James Connolly

Connolly and the First World War

Part 11 of Michael Johnson’s series on the life and politics of James Connolly. The rest of the series can be found here . In March 1914, Asquith made his new and final proposal on Home Rule, putting forward a scheme whereby the Ulster counties could exclude themselves from the new Irish constitution. It was supposed to be a temporary exclusion, for six years, but a general election in the interim delivering a Tory majority could make it permanent. It was clear that Ulster was holding out for permanent exclusion — partition — if could not prevent Home Rule from passing. Adding to the...

Connolly and the Irish labour movement

Part ten of Michael Johnson’s series on the life and politics of James Connolly. The rest of the series can be found here . The issue of the need for an independent Irish labour movement and an Irish Labour Party was a source of conflict with members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in Belfast, whose leading light was William Walker. Walker, a long-time Belfast labour activist and former member of the British Labour Party’s executive, advocated the further integration of labour bodies in Ireland with the British labour movement, a view he understood to represent “internationalism”...

Connolly and the Unionists

Part nine of Michael Johnson’s series on the life and politics of James Connolly. The rest of the series can be found here . The prospect of the Third Home Rule Bill sparked a widespread mobilisation of Ulster Unionists in opposition to the measure, backed to the hilt by the Tory establishment who hoped to use Ulster to defeat Home Rule for Ireland as a whole. Connolly’s perspective after 1910 was that Home Rule was inevitable and that workers needed an independent Irish Labour Party to provide opposition to the Irish Nationalists in a future Home Rule Parliament. As late as 1913 he remained...

Connolly and the Dublin lockout

Part eight of Michael Johnson’s series on the life and politics of James Connolly. The rest of the series can be found here . While the Home Rule crisis raged in Ulster, the southern Irish labour movement was about to engage in a class battle of unprecedented militancy. Connolly, along with Jim Larkin, would be at the centre of events during the 1913 Dublin Lock-Out. In the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War, Great Britain was convulsed by an unprecedented wave of syndicalist-inspired strike action known as the “Great Unrest”. Dockers and railway workers took prolonged...

Connolly, the rise of Irish labour and Home Rule

By January 1908, Connolly finally had an organ of his own once again, when he founded The Harp as the newspaper of the Irish Socialist Federation (ISF) in the USA. The ISF was inspired by Connolly’s work alongside Italian workers in the Il Proletario group, which prompted him to learn Italian and organise free speech protests against police harassment of the group’s meetings. Irish-Americans did not have their own national federation. Indeed, New York Mayor George B. McClellan had declared that “There are Russian Socialists and Jewish Socialists and German Socialists. But thank God there are...

Connolly, the USA, and the Wobblies

In June 1905, the American workers’ movement took a huge leap forward, with the establishment of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Chicago. Its roots lay in the militancy of mine workers in the mid-western states, where for a decade the Western Federation of Miners had been fighting intense class battles with the employers, uniting skilled and unskilled workers and relying on workers’ own strength and solidarity to defeat the bosses. The need for an organisation like the IWW (known commonly as the “Wobblies”), emphasising class struggle and solidarity, and organising the unorganised...

Connolly, Millerand, and De Leon

In 1900, the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP) scored a victory when the Paris Congress of the Second International recognised its delegates, E.W. Stewart and Tom Lyng, as representing a separate national group from the British socialist organisations. Amongst the delegates supporting this stance — against the British SDF — were those from Daniel De Leon’s American Socialist Labour Party (SLP), whose struggle against reformism and opportunism in the socialist movement was admired by the Irish socialists. One major issue of controversy at the 1900 conference was the decision in 1899 by...

Uniting the Dublin socialists

Michael Johnson continues a series on the life and politics of James Connolly. When Connolly arrived in Dublin in May 1896 he had his work cut out for him. The situation for the working-class was even worse than in Edinburgh. Overcrowding and tuberculosis were rife, and the city had the fifth highest recorded death rate in the world. To make matters worse, despite the creation of the Irish Trades Union Congress (ITUC) in 1894, the labour movement had largely been untouched by the wave of New Unionism across the water. It was dominated by cautious craft unions based in luxury goods industries...

How Connolly became a socialist

James Connolly was born in poverty in the Edinburgh slum of Cowgate in 1868 to Irish parents. His father, John, was a manure carter for the Edinburgh Corporation and his mother, Mary, a domestic servant. Cowgate was part of a “little Ireland” ghetto in Edinburgh, politically dominated by the Irish National League (linked to the pro-Home Rule Irish Parliamentary Party) and the influence of the local clergy. Some Irish workers found a niche in the local garment trade, and their relative advantage over poorer Scottish labourers generated a cross-class national solidarity with the Irish middle...

Liam Daltun: 50 years after the Easter Rising, a Socialist Republican's "Reflections on the Easter jamboree"

Introductory note. This article appeared in the London monthly of the Irish Workers' Group, “Irish Militant”, in May 1966. The author, Liam Daltun had been a member of the IRA who had taken part in the 1956 split in that organisation, siding with the faction led by Joe Cristle, which was impatient for “action” against the 6 County sub state. He took part in the “action” of November 1956, when they set fire to custom posts along the internal Irish border, which preceeded the “official” IRA Campaign that would start in December 1956. Eventually disillusioned with both of the IRA factions, he...

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.