article "The War Upon the German Nation" that it was as an economic rival that Britain wanted Germany crushed. ("Irish Worker", August 29, 1914). To further that objective the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey had in fact told Clemenceau of France in April 1908 that it was his policy to reinforce Tsarist Russia as a "counterpoise to Germany on land". A strengthened Russia would in turn threaten Germany's ally Austria, and Grey sanctioned Russia's sponsorship of expansionist Serbian nationalism for that purpose. And damn the consequences.

James Joyce, who had lived under the Austrian Empire in Trieste, would, in a post-war letter to Mary Colum, dismiss Britain's anti-Austrian propaganda with the observation: "They called the Austrian Empire a ramshackle empire ... I wish to God there were more such empires". The novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, whose book The Wandering Jews provides one of the most penetrating accounts of the horrifying predicament facing his fellow-Jews in inter-War Europe, also recalled: "My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary". But Britain wanted that Empire broken up, no matter what, and in fact expressed anger that Russia had not reacted more firmly in 1908 against Austria's formal incorporation of the Bosnia it had ruled since the collapse of Ottoman rule in that province in 1878.

Serbia, of course, wished to rule Bosnia as part of a Greater Serbia, irrespective of the fact that the majority of Bosnians were opposed to any such outcome. In 1914 Croats, Muslims, Slovenes, Croatian Serbs — and even a minority of Bosnian Serbs — would all fight in the Austrian army against Serbia. And the spark that came from that conflict set alight the Inferno that engulfed Europe for the next four years. Following the conclusion of the World War in November 1918, when Serbia had finally conquered Bosnia, Britain's ally went on to celebrate its triumph in the New Year of 1919 with the massacre of 1,000 Muslim men, the burning to death of seventy-six Muslim women and the pillaging of 270 villages.

We are still living today with the consequences of the forces that Britain set out to unleash in Europe a century ago. When the U.C.D. Professor of Economics and Redmondite M.P. Tom Kettle launched his war propaganda on behalf of Britain with an article entitled "Europe Against The Barbarians" ("Daily News", August 10, 1914), it was to give Serbia a free hand to do whatever she wanted to do in the Balkans, while Britain got to grips with the bigger picture:

"As for Serbia, it seems probable that nobody will have the time to go to war with her. Her function has been that of the electric button which discharges the great gun of a fortress. And now that the lightenings have been released, what is the stake for which we are playing? It is as simple as it is colossal. It is Europe against the barbarians ... The 'big blonde brute' has stepped from the pages of Nietzsche out on to the plains about Liege".

On February 23, 1916 the British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was to declare: "We shall not sheath the sword ... until Belgium — and I will add Serbia — recovers in full measure all, and more than all she has sacrificed". And in June 1916 that Government made sure that 'Kosovo Day' was celebrated in honour of the Serbs throughout the length and breadth of Britain.

The British Government knew perfectly well the character of the forces it was supporting. The Balkan Wars had commenced in October 1912 following a revolt against Ottoman rule both in Albania itself and by the Albanian majority in Kosovo. Serbia then attacked in order to annex not only Kosovo but also Northern Albania as a coastal territory. Austria forced Serbia to withdraw from Albania proper and concede its independence. But Serbia hung on to Kosovo, having massacred anything between 20,000 and 25,000 Albanian civilians by December 1912.

These massacres had been recounted at the time in eye-witness reports by Edith Durham in the English-speaking press, by Leon Trotsky in the Russian-speaking press, and by a host of newspaper reports right across Europe. The massacres in Kosovo were also confirmed by a Carnegie Commission Report co-authored by the editor of "The Economist", H.N. Brailsford. This 1913 Report spoke of "houses and whole villages reduced to ashes, unarmed and innocent populations massacred en masse, incredible acts of violence, pillage and brutality of every kind — such were the means which were employed and are still being employed by the Serbo-Montenegrin soldiery, with a view to the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians". And so it was that both Kettle and Asquith were made fully aware beforehand as to what was in store for the Balkans when they went on to unequivocally champion Serbia's War in 1914.

While Kettle was whipping up Irishmen to enlist in Britain's War against Germany, Connolly issued a manifesto in the name of the Irish Citizen Army which pointed out:

"Remember, all you workers, that this war is utterly unjustifiable and unnecessary. Belgium would never have been in the slightest danger if France had not encouraged Russia to prepare to attack Germany. And France would not have given that encouragement to Russia had she not been urged to do so by the secret diplomacy of England. There would never have been a war within two hundred and fifty miles of the Belgian frontier had not the French and English Governments secretly resolved to attack Germany in order to help Russia — the greatest and most brutal foe of human liberty in the world". ("Irish Worker", August 15, 1914).

When James Connolly categorised British policy in August 1914 as "The War Upon the German Nation", it was also a war upon any German national who could be found. It is a remarkable fact that all of the historians and journalists who have sought to re-create and celebrate Irish involvement in England's Imperialist War have either overlooked or studiously ignored one very dramatic event during the first fortnight of that War — the Dublin pogrom of August 15, 1914. Between 11 and 11.30 that night a wave of mob attacks on German pork butcher shops occurred across Dublin. The most serious were on the premises of Frederick Lang in Wexford Street and George Reitz at Leonard's Corner on South Circular Road, Portobello.

These attacks were particularly frightening because they were conducted by the same mob making it's way from one premises to the other, requiring a walk of at least twenty minutes. All the more sinister was the fact that this mob, hell-bent on destruction and pillage, was led by a newly-enlisted soldier who had answered John Redmond's and Tom Kettle's call to arms and who first wished to fight the "barbarians" in our midst before embarking for the War on the Continent. Not only were both shop premises totally wrecked, but the upstairs living quarters of Lang and his family and staff had also been invaded and their furniture smashed up and thrown out the window.

The fullest account of the attack on George Reitz's premises appeared in the "Irish Worker" on August 22, 1914. Under the heading of "German Baiting: The Police Cowardice" the correspondent described a classic pogrom scene. Having first arrested Reitz himself, the Dublin Metropolitan Police then left his premises unprotected and allowed the mob to proceed unhindered in destroying that shop and robbing its contents. Meanwhile, the DMP themselves stood "idly by" and laughed away the night as they observed the "sport" of the Redmondites plundering to their hearts content.

But the "Irish Worker" of Larkin and Connolly let it be clearly understood that if the homes of "citizens of German extraction" were to face the threat of any further pogroms, "an appeal to the men of the Transport Union and the Citizen Army to act as a guard for their houses would not fail to produce good results". In writing in the same issue, the Aran Islander Micheál Ó Maoláin, an organiser for both the Irish Transport and General Workers Union and the Irish Citizen Army, observed:

"One of the most distinguished gentlemen upon whom the Freedom of this City was recently conferred was a German — Dr. Kuno Meyer ... (for his) work in the saving of the Irish language. He was then acclaimed as a public benefactor, but now it seems that were he found in our streets he would be apprehended ... and perhaps his residence looted by the King's Irishry".

Ó Maoláin was not far wrong. Kuno Meyer was the German co-worker of an Craoibhín who had founded the Dublin School of Irish Learning in 1903. On March 15, 1915 Dublin City Council voted to deprive Meyer of the Freedom of the City it had previously bestowed on him in 1911 — an act once again denounced by Ó Maoláin in Connolly's "Workers Republic" on November 6, 1915. And Meyer was to be similarly punished by Cork City Council. Given such a vendetta, Mrs. Douglas Hyde was perhaps fortunate that, although known in
Dublin as "a foreign woman", ignorance of her maiden name of Lucy Cometina Kurtz meant that attention was not drawn to her own German parentage, or to the fact that her early love-correspondence with an Craoibhín had been conducted almost entirely in German.

The pogromist attack on George Reitz's shop at Leonard's Corner rang particular alarm bells for Dublin's Jewish community, since Leonard's Corner was where the Lower Clanbrassil Street thoroughfare of kosher and other Jewish shops commenced. Had that particular mob not been fully sated and exhausted by attacking two widely separated German shops in succession, there can be little doubt that the Jewish shops nearby would have been treated as the next sitting targets. Anti-Semitic outbursts would not have been a novel feature for a Redmondite mob. At the February 1909 Convention of the United Irish League, where John Redmond had denied free speech to William O'Brien M.P. and had driven him out of the Party, the great cry of Redmond's Hibernian bully boys had been "Down with the Russian Jewess!", with reference to O'Brien's wife, Sophie Raffalovich. Moreover, in the two days prior to the anti-German pogrom in Dublin the press had made it clear that the xenophobia against aliens that British war hysteria was now whipping up would make little distinction between German and Jew. The headline in the "Irish Independent" of August 13 ran:

"Germans in Ireland — Looking for the Spies — Wholesale Arrests in Dublin — Russian Jews Arrested".

It was reported that two Russian Jewish pedlars had been arrested in Mullingar and another Russian Jew in Fermoy, one of the three continuing to be held in detention. On August 14 the "Irish Independent" also described another arrested Jew as a Russian Pole when, under the heading of "Thurles Anti-German Feeling", it reported:

"Included in the arrests reported yesterday was a Russian Pole named Marcus ... On being arrested at Thurles, where he had been 3 years, Ernest Krantz, a jeweller, was booed and jeered at, amidst loud cries of 'Down with Germany', and the police had difficulty in saving him from being mobbed".

The anti-historical telescoping of the First and Second World Wars has succeeded in obscuring the fact that in the 1914 War between Britain and Germany it was Britain, in alliance with Tsarist Russia, that represented the forces of anti-Semitism. As Niall Ferguson points out in The Pity of War, when Lord Rothschild implored the London "Times" on July 31, 1914 to tone down its leading articles, which were ''hounding the country into war", both the foreign editor Henry Wickham Steed and his proprietor Lord Northcliffe described this plea as "a dirty German-Jewish international financial attempt to bully us into advocating neutrality" and concluded that "the proper answer would be a still stiffer leading article tomorrow".

The anti-Semitic hysteria of the British Establishment had its greatest impact in Ulster. In Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland Dermot Keogh has brought to light the fact that Sir Otto Jaffe, Belfast's only Jewish Lord Mayor, who had held that office in both 1899 and 1904, was compelled to resign his seat on Belfast City Council and flee Ulster in 1916. Despite the fact that this Life-President of the Belfast Jewish Congregation had lived in Ulster for over sixty years, that he had funded the establishment of a physiology laboratory in Queen's University Belfast and that he had both a son and a nephew serving in the British army that was waging war on Germany, his own German birth now made Jaffe a marked man among his fellow-Unionists. In April 1920 Dublin City Council belatedly but unanimously made amends to the memory of the now-deceased Kuno Meyer. Perhaps a more enlightened Belfast City Council might yet do the same for Otto Jaffe.

Russian-born but Newry-reared Leonard Abrahamson observed in 1914 that "the virus of anti-Semitic feeling, born of ignorance and fostered by unrelenting prejudice, still courses in the veins of numerous — if not the majority — of Britishers". And Leonard's own father became the target of such anti-Semitism. The fact that never in his life had he the remotest connection with Germany was not to spare David Abrahamson from being subjected to the "anti-German" attacks of Ulster's Empire Loyalists in both Newry and Bessbrook. Leonard further observed:

"Since the outbreak of the war, the belief generally rampant that all Jews are Germans, has given rise to many unpleasant and reprehensible occurrences. Not only has this erroneous notion gained ground amongst the uneducated but it has been fostered by the repeated linking in several journals — amongst others, the Times — of the term Jew and German".

Such experiences only served to accelerate Leonard Abrahamsons's own development as an Irish Nationalist. As honorary librarian of Trinity College Dublin's Gaelic Society, and signing himself MacAbram, he was to be disciplined in November 1914 by the University's Provost John Pentland Mahaffy for daring to invite "a man called Pearse" to speak from its platform, to whom Mahaffy particularly objected because "he was a declared supporter of the anti-recruiting agitation" against Britain's War-effort. The occasion was to have been a Thomas Davis Centenary lecture by W.B. Yeats, with Tom Kettle requested to propose the vote of thanks and Patrick Pearse to second it. Barred from Trinity, Abrahamson and his colleagues were determined to retain Pearse as a speaker, and so they reconvened the meeting with a new venue in the Antient Concert Rooms on November 20. British army recruiting officer Kettle arrived at the meeting quite drunk, and was booed both for his recruiting activities and his drunkenness. Pearse sang the praises of John Mitchel as well as Davis. And Yeats, while criticising both the Unionism of Mahaffy and the pro-Germanism of Pearse, also went on to take a stand against Kettle's hate-campaign against German culture. In replying to the vote of thanks Yeats quoted from Nietzsche, whom he described as "the great German idealist and philosopher". He stated that he was doing so on purpose. For fear that he would never again hear Nietzsche applauded by a Dublin audience, he wished to hear him applauded once. He accordingly called on the meeting to give "Three cheers for Nietzsche!".

Central to Connolly's propaganda against Britain's War was his exposure of anti-Semitism. This was no overnight conversion on Connolly's part. If we are to assess the whole array of Irish leaders of the past century, Connolly stands head and shoulders above everybody else in his commitment to a pluralist Ireland that should also welcome the Jewish immigrant. In my 1988 study Connolly Socialism and the Jewish Worker which was published in "Saothar", Journal of the Irish Labour History Society, I pointed out Connolly's unique place in history as the only Irish politician ever to have published an election address in the Yiddish language. This was during the
1902 local elections when he sought the support of the immigrant Jewish workers who had fled to Dublin as refugees from Tsarist Russian pogroms. His Redmondite opponents responded by putting it about among Christian voters that Connolly must therefore have been a Jew himself!

From the very outset of the War, Connolly was to denounce Britain's alliance with the powerhouse of anti-Semitism in Europe, Tsarist Russia. He described that Empire's massacres as follows:

"In these pogroms the Jewish districts were given up to pillage and outrage by mobs of armed men, while the police looked calmly on. Shops and houses were burned after being looted, women and children were ravished, babies and old men were thrown from windows to their death in the streets and hell was let loose generally upon the defenceless people". ("Irish Worker", August 22, 1914).

This was a theme continued by Connolly a month later in his article "The Friends of Small Nationalities" ("Irish Worker", September 12, 1914). He quoted the following from the New York Yiddish daily newspaper "Warheit": "The question is, on what side must we Jews sympathise? Where do our interests lie? The very question suggests the answer. At the present time there are only three nations in the whole of Europe whose people are not entirely antagonistic to the Jews. These countries are Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy. Never have they been so much hated, persecuted and despoiled in any countries as in Russia, Roumania, and Greece ... Even the English have lately begun to hate and persecute the Jews, while in France even their household life is made unbearable. All these considerations naturally incline us to one side. Cursing those who have now compelled Jew to fight Jew, and war in general, we hope and pray that the Austrian and German arms will be victorious in the struggle".

And so Connolly continued to agitate in the remaining two years of his life. In the "Workers Republic" on September 18, 1915 he highlighted the fact that anti-Semitism had become rampant in France and that it was regarded as tantamount to treason to fight against it, while "in Russia the government is getting ready to stain its hands with more Jewish massacres; blaming the failure of the Russian armies ... upon the Jews".

And a week before the Easter Rising, in an article entitled "Russia and the Jews", he again exposed the genocidal character of Tsarist pogroms ("Workers Republic", April 15, 1916).

This was not just alarmist propaganda on Connolly's part. History has proved him right. Martin Gilbert's First World War tells it like it was as the Russian troops pushed deeper into Austrian Galicia in 1914: "In the zone of the Russian armies, according to (one of the principal architects of the War) the French Ambassador to Russia, Paléologue, Jews were being hanged every day, accused of being secretly sympathetic to the Germans and wanting them to succeed... Hundreds of thousands of Jews were driven from their homes in Lodz, Piotrkow, Bialystok and Grodno, and from dozens of other towns and villages".

The same was to happen in the Baltic region in March 1915: "Russian Cossacks, the traditional enemies of the Jews since the seventeenth century, forced them out of their homes and drove them through the snow. As many as a half a million Jews were forced to leave Lithuania and Kurland".

The situation worsened further during the Russian retreat of Summer 1915. Norman Stone's study, The Eastern Front 1914-1917, described how the Tsarist army proclaimed a 'scorched earth' policy that was very selectively applied indeed: "In practice, this meant merely a heightened degree of anti-Semitism". Stone further revealed how the British Government had kept itself fully briefed concerning the atrocities being committed by its great ally. On August 4, 1915 a War Office official named Blair provided his London superiors with the following on-the-spot assessment from Russia: "Even the most extreme anti-Semites have been moved to complain at treatment of the Jews". Yet Britain itself did not complain. Instead, Sir Winston Churchill would go on to pen an uncritical hymn of praise entitled The Unknown War, which he dedicated to the Tsarist army.

But the English-speaking public at large did not need to await the subsequent researches of historians for the horrors that were being perpetrated behind the Russian lines to be clearly revealed. America's top correspondent John Reed had reported on this dark subject for the "Metropolitan Magazine" during 1915 itself, and his dispatches were subsequently published in book form in 1916 under the title War in Eastern Europe — Travels through the Balkans in 1915. The last thing that Reed could have been accused of was pro-Jewish bias. Quite the contrary. There was hardly a Jewish individual or an entire Jewish community encountered by Reed that he did not describe with evident distaste. But anti-Semitic prejudices were one thing and pogroms and massacres quite a qualitative leap into something else.

As he travelled through Russian-occupied territory, Reed was horrified by what he found among the ruins of the Jewish quarter of Austrian Novo Sielitza: "The Russians had wrecked everything at the beginning of the war — what became of the people we didn't like to think". Moving northward through Bukovina he described the villages he found: "Many houses were deserted, smashed and black with fire — especially those where Jews had lived. They bore marks of wanton pillage — for there had been no battle here — doors beaten in, windows torn out, and lying all about the wreckage of furniture, rent clothing. Since the beginning of the war the Austrians had not come here. It was Russian work ..."

In the town of Zalezchik, "an atmosphere of terror hung over the place — we could feel it in the air. It was in the crouching figures of the Jews, stealing furtively along the tottering walls." These were the survivors of the massacre described to Reed by a Jewish pharmacist who had also survived: "A month ago the Russians came in here — they slaughtered the Jews, and drove the women and children out there" — westwards. And in the town of Tarnapol there were three Russian soldiers to every civilian. "Many Jews had been 'expelled' when the Russians entered the town — a dark and bloody mystery that". Reed summed up the Tsarist Russian mind-set as one which would do its best "to exterminate the Jews".

This, then, was the ally that Britain wished to see triumphant in the East. In Britain's grand scheme of things for Europe, tens of thousands of exterminated Jewish civilians were as expendable as their Albanian counterparts in Kosovo. And following the Russian Revolution of 1917 Britain would wage another war in alliance with exactly those same dark forces in an attempt to restore Tsarism. As David Carlton recounts in Churchill and the Soviet Union, the principal supporter of the 1919 campaign of Denikin's White army in Southern Russia was Churchill himself as Britain's Secretary for War. Even Churchill's own authorised biographer Martin Gilbert states that "during 1919, more than 100,000 Jews were murdered". By October 7, 1919 British Prime Minister Lloyd George at last raised with Churchill the issue of the "treatment of the Jews by your friends". But Churchill sought to unashamedly justify such anti-Semitism when replying to Lloyd George on October 10:

"There is a very bitter feeling throughout Russia against the Jews, who are regarded as the main instigators of the ruin of the Empire... This feeling is shared by ... the army of the Don under General Denikin".

A bitter reality which it is unpalatable for the overwhelming majority of pro-British historians to acknowledge is that until such time as Adolf Hitler embarked on the Holocaust of Nazi Germany's attempted "Final Solution of the Jewish Question", the international statesman with the greatest responsibility for genocidal war crimes against entire Jewish communities had been none other than Britain's Winston Churchill. That the extent of Jewish extermination had not been even more catastrophic was due solely to the fact that the Soviet Union had succeeded in defeating Churchill's War of Intervention. At a Conference held in London by the Federation of Ukrainian Jews in January 1922, Britain's Chief Rabbi spoke of how "one of the blackest pages in the annals of mankind had just been closed — 100,000 human beings at least had been butchered; one community of 1,500 had been wiped out".

This was reported in the "Workers Republic" of January 21, 1922 by the young Roddy Connolly, in keeping with the political legacy bequeathed to him by his executed father. For James Connolly was not merely a great Irishman. His stature is also that of a great European by virtue of his appreciation of the wider ramifications of the First World War and for the stand he took against the devastation of Europe unleashed by Britain and her genocidal allies.

"Degradation" was the term that Connolly used time and time again to describe the enlistment of Irish support for Britain's War. And he was not just referring to the sacrifice of 35,000 Irish lives in the actual warfare itself. He was also referring to the degradation of Irish society by all the anti-Semitic and anti-German racism that was central to the British war effort. Ending such degradation ranked high among the objectives for which he planned the 1916 Rising.

Connolly was hardly a year dead before the republication of his Labour in Irish History in 1917 brought with it a particularly insidious exercise in the denigration of his stand. And it was all the more poisonous in being so sympathetically expressed. In Ireland in the Great War — the Irish Insurrection of 1916 Set in its Context of the World War, Brendan Clifford has commented on how incongruous it was for a pro-British War propagandist like Robert Lynd to be asked to write that new introduction to Connolly's writings. For Lynd used the opportunity to yet again expound his own anti-German propaganda and to patronisingly dismiss Connolly's views on the War with the contention that "Connolly could not interest himself very deeply" in it.

The sop that Lynd threw to sentiment was his opening sentence that "James Connolly is Ireland's first Socialist martyr". And this was the red herring that distracted Seán O'Casey in 1919 when he argued in his booklet The Story of the Irish Citizen Army that "in Sheehy-Skeffington, and not in Connolly, fell the first martyr to Irish Socialism". Apart from the fact that Francis Sheehy-Skeffington could not in conscience take up arms himself, there was in reality no essential political difference between himself and Connolly. As he awaited the firing squad the wounded Connolly expressed the wish that Sheehy-Skeffington should be named as his literary executor, only to discover that he too had already been murdered by the British army. Both men had been of one mind, even in relation to the desirable outcome of the First World War.

Sheehy-Skeffington's own involvement in the Neutrality League had been as much a pose as Connolly's. More to the point, the Neutrality League itself had been operated as a pose by all concerned to such an extent that it was on the League's behalf that Sheehy-Skeffington had been sent to the United States in 1915 in order to seek German assistance. Indeed, Sheehy-Skeffington himself had previously made contact with a German army commander in Belgium in order to request financial assistance for his own campaign against British army recruitment. And Sheehy- Skeffington's speech from the Dock in his June 1915 trial for anti-recruiting activities was on a par with Connolly's own perspective in rejoicing at the possibility that the break-up of the British Empire might result from that War.

Connolly's stand on the War also comes under attack in more indirect ways, through the creation of alternative heroic myths on the other side of the Great War divide. Francis Ledwidge is often extolled not only for his poetry and personal courage but also for the cause for which he enlisted in the British army. Ledwidge, who fought in Kosovo in 1915 in order to expel the new Bulgarian invaders and restore that province to the only slightly more established Serbian invaders of 1912, has been frequently quoted with approval for the anti-German sentiments contained in his statement that "I joined the British Army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilisation and I would not have it said that she defended us while we did nothing at home but pass resolutions". But this statement is usually quoted out of context. Alice Curtayne's biography — Francis Ledwidge, A Life of the Poet — makes it perfectly clear that it is taken from a June 1917 letter in which Ledwidge, while no longer adhering to such a view, explained what had been his original motivation for enlisting in 1914. In that same letter Ledwidge revealed his sympathies for the 1916 Rising, referred to his poem on the executed Rising leader Thomas McDonagh as his favourite one, and described how awful it felt to be "called a British soldier while my own country has no place among the nations but the place of Cinderella". Home on leave in the immediate aftermath of the Easter Rising Ledwidge had in fact told his brother Joe: "If I heard the Germans were coming in over our back wall, I wouldn't go out now to stop them. They could come!".

Which brings us back to Connolly and the utter inappropriateness of Robert Lynd's so-called "appreciation" of Connolly. Writing in October 1916, Lynd sought to sum up as "the true interpretation of the last passion of James Connolly" what Tom Kettle had said of him in July 1916, that Connolly could only be explained in terms of the anarchist desire "to wreck the guilty Temple and give us rest".

But there was nothing so purposeless in Connolly's death. It is Kettle's own death in the British army in September 1916 that poses such a question.It is summed up in the final lines of his last poem:

"Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor —
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the sacred Scripture of the poor".

Marx observed that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Here both effects were produced simultaneously — the tragedy of Kettle's death and the farce of his own explanation of it. Kettle's borrowing of the "neither King nor Kaiser" imagery from Connolly had even less validity in his case, precisely because he himself had explicitly recruited for the British army on the basis of arguing that "Britain, Russia, France enter this war purged of their sins of past domination". The events of Easter Week 1916, and not least the murder of his own brother-in-law Sheehy-Skeffington, highlighted for Kettle the bankruptcy of his political position. He had enough personal integrity and courage to see through to the end the War for which he had encouraged 35,000 other Irishmen to die. But he no longer believed in it. Both Kettle and Ledwidge died on the wrong side. Their personal tragedies lie primarily in the fact that they knew that to be the case. To repeat, there was nothing so purposeless about either the life or death of James Connolly. As he said to his daughter Nora on May 9, 1916:

"It was a good clean fight. The cause can't die now. The fight will put an end to recruiting. Irishmen now realise the absurdity of fighting for another country when their own is enslaved".

And on the morning of his execution on May 12 when his wife Lilly had cried out in anguish — "But your beautiful life, Jim, your beautiful life!" — Connolly said to her: "Wasn't it a full life Lilly, and isn't this a good end?".

But what, then, of Connolly's Socialism?

In The Story of the Irish Citizen Army, Seán Ó Casey maintained that on the road to the 1916 Rising "Connolly had stepped from the narrow byway of Irish Socialism onto the broad and crowded highway of Irish Nationalism ... Connolly was no more an Irish Socialist martyr than Robert Emmet, P.H. Pearse, or Theobold Wolfe Tone".

Connolly's biographer Samuel Levenson was to disagree with O'Casey:

"The claim is made that, when World War I broke out, Connolly scrapped his faith in socialism and the brotherhood of the working class in order to embrace pure and simple nationalism ... A slight change in emphasis did take place, I think, but on the whole Desmond Ryan was correct in calling Connolly's socialism 'the most vital and consistent thing about him'. Connolly was not likely to make a drastic change in his thinking at the age of forty-six, when the War started".

Nonetheless, Levenson also drew attention to Connollys court-martial statement of May 8, 1916 wherein he declared:

"We succeeded in proving that Irishmen are ready to die endeavouring to win for Ireland those national rights which the British Government has been asking them to die to win for Belgium".

Levenson proceeded to offer the following critique:

"No doubt a splendid 'statement at the dock', but it seems hardly appropriate for a hardened socialist, syndicalist, or labour organiser. All the statement stressed is the right and duty of the Irish people to seek national freedom and to expel the British Government from Ireland. Not a word about freeing the working class from capitalist exploitation ... In a similar situation there is no doubt what other socialists and radicals — Lenin, Bukharin, Daniel De Leon, Jim Larkin, Emma Goldman — would have said. Eugene Debs did say it when he was tried a few years later for agitating against the same World War ... Desmond Greaves answers the question implied here by stating that Connolly was not delivering a political statement, but merely answering specific charges brought against him at a private court-martial. It was not the time or place to speak about his socialist convictions, and his failure to mention them does not imply that he had shed them. Greaves's argument is not entirely convincing, for Connolly thought the statement important enough to warrant slipping a copy of it to his daughter Nora when she and her mother visited him after the court-martial".

Greaves's contention was indeed unconvincing. Connolly's statement cannot be reduced to a mere rebuttal of specific charges, since these were disposed of in two short opening sentences. The essence of what be declared at his court-martial was in fact a succinct statement of principle on the aims and objectives of the Easter Rising. It was at one and the same time a statement of Irish dissociation from Britain's War in Europe, a declaration of Ireland's right to national self-determination and an invocation of the Irish right to resistance against a British rule that was, in Connolly's words, "forever a usurpation and a crime against human progress".

In 1973 I had found Levenson more convincing than Greaves, but subsequent re-assessment has led me to conclude that Levenson had in fact asked the wrong question. Connolly and the American Socialist leader Eugene Debs may well have been both opposed to the same War. But they were engaged in two quite different struggles. Debs was agitating against US involvement in that War. Connolly had concluded the War was going to be fought out to the bitter end and in that context Irishmen should also take to arms to end British occupation. Levenson's question was misplaced because no one asks, and rightly so, a similar question of Socialist and Communist resistance leaders in the Occupied Europe of World War II as to why, if ever given a court martial, they had 'only' used the opportunity to denounce Nazi German occupation.

The appropriate question to ask is whether or not Connolly had made amply clear during the 1914-16 period that he still adhered to his pre-War socialist convictions. In answering that question we also need to clarify what those socialist convictions were, since there is a Redmondite school of commentary that seeks to caricature and damn Connolly on all scores. One particular example of this was offered by the Irish Times of May 10, 2001 in the following outburst from Kevin Myers:

"Connolly ... much to Kaiser Bill's pleasure, started bumping people off in the centre of Dublin ... This is the only free country in the world where a bloodthirsty proponent of violent Marxism is still spoken of with respect".

But as far back as his article in the "Shan Van Vocht" of August, 1897 Connolly had made it perfectly clear that "in an independent country the election of a majority of Socialist representatives to the Legislature" was the democratic precondition required for "the gradual extinction" of the rule of the propertied classes and "the work of social reconstruction".

There was nothing "bloodthirsty" or "violent" about Connolly's Marxism. In "L'Irlande Libre" in 1897 he outlined his conception of Socialism as follows:

"Scientific Socialism is based upon the truth incorporated in this proposition of Karl Marx, that, 'the economic dependence of the workers on the monopolists of the means of production is the foundation of slavery in all its forms, the cause of nearly all social misery, modern, crime, mental degradation and political dependence'... Since the abandonment of the unfortunate insurrectionism of the early Socialists whose hopes were exclusively concentrated on the eventual triumph of an uprising and barricade struggle, modern Socialism, relying on the slower, but surer method of the ballot-box, has directed the attention of its partisans toward the peaceful conquest of the forces of Government in the interests of the revolutionary ideal. The advent of Socialism can only take place when the revolutionary proletariat, in possession of the organised forces of the nation (the political power of Government) will be able to build up a social organisation in conformity with the natural march of industrial development...""

"(1) We hold 'the economic emancipation of the worker requires the conversion of the means of production into the common property of Society'. Translated into the current language and practice of actual politics this teaches that the necessary road to be travelled towards the establishment of Socialism requires the transference of the means of production from the hands of private owners to those of public bodies directly responsible to the entire community.

(2) Socialism seeks then in the interest of the democracy to strengthen popular action on all public bodies".

Moreover, in an article entitled "Physical Force in Irish Politics", Connolly met this issue head-on in the "Workers' Republic" of July 22, 1899:

"The Socialist Republican conception of the functions and uses of physical force is: We neither exalt it into a principle nor repudiate it as something not to be thought of. Our position towards it is that the use or non-use of force for the realisation of the ideas of progress always has been and always will be determined by the attitude, not of the party of progress, but of the governing class opposed to that party. If the time should arrive when the party of progress finds its way to freedom barred by the stubborn greed of a possessing class entrenched behind the barriers of laws and order; if the party of progress has indoctrinated the people at large with the new revolutionary conception of society and is therefore representative of the will of a majority of the nation; if it has exhausted all the peaceful means at its disposal for the purpose of demonstrating to the people and their enemies that the new revolutionary ideas do possess the suffrage of the majority; then, but not till then, the party which represents the revolutionary idea is justified in taking steps to assume the powers of Government, and in using the weapons of force to dislodge the usurping class or Government in possession, and treating its members and supporters as usurpers and rebels against the constituted authorities ... The ballot-box was given us by our masters for their purpose; let us use it for our own. Let us demonstrate at the ballot-box the strength and intelligence of the revolutionary idea; let us make the hustings a rostrum from which to promulgate our principles; let us grasp the public powers in the interest of the disinherited class ...".

Connolly's conception of a Socialist society underwent further development and deepening during his period in the United States of America and found expression in his 1908 series of lectures subsequently published under the title of Socialism Made Easy. His involvement with the Industrial Workers of the World imbued him with the convictions that a Socialist society had to be based on industrial democracy in the workplace itself and that the development of an industrial union movement was the most essential prerequisite for such a transformation of society. In the chapter entitled "Industrial Unionism and Constructive Socialism" Connolly maintained:

"The enrolment of the workers in unions patterned closely after the structure of modern industries, and following the organic lines of industrial development, is par excellence the swiftest, safest, and most peaceful form of constructive work the Socialist can engage in. It prepares within the framework of capitalist society the working forms of the Socialist Republic, and thus while increasing the resisting power of the worker against present encroachments of the capitalist class it familiarises him with the idea that the union he is helping to build up is destined to supplant that class in the control of the industry in which he is employed ... On the day that the political and economic forces of labour finally break with capitalist society and proclaim the Workers' Republic these shops and factories so manned by Industrial Unionists will be taken charge of by the workers there employed, and force and effectiveness thus given to that proclamation. Then and thus the new society will spring into existence ready equipped to perform all the useful functions of its predecessor".

Connolly's most coherent description of the new society envisaged by him was as follows:

"Under a Socialist form of society the administration of affairs will be in the hands of representatives of the various industries of the nation; the workers in the shops and factories will organise themselves into unions, each union comprising all the workers at a given industry; said union will democratically control the workshop life of its own industry, electing all foremen, etc, and regulating the routine of labour in that industry in subordination to the needs of society in general, to the needs of its allied trades and to the department of industry to which it belongs... "

"In short, Social-Democracy, as its name implies, is the application to industry, or to the social life of the nation, of the fundamental principles of democracy. Such application will necessarily have to begin in the workshops, and proceed logically and consecutively upward through all the grades of industrial organisation until it reaches the culminating point of national executive power and direction. In other words, Socialism must proceed from the bottom upward whereas capitalist political society is organised from above downward ... "

"It will be seen that this 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 giving assurance that the social order of the future will be an extension of the freedom of the individual, and not a suppression of it".

Connolly belonged neither to the Soviet nor the British schools of State Socialism. When he returned to Ireland and published Labour in Irish History in 1910, his Chapter entitled "An Irish Utopia" showed that it was from the co-operative principles of the 1830s commune in Ralahine, County Clare that he drew inspiration for his vision of a new society in Ireland grounded in industrial as well as political democracy:

"Ralahine was an Irish point of interrogation erected amidst the wilderness of capitalist thought and feudal practice, challenging both in vain for an answer ... Such is the lesson of Ralahine. Had all the land and buildings belonged to the people, had all other estates in Ireland been conducted on the same principles, and the industries of the country also so organised, had each of them appointed delegates to confer on the business of the country at some common centre as Dublin, the framework and basis of a free Ireland would have been realised. And when Ireland does emerge into complete control of her own destinies she must seek the happiness of her people in the extension on a national basis of the social arrangements of Ralahine ... Where such changes came in the bud, what might we not expect from the flower? If a partial experiment in Socialism with all the drawbacks of an experiment will achieve such magnificent results, what could we not rightfully look for were all Ireland, all the world, so organised on the basis of common property, and exploitation and mastership forever abolished?".

But what happened Connolly's Marxism during the First World War? Did he abandon this explicitly Social-Democratic perspective to become instead "a bloodthirsty proponent of violent Marxism", or did he abandon Socialism altogether for the "Physical Force" Nationalism whose mystique he had previously challenged? He did neither. Britain's War had by definition closed off all peaceful options until that War should be brought to a conclusion. And it was the "Rule Britannia, Britannia Rules the Waves" basis of that War that had closed off the possibility not only of Socialism itself but also of free industrial development in its capitalist form. It was not merely as an Irish Republican but also as an International Socialist that Connolly sought Britain's defeat. Only a month short of the Easter Rising, in the "Workers' Republic" of March 18, 1916, Connolly argued in an article entitled "The German or the British Empire":

"Every Socialist who knows what he is talking about must be in favour of freedom of the seas, must desire that private property shall be immune from capture at sea during war, must realise that as long as any one nation dominates the water highways of the world neither peace nor free industrial development is possible for the world. If the capitalists of other nations desire the freedom of the seas for selfish reasons of their own that does not affect the matter. Every Socialist anxiously awaits and prays for that full development of the capitalist system which can alone make Socialism possible, but can only come into being by virtue of the efforts of the capitalists inspired by selfish reasons ... We do not wish to be ruled by either Empire, but we certainly believe that the first named contains in germ more of the possibilities of freedom and civilisation than the latter".

If we might borrow the language of the great split that occurred in the Russian Socialist movement a century ago, Connolly was an Irish Menshevik rather than an Irish Bolshevik. He held that the political pre-requisite for constructing a Socialist society was the democratic mandate of majority support. But, no less importantly, he also held that the economic pre-requisite was that such a society should be built on foundations established by the full development of the capitalist system. On the eve of the Easter Rising Connolly nailed his socialist colours to the mast — the colours of evolutionary socialism.

The circumstances of Britain's Imperialist War, however, dictated that as far as the issue of Irish independence was concerned, revolutionary methods were now called for. Not satisfied with the fact that tens of thousands of Irishmen in the British Army were already sacrificing their lives, British Imperialist blood-lust would soon confront Ireland with the threat of conscription.

Connolly argued:

"They who now would oppose conscription must not delude themselves into the belief that they are simply embarking upon a new form of political agitation, with no other risks than attend political agitation in times of peace ... (If) the British ruling class has made up its mind that only conscription can save the Empire ... it will enforce conscription though every river in Ireland ran with blood ... Our rulers will 'stop at nothing' to attain their ends. They will continue to rule and rob until confronted by men who will stop at nothing to overthrow them". ("Workers' Republic", November 27, 1915).

Connolly further declared:

"We believe in constitutional action in normal times; we believe in revolutionary action in exceptional times. These are exceptional times". ("Workers' Republic", December 4, 1915).

Early in the New Year of 1916 Connolly proceeded to issue a public call to the Irish Volunteers to join with his Irish Citizen Army in taking the necessary action:

"It is our duty, it is the duty of all who wish to save Ireland from such shame or such slaughter to strengthen the hand of those of the leaders who are for action as against those who are playing into the hands of the enemy. We are neither rash nor cowardly. We know our opportunity when we see it, and we know when it has gone". ("Workers' Republic, January 22, 1916).

The title of that editorial is "What Is Our Programme?" and in it is embodied Connolly's constructive legacy. It is a remarkable document in so many different ways. Levenson highlighted its importance in the chronology of events leading up to the Easter Rising and yet promptly forgot its significance when narrating the aftermath. Otherwise he might have realised that his observations on Connolly's court-martial statement were beside the point. In 1973 I myself had been equally mistaken in agreeing with Levenson's observations — completely overlooking the fact that in this very Programme that issued the call for a 1916 Rising Connolly had made it quite explicit that he was doing so as a Socialist who would never lose sight of his vision of a new society:

"The Labour movement is like no other movement. Its strength lies in being like no other movement ... Other movements dread analysis and shun all attempts to define their objects. The Labour movement delights in analysing, and is perpetually defining and re-defining its principles and objects ... What is our Programme? We at least, in conformity with the spirit of our movement, will try and tell it. Our programme in time of peace was to gather into Irish hands in Irish trade unions the control of all the forces of production and distribution in Ireland. We never believed that freedom would be realised without fighting for it. From our earliest declaration of policy in Dublin in 1896 the editor of this paper had held to the dictum that our ends should be secured 'peacefully if possible, forcibly if necessary' ... We believe that in times of peace we should work along the lines of peace to strengthen the nation, and we believe that whatever strengthens and elevates the working class strengthens the nation".

Britain's Imperialist War, however, confronted Ireland with a challenge that had now to be met with firm resolve:

"But we also believe that in times of war we should act as in war. We despise, entirely despise and loathe, all the mouthings and mouthers about war who infest Ireland in time of peace, just as we despise and loathe all the cantings about caution and restraint to which the same people treat us in times of war. Mark well then our programme. While the War lasts and Ireland still is a subject nation we shall continue to urge her to fight for her freedom. We shall continue, in season and out of season, to teach that the 'far-flung battle line' of England is weakest at the point nearest its heart, that Ireland is in that position of tactical advantage, that a defeat of England in India, Egypt, the Balkans or Flanders would not be so dangerous to the British Empire as any conflict of armed forces in Ireland, that the time for Ireland's battle is NOW, the place for Ireland's battle is HERE ...".

Yet never was such a call to arms accompanied by such outright and forthright opposition to all forms of militarist ideology. Echoing his 1899 critique of the mystique of "Physical Force in Irish Politics", the Connolly of the 1916 Rising drew the following line in the sand and added his own emphasis:

"But the moment peace is once admitted by the British Government as being a subject ripe for discussion, that moment our policy will be for peace and in direct opposition to all talk or preparation for armed revolution. We will be no party to leading out Irish patriots to meet the might of an England at peace. The moment peace is in the air we shall strictly confine ourselves, and lend all our influence to the work of turning the thought of Labour in Ireland to the work of peaceful reconstruction ... ".

There was nothing of the "anarchist" or "bloodthirsty" caricatures of Connolly to be found in his actual Programme — an eminently pragmatic and practical approach to whatever possibilities existed for ensuring the progress of Irish society and advancing the working class position within it. And yet in all his practicality he never lost sight of a value-system and a vision of an ideal society that drove that practicality forward and gave it purpose. I will therefore conclude with Connolly's own lines from his poem "Be Moderate":

"Some men faint-hearted ever seek
Our Programme to retouch
And will insist when e'er they speak
That we demand too much.
'Tis passing strange, yet I declare
Such statements cause me mirth,
For our demands most modest are:
We only want the Earth!".

END