PRC-UTE
7th September 2007, 15:27
The Plough
Volume 4, Number 19
31 August 2007
E-mail newsletter of the
Irish Republican Socialist Party
1) Editorial
2) James Connolly’s strategy and the 1916 Easter Rising
3) Connolly and ‘blood sacrifice’
4) Letters
Editorial
In this edition we reprint articles on James Connolly. The articles were first
printed in the Weekly Worker a publication of the “Communist Party of Great
Britain” (www.cpgb.org.uk <http://www.cpgb.org.uk> ) and were written by a
former member of Sinn Fein (provisional) Philip Ferguson. James Connolly was
and still is the most influential Marxist in Irish revolutionary politics.
These articles are an articulate and influential response to those who would
revise and write out of history the essential revolutionary core of Connolly or
dismiss him as irrelevant. Irish republicans and socialists when in doubt as to
what direction we should take in the struggle should go back to Connolly and on
to socialism!
James Connolly’s strategy and the 1916 Easter Rising
James Connolly and his revolutionary circle saw the outbreak of war in Europe in
1914 as making rebellion in Ireland not only possible, but an imperative
necessity. “I will not miss this chance,” Connolly declared when war broke
out.[1] In September he asked, “Would it not be better for all capable of
bearing arms to resolve to fight and if need be to die for freedom here at home
rather than be slaughtered for the benefit of kings and capitalists
abroad.”[2] Connolly was also no doubt aware of the problems which beset the
British administration in Ireland at the opening of the war.
Indeed, the Irish Times argued just before war broke out that the state of
Ireland “Is desperately critical. The Administration is helpless and
discredited.”[3] As Young, who is hostile to the Connolly perspective, notes,
“From the outbreak of the First World War, Countess Markievicz and James
Connolly were waiting their opportunity to initiate a nationalist-cum-socialist
revolt. When the opportunity came in April 1916, they did not hesitate to
confront the might of British imperialism.”[4]
Far from being goaded into the Easter Rising, “Countess Markievicz and James
Connolly had decided upon the efficacy of a nationalist uprising in August
1914.”[5]
It should be noted that this was James Larkin’s perspective as well. Along
with calling on workers to fight for Ireland alone, he declared “England’s
need is Ireland’s opportunity”,[6] that “the guns must be got, and at
once”[7] and that Ireland “had now the finest chance she had for
centuries.”[8] Larkin also organised anti-war protests and told a rally of
7000 in Dublin that the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, the militant
union led by Connolly and himself, was prepared to help land weapons in Ireland.
The Dublin Trades Council, following the killings the evening of the Howth
gun-running on July 26, adopted a motion from ITGWU leader O’Brien which
included the view that “the only effective manner of dealing with this latest
action of the Government is for the people to meet force with force.”[9]
Most importantly, from the viewpoint of revolutionary socialists such as Larkin,
Connolly and Markievicz, the war and John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary
Party’s role in supporting it while acquiescing in the shelving of Home Rule,
provided militant labour with the opportunity to push past the bourgeois
nationalists and unite all the progressive forces behind the radical working
class movement.
The forces led by Connolly (and earlier by Larkin also) sought to detach the
republicans from the bourgeois nationalist Redmondites within the Irish
Volunteers and then the left-republicans from the timid elements around Irish
Volunteers’ leader (and university professor) Eoin MacNeill. When Redmond
pledged the Volunteers to Britain at Woodenbridge in September 1914, Larkin
described him as “The Irish Judas” and suggested he should be strung
up.[10] The following month, Larkin headed one of his editorials, “Redmond
Eats His Own Vomit”.[11] The Irish Independent Labour Party launched an
“Appeal to the Irish Working Class” asking them to remember they belonged
to the same class as the workers of the rest of Europe, urging a revolutionary
defeatist position on the basis that a British defeat would assist the struggle
for Irish freedom. As the actress Maire nic Shublaigh, an early activist in the
radical republican women’s group Inghinidhe na hEireann noted in her
autobiography, the suspension of Home Rule “raised a storm of protest” and
Redmond’s decision to back Britain despite this ensured “The young men were
outraged.”[12] In effect, the IPP sell-out opened the way for the initiative
on the national question to pass to the militant labour and republican
groupings. Connolly was determined not to let the opportunity pass.
In May, Connolly had written,
“We believe there are no real Nationalists in Ireland outside of the Irish
Labour Movement. All others merely reject one part or another of the British
Conquest - the Labour Movement alone rejects it in its entirety and sets itself
to the reconquest of Ireland. . .”[13] Barely two months into the war he
declared “a fight to the finish” with the Redmondites, noting “For some
of us the finish may be on the scaffold, for some in the prison cell, for
others more fortunate upon the battlefields of an Ireland in arms for a real
republican liberty.”[14] He was, however, optimistic, writing to Larkin six
days later, on October 9, “We are at present in a very critical stage for the
whole of Ireland as well as for the Labour movement. One result of this is that
we have an opportunity of taking the lead of the real Nationalist movement. .
.”[15] This was the heart of Connolly’s strategy up to the Rising, a
strategy in which his closest co-workers were Markievicz and Michael Mallin,
fellow members of the Army Council of the Irish Citizen Army, the workers’
militia which arose out of the Great Dublin Lockout of 1913-14.
Although sharing the view that Connolly moved away from socialism to
nationalism, Young notes the “nationalist-cum-socialist” nature of the
rebellion envisaged by Connolly and Markievicz. In fact, Connolly from the
beginning perceived the rebellion as having a wider significance than simply an
attempt at national liberation for one oppressed people (as important as that
was). Through an insurrection, “Ireland may yet set the torch to a European
conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last
capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of the
last war lord,” he wrote as war was declared on the continent.[16] Connolly
began, relates O’Brien, his ITGWU colleague, to seek out allies “with the
view to combined action in preparation for an insurrection.”[17] The logical
place to find them was in a section of the Irish Republican Brotherhood since,
as Strauss has noted, that group’s “left-wing approached the position of
the militant labour movement.”[18] Thus it was not just anybody at hand
whom Connolly sought out for an alliance.
Strauss’ point about the convergence of the politics of the IRB’s left,
exemplified by Pearse, Clarke and the other Easter Proclamation signatories,
with the labour radicals is especially important and largely ignored by critics
of Connolly. The alliance between Connolly and the republicans is usually seen
as being a convergence around nationalist separatism, or Connolly’s
subordination to it. Yet this overlooks the large degree of convergence on
issues of domestic Irish politics. Both the republicans and Connolly regarded
the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which wielded immense power in the
Parliamentary Party, as an excrescence in Irish political life.[19] Both
regarded the bourgeois nationalist IPP itself as, if anything, worse than the
British government since the Parliamentary Party was the enemy within - the
main organisation in nationalist Ireland without which British rule could not
have been maintained on any stable basis. Again, Connolly and the republicans
agreed that fundamental changes in the social and economic structure were
necessary and could only be carried out in an independent country.
Even before the Dublin labour dispute the IRB’s paper, Irish Freedom, had run
articles making clear that they sided with the plebeian masses. One article,
headed “The economic basis of a revolutionary movement” by “Northman”,
maintained that labour and republicanism “rest upon the same foundation, they
are but different manifestations of the same principle and would form a natural
and mutually helpful alliance.”[20] The class sympathies of the republicans
were also evident during the 1913-14 labour struggle, with all the future
republican signatories of the 1916 Proclamation siding with the workers.
During the dispute, for instance, Irish Freedom, in a front-page article,
described the police as “Irish Cossacks” and, following the clashes in
O’Connell Street, accused them of “the killing of two citizens of Dublin
and the wounding of about six hundred.” Of the workers, the paper said,
“If they claim the right to conduct a strike against their employers, no
reasonable man can object.” If the police and military were used to suppress
them, the workers “must act after consideration and deep thought. But they
cannot punish the police brutes with empty hands against batons, or stones
against bullets. We have often advised the people of Ireland to arm themselves,
and we shall press upon them the wisdom of this course upon every against
bullets.” (Sic)[21] In a column in the same issue, Pearse, backing the
workers, likened the Dublin employers to Marie Antoinette and her alleged
“Let them eat cake” comment about the starving poor. “Poor Marie
Antoinette did not quite grasp the situation in France,” Pearse noted. “In
the end the situation grasped her and hurried her to the guillotine.” Another
proclamation signatory, Eamonn Ceannt, had even lectured on several occasions
for Connolly’s Socialist Party.[22]
The extent of this convergence between the Connolly militant labour current and
the republican militants is clearly apparent in Pearse’s final and most
developed political tract, The Sovereign People, in which he builds upon the
ideas of Lalor, the most socially revolutionary of all the republican figures
of the 1800s and a hero of Connolly’s, and at last deals with “the material
basis of freedom”. In this work Pearse makes clear his view that
“no private right to property holds good against the public right of the
nation” and that the nation must
“exercise its public right so as to secure strictly equal rights and liberties
to every man and woman within the nation”.[23] Pearse view of equal rights in
relation to women extends to participation in the government itself. He
remarks,
“in order that the people may be able to choose as a legislation and as a
government men and women really and truly representative of themselves” they
would be wisest to adopt “the widest possible franchise - give a vote to
every adult man and woman of sound mind. To restrict the franchise in any
respect is to prepare the way for some future usurpation of the rights of the
sovereign people.”[24]
Pearse had only been a republican for several years at the time, was only in his
mid-30s and evolving rapidly politically.
All of this undermines Austen Morgan’s claim that the people with whom
Connolly united in 1916 were “a group of five, later six, petty-bourgeois
cultural nationalists, most of whom had only recently embraced physical force,
a conspiracy with the pretensions of a national bourgeoisie.”[25] Far from
having “the pretensions of a national bourgeoisie”, Pearse, Clarke,
Plunkett, MacDiarmada, Ceannt and Plunkett wanted to destroy the power of the
national bourgeoisie - whose party was the IPP - and gave their lives, like
Connolly, as much to that as to the ridding of Ireland of British rule.[26]
All through the period up to the Rising, Connolly never lost an opportunity to
impress upon the republican militants his view that the working class was the
driving force for national liberation and that anyone proposing to win
Ireland’s freedom could not succeed unless they recognised this. He never
lost sight of where his group stood - “we belong to the working class of
Ireland, and strive to express the working class point of view”[27] while
pressing his point that the Irish Citizen Army was “the only body that,
without reservation, unhesitatingly announces its loyalty to the republican
principle of National Freedom of which the Fenians stood.”[28]
One of Connolly and Markievicz’s first steps to build an alliance with the
republican militants following the outbreak of war was a meeting on September 8
in the library of the Gaelic League in Parnell Square. It was attended by all
seven future Easter Proclamation signatories, veteran republican John MacBride,
O’Brien and several others. Connolly advocated that they begin preparations
for an insurrection and suggested the setting up of two subcommittees to assist
this: one to make contact with Germany for military support and one to organise
open propaganda and recruit to the secret movement.[29] A possible fruit of
the September 8 meeting was a decision made by the IRB. According to O Broin,
sometime between September and November 1914 the IRB decided to stage an
insurrection before the war was over.[30] This would suggest that the IRB
decision would have been made after the meeting at which Connolly proposed this
course, pointing up the key role played by him in initiating the insurrection.
The open organisation agreed on at the September 8 meeting, meanwhile, was
established as the Irish Neutrality League, including Markievicz and Connolly,
O’Brien and Foran from the labour movement, the pacifist Francis Sheehy
Skeffington, republican figures Sean T. O’Kelly, Sean Milroy and J.J.
Scollan, and Sinn Fein’s Arthur Griffith.[31] It was primarily a group of
leaders, without a general membership and although it organised meetings and
produced leaflets for a couple of months British military restrictions made it
impossible for the League to continue.[32] However, it may have been that
Connolly had decided the time was right to move on to a more militant flouting
of the authorities. It is clear that Markievicz and Connolly were already
thinking along such lines before the INL was even launched. For instance,
plans were laid for Citizen Army and Irish Volunteers members to seize the
Mansion House on the night of September 24 and hold it for twenty-four hours in
order to prevent Asquith and Redmond from holding their advertised recruiting
meeting in the building the following day. Although the plan had to be
abandoned due to the strength of British forces, the militants won a victory
elsewhere that day. The IV’s original executive repudiated Redmond’s
nominees as, four days earlier, Redmond had promised the Volunteers’ support
to Britain during the war. The expulsion of the Redmond group led to a split in
which the Parliamentary Party took the vast bulk of the membership, reducing the
organisation to maybe 12,000 members. Connolly was delighted.
On October 10 he declared the “fight against Redmondism and Devlinism is a
fight to save the soul of the Irish nation” and exhorted the Irish Volunteers
to throw everything into the fight against Britain’s war effort and the
IPP’s betrayal, and to adopt “the daring appeal of the
Revolutionist.”[33] Two weeks later he declared that if Britain tried to
introduce conscription in Ireland through the Militia Ballot Act or any other
measure, the ITGWU and ICA “have our answer ready.” Resistance “must of
necessity take the form of insurrectionary warfare. . . barricades in the
streets, guerrilla warfare in the country.”[34]
The split with the Redmondites[35] , so desired by Connolly, had not left the
revolutionaries in control, however. Leaders such as MacNeill and the
ubiquitous Hobson were far from sharing the views of the militant republicans
and socialists. Connolly continued to try to drive a wedge into the Volunteers,
to detach the militants from MacNeill and Hobson and pull them towards his
militant socialist/labour current.
In May 1915 the republican militants took a further step forward, setting up a
military committee, comprising Ceannt, Pearse and Plunkett with the latter
reputedly being the military expert; Clarke and MacDiarmada joined later in the
year, Connolly in January 1916 and MacDonagh later again.[36] During this
period Clarke was IRB Supreme Council secretary, MacDonagh treasurer and Denis
McCullough president.
Mid-1915 also saw a new initiative of the Connolly forces. An anti-conscription
committee was formed, with Markievicz and Connolly occupying central roles. In
August Connolly claimed,
“We saved the lives of thousands, held together thousands of homes, and amid
all the welter and turmoil of a gigantic and unparalleled national betrayal we
presented to the world the spectacle of the organised Irish working class
standing steadfastly by the highest ideals of freedom, so that the flag of
Labour became one with the standard of national liberty.”[37] In October
the Dublin Trades Council, at the initiative of Transport Union delegates,
passed a resolution calling upon workers to join the ICA and IVs as the best
way of preventing the introduction of conscription. Discussions also took place
between the trades council and Volunteers in relation to a campaign against
economic conscription. “Connolly insisted that if the organized workers were
to pledge their support for a certain policy, the Irish Volunteers should also
be pledged to back that policy with military support should that be
necessary,” recalls O’Brien, but MacNeill would not agree.[38]
During this period recruitment in Ireland fell off noticeably. Between August
1914 and August 1915, Britain succeeded in recruiting 80,000 from Ireland. Over
the following twelve months this declined to a mere 12,000. Most recruits came
from Ulster. The lowest rates were in Connaught and Munster (the south and
west), where the land struggle had been strongest. Only 10.7 percent of the
relevant age group from Ireland served in the British Army, compared to 24.2
percent in England and Wales and 26.9 percent in Scotland.[39]
Connolly and Markievicz also upped the ante, with the Citizen Army increasingly
appearing on the streets with weapons. In July they even led it in a mock
attack on Dublin Castle. Meanwhile every hesitation by the IV leadership was
met with fiery denunciation, as when they gave in to a British order that one
of their chief organisers Captain Robert Monteith (who also had a reputation as
a labour sympathiser) leave Dublin.[40]
Connolly also made clear that ICA collaboration with the Volunteers was
conditional, stating “However it may be for others, for us of the Citizen
Army there is but one ideal - an Ireland ruled, and owned, by Irish men and
women. . . The Citizen Army will only co-operate in a forward movement. The
moment that forward movement ceases it reserves for itself the right to step
out of the alignment, and advance by itself if needs be, in an effort to plant
the banner of Freedom one reach further towards its goal.”[41] This message
was not directed at MacNeill, as Connolly had no illusions about an alliance
there, but at the republican militants. His strategy was to continue to pull -
and, where necessary, push - them forward until their alliance with MacNeill was
no longer sustainable and broke up. At that point, Connolly would have been
able to draw them to his own group, in effect uniting around the militant
labour forces all the most radical republican elements.
Indeed, Connolly lost no opportunity to drive a wedge between the revolutionary
republicans and the timid elements around MacNeill. For instance, on November
4, 1915 Pearse gave a public talk reviewing the different political tendencies
at the time of the rather farcical attempt at rebellion in 1848. Connolly
described it as a “brilliant lecture”[42] and effectively used Pearse’s
arguments against MacNeill - and, by extension, against the republican
militants clinging to their alliance with MacNeill.
As Pearse had in the lecture, Connolly drew the conclusion from 1848 that
“The British Government would not wait until the plans of the revolutionists
were ready. It has not held Ireland down for 700 years by any such foolish
waiting. It struck in its own time, and its blow paralysed the people.”[43]
In a blow at both MacNeill and the IRB, Connolly went on to criticise those who
talked of “premature insurrection” and provoking the government, arguing
“Revolutionists who shrink from giving blow for blow until the great day has
arrived, and they have every shoe-string in its place, and every man has got
his gun, and the enemy has kindly consented to postpone action in order not to
needlessly hurry the revolutionists nor disarrange their plans - such
revolutionists only exist in two places - the comic opera stage, and the stage
of Irish national politics. We prefer the comic opera brand. It at least
serves its purpose.”[44]
It might be further noted that at the same time Connolly was drawing in the most
militant and politically-advanced elements of the women’s movement. While a
number of former Inghinidhe na hEireann activists had already been integrated
into the ICA, and IWFL member Kathleen Lynn had been made medical officer,
holding the rank of lieutenant, in December 1915 Connolly took on a number of
radical suffragists to do ITGWU organising work.[45]
The other aspect of Connolly and Markievicz’s strategy was to continue to
challenge the authorities and push the limits of what they could get away with.
It seems to me that there were three main elements to this.
Firstly, they were preparing their followers for the insurrection through a
process of toughening them up. Insurrection is not a business for the
faint-hearted and Connolly and Markievicz wanted a reliable and hardened force.
In early 1916, for instance, Connolly summoned each member of the ICA
individually into his office and asked them if they were prepared to fight in a
rebellion, and alongside the Volunteers.[46]
Secondly, they were showing ordinary Irish people, who had long been taught to
think of themselves as inferior and powerless, that the authorities were not
omnipotent, that they could be challenged and that they only maintained their
power as long as people acquiesced in their own oppression. This attitude was
summed up in the motto Connolly took from Desmoulins, a French revolutionary of
the eighteenth century:
“The great only appear great because we are on our knees. Let us arise!”
Thirdly, the ICA’s activities made the British think twice about what they did
since any repressive actions they planned would be met with force. These three
elements were closely related to each other. For instance, whenever armed ICA
members prevented the British from taking some action, it would raise the
self-confidence of the workers’ militia and have a positive effect on public
opinion. O’Brien has commented, for example, the ICA “attends all our
Labour meetings and you would be surprised at the changed attitude of the
police in consequence.”[47]
While the Volunteers’ leadership usually capitulated when challenged by the
authorities, as in the Monteith case, the ICA evinced another spirit. For
example, following a police raid on Markievicz’s house, remarks O’Brien,
“the police came to the Countess and wanted her to register as an alien!
Being married to a Russian the Countess is technically a Russian subject but
she told the police, more forcibly than politely, that ‘she was an Irishwoman
and before she would register as an alien she would see the police in
hell.’”[48] On another occasion in early 1916, when police called at her
house to check she would not break an order banning her from speaking at a
meeting in Tralee, she warned them to keep away from her home as no-one there
liked them and, besides, they made “grand big targets”.[49] Connolly, who
faced constant difficulties producing a newspaper, finally moved a printing
press into Liberty Hall and placed an armed guard on it. Markievicz, who did
guard duty as one of her first soldierly works, relates, “Our instructions
were, if raided, to fight to the last cartridge.”[50] This might have been
some shoot-out given that she “had an army rifle, a ‘Peter’ and a small
Browning. My comrade also was well supplied.”[51] On another occasion,
March 24, 1916, when the British attempted to remove copies of The Gael, they
faced an armed Markievicz, apparently fingering her automatic, while Connolly
pulled out a revolver, saying “Drop them or I’ll drop you.”[52]
This spirit had, in fact, been manifest following the suppression of the Irish
Worker on December 4, 1914. Connolly managed, however, to bring out a two-page
leaflet headed Irish Work, in which he argued that repression was growing, and
the more tame people were the more emboldened the authorities would be.
He declared to the authorities, “our cards are all on the table! If you
leave us at liberty we will kill your recruiting, save our poor boys from your
slaughter-house, and blast your hopes of Empire. If you strike at, imprison,
or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will
thwart you, and mayhap, raise a force that will destroy you. We defy you! Do
your worst!”[53]
It seems to me that Connolly was continually trying to limit the ability of the
British to implement their initiatives, until he could reach the point at which
Ireland would be ungovernable by anything like ordinary means. In such a
situation conditions would be ripe for an insurrection.
The Easter Rising, I would conclude, was not simply a nationalist or even
radical nationalist insurrection. It marked the success of the militant labour
forces in “taking the lead of the real Nationalist movement”.[54] Unforeseen
circumstances, including the capture of the Aud and MacNeill’s countermanding
orders, ensured that the rebellion was far more limited in scope than the
revolutionaries had intended. O’Brien recounts, for instance, that the plan
was to hold a continuous line forming a loop through the centre of the city,
but the necessary numbers ended up not being available due to MacNeill and
Hobson’s actions.[55] Markievicz’s articles and Lee’s provide
convincing arguments that the leaders hoped for a better outcome and had their
preparations proceeded as planned a far more significant fight may well have
been possible and the leaders may have been able even to escape.
The Rising did, however, show the political weakness of the republican militants
as aspiring revolutionaries. Their secret, conspiratorial politics locked them
up inside the IRB and, in the Volunteers, in a crippling alliance with
MacNeill. Other options were open to them. For instance, fighting openly for
the leadership of the Volunteers at the time MacNeill capitulated to Redmond
may have put them in a much stronger position in the long-term. Even if, as is
likely, they had ended up with only a small fraction of the Volunteer
membership it could not possibly have been less than the small force of maybe
2000 they were left to lead out on Easter Monday following MacNeill’s
countermanding order. If they had have broken with MacNeill in mid-1914, they
could have even united their forces with the ICA, which would have given a
major boost to the overall revolutionary movement. The failure of the
republican militants to transcend revolutionary nationalism and develop a
class-based revolutionary perspective left them, like the IWFL feminists,
unable to achieve their progressive goals. In the case of the republicans, the
failure was paid for with their lives.
In the case of militant labour, the Rising represented its achievement of the
leadership role for which Connolly, Markievicz (and Larkin before his departure
to the US in October 1914) had organised. In fact, one of the most interesting
features of the period up to the First World War and the Rising was the way in
which Labour was the dominant force in anti-establishment politics.
When partition was mooted, it was not the IRB or Sinn Fein which mobilised
opposition on the street but the ITUCLP. It was also organised labour which was
represented in local government throughout the country, not Sinn Fein and the
IRB. Even in Dublin it was Labour and not the anti-parliamentary nationalists
who formed the main opposition to the Irish Parliamentary Party/United Irish
League machine which ran the city. The main voice of labour, the Irish Worker,
had ten to fifteen times the circulation of the SF paper and of Irish Freedom,
the revolutionary paper backed by the IRB. The labour movement could mobilise
thousands on the national question, provided security for suffrage marches and
meetings, and took up other political questions while the IRB and Sinn Fein
could mobilise almost no-one under their own banners. In addition, the best of
the republicans, such as those grouped around Irish Freedom, were being drawn to
the side of labour and increasingly becoming influenced by socialist ideas.
An alternative perspective for Irish labour has been posited by a number of
present-day left-wing social and labour historians, including Morgan, Young and
Keogh. Yet had the ITUCLP been blessed with their presence as party strategists
and stuck to bread-and-butter issues, as they suggest, it is likely the party
would have been annihilated. No party which aspired to lead the working class
could avoid taking a stand on the number one political issue of that period in
Ireland: Irish independence.
Taking a stand on the national question, women’s rights and other political
and social questions was essential if the working class was going to take the
lead in society as a whole. It is because they did this that the radical
labour forces prior to 1916 were able to reach the early stages of challenging
the IPP as the dominant party of the Irish people and the Unionists for the
allegiance of that section of the working class still attached to the Union
with Britain. Subsequently, Labour fell back and was replaced by Sinn Fein,
because the post-1916 Labour leaders, like the revisionist critics of Connolly,
lacked any revolutionary perspective and were basically what Connolly had once
described as “gas and water socialists”. In the vacuum that opened up, the
mantle of national liberation, which Connolly had united with the cause of
labour, passed to the reorganised republican forces. These had a much more
socially conservative leadership than in the period of Pearse and Clarke, but
were prepared to fight Britain for independence.
The result of the destruction of the Connolly perspective within the labour
movement was, ultimately, the settlement of 1921. For the masses of Irish
people, that settlement, which included partition, brought about exactly the
‘carnival of reaction’ on both sides of the border which Connolly had
foreseen.
The failure of the revolutionary left to integrate the national and class
questions at each decisive point since 1916, meanwhile, has ensured its
isolation during periods of mass struggle. Today, there is a profound need to
recover the Connolly perspective in the context of an overall partyist project
if there is to be any serious advance in the struggle for Irish national
liberation and socialism.[56]
Philip Ferguson
[1] See Connolly’s ITGWU colleague William O’Brien’s “Introduction” in
the collection of Connolly’s writings, Labour and Easter Week, p1.
[2] Irish Worker, September 5, 1914.
[3] Irish Times, July 27, 1914.
[4] James D. Young, “James Connolly, James Larkin and John Maclean: the Easter
Rising and Clydeside Socialism”, in Robert Duncan and Arthur McIvor (eds)
Militant Workers: Labour and Class Conflict on the Clyde 1900-1950, Edinburgh,
John Donald, 1992, p161.
[5] Ibid. Emphasis in original.
[6] Irish Worker, August 8, 1914.
[7] Irish Worker, August 1, 1914.
[8] Irish Worker, August 29, 1914.
[9] Irish Worker, August 1, 1914.
[10] Irish Worker, September 26, 1914.
[11] Irish Worker, October 17, 1914.
[12] The Splendid Years: Maire nic Shubhlaigh’s story of the Irish National
Theatre as told to Edward Kenny, Dublin, James Duffy and Co, 1955, p159.
[13] Irish Worker, May 30, 1914.
[14] James Connolly, “Redmond Cannot Deliver the Goods”, Irish Worker,
October 3, 1914. Reprinted in Socialism and Nationalism.
[15] The letter, written at the time of Larkin’s departure for the United
States, appears in O’Brien, Forth the Banners Go, p242. John Newsinger has
neatly summarised militant labour’s position, writing “The Irish Worker’s
opposition to the war was accompanied by an urgent resolve to take advantage of
the crisis to ditch Redmond and the Nationalist Party, capture the leadership
of the Volunteer movement, and use it to secure national independence while
Britain was embroiled on the continent.” (John Newsinger, “’In the
hunger-cry of the nation’s poor is heard the voice of Ireland’: Sean
O’Casey and politics, 1908-1916”, Journal of Contemporary History, vol 20,
1985, p94.)
[16] James Connolly, “Our Duty in the Present Crisis”, Irish Worker, August
8, 1914. Reprinted in Socialism and Nationalism.
[17] William O’Brien, “Introduction”, in James Connolly, Labour and Easter
Week, p1.
[18] Emil Strauss, Irish Nationalism and British Democracy,London, Methuen,
1951, p221. He also notes the IRB’s right-wing, typified by Hobson, was
“in many respects almost indistinguishable from the Sinn Feiners under
Griffith.”
[19] Connolly’s view of the AOH is succinctly put in “Mr John E. Redmond,
his strength and weakness”, Forward, March 18, 1911, where he states it
“has spread like an ulcer throughout Ireland, carrying social and religious
terrorisn with it into quarters hitherto noted for their broadmindedness and
discernment.” It had “organised the ignorant, the drunken and the rowdy
and thrown the shield of religion around their excesses” and represented
“the organised ignorance of the community placing itself unreservedly at the
disposal of the most insidious and inveterate enemies of enlightenment.”
[20] Irish Freedom, January 1913.
[21] Irish Freedom, October 1913. Presumably they meant to say something like
“upon every occasion they are up against bullets.”
[22] O’Brien refers to this in Forth the Banners Go, Dublin, Three Candles,
1949, p259.
[23] The Sovereign People is reprinted in Pearse’s Political Writings and
Speeches, Dublin, Talbot Press, 1952, pp331-72. The quote comes from p336.
[24] Ibid, pp342-3, emphasis in original.
[25] Austen Morgan, James Connolly: a political biography, Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 1988, p19.
[26] Irish Freedom, for instance, declared in a July 1914 editorial, “(A)fter
the British government the Irish Parliamentary Party in its later years has
been the most evil force in Ireland.”
[27] Workers Republic, July 15, 1915.
[28] From Connolly’s tribute to O’Donovan Rossa, “The Man and the
Cause!”, Workers Republic, July 31, 1915. Reprinted in Labour and Easter
Week.
[29] O’Brien, p270.
[30] O Broin, Revolutionary Underground: the story of the IRB, 1858-1924,
Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1976, p156. O Broin says the decision was made in
the autumn. Remembering that he is referring to autumn in the northern
hemisphere I have put the date between September and November.
[31] O’Brien, p270.
[32] Ibid, p271.
[33] James Connolly, “A Forward Policy for the Volunteers”, Irish Worker,
October 10, 1914. Reprinted in Socialism and Nationalism.
[34] James Connolly, “The Ballot or the Barricades”, Irish Worker, October
24, 1914. See also “The Hope of Ireland”, Irish Worker, October 31, 1914
and “Rally for Labour”, Irish Worker, November 14, 1914. All reprinted in
Socialism and Nationalism.
[35] The Redmondites set up a new, much larger group, the National Volunteers.
This group soon faded away however, many of them ending up fighting for Britain
in the European conflagration.
[36] O Broin, p166-7.
[37] James Connolly, “Wee Joe Devlin”, Workers Republic, August 28, 1915.
Reprinted in Socialism and Nationalism.
[38] O’Brien, see p275-6.
[39] See J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985: politics and society, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, p23 and J.M. Winter, “Britain’s ‘lost generation’ of
the First World War”, Population Studies, vol 31, no 3, 1976.
[40] See Connolly’s biting “Trust Your Leaders!”, Workers Republic,
December 4, 1915. Reprinted in Labour and Easter Week.
[41] James Connolly, “For the Citizen Army”, Workers Republic, October 30,
1915. Reprinted in Labour and Easter Week.
[42] James Connolly, “Ireland - Disaffected or Revolutionary”, Workers
Republic, November 13, 1915. Reprinted in Labour and Easter Week.
[43] Ibid. .
[44] Ibid.
[45] This is reported in Workers Republic, December 18, 1915.
[46] Frank Robbins, Under the Starry Plough: recollections of the Irish Citizen
Army, Dublin, Academy Press, 1977, p55.
[47] O’Brien, p253.
[48] Ibid, p252-3.
[49] Marreco, The Rebel Countess, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967, p196.
[50] Constance Markievicz, “1916”, The Nation, April 23, 1927.
[51] Ibid.
[52] O’Brien, p279.
[53] James Connolly, “Courtsmartial and Revolution”, Irish Work, December
19, 1915. Reprinted in Socialism and Nationalism.
[54] See, fn 11.
[55] O’Brien, p283.
[56] For a useful recent defence of Connolly, see:
http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/RecentAr...OfConnolly.html (http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/RecentArticles/RecentDebateInDefenceOfConnolly.html)
Dublin 1916 and the ‘blood sacrifice’
Philip Ferguson gives his view on some common criticisms of James Connolly
In the early 1900s the national question affected every movement for social
change in Ireland. For the labour movement, particularly those who sought to
lead it in a revolutionary direction, the national question posed the greatest
challenge. If the goal of the working class, in the view of the
revolutionaries, was a social revolution and the establishment of a workers’
republic, how should the political question of British rule in Ireland be
approached? Was the road forward for the workers in Ireland, a colonial
possession of an imperial power, the same as that in Britain? What was the
relationship between economic and political issues? Was the job of
revolutionaries simply to provide an analysis of capitalism and/or counsel
workers to be more militant in struggling for better wages and conditions? Was
a working class-based or, at least, working class-led, revolution possible?
Given the weakness of the working class - due to the historical
underdevelopment of capitalism in Ireland and the sectarian divisions which
stemmed from this underdevelopment - were there other social forces which could
be drawn to the workers’ side in a struggle for the revolutionary
transformation of society? The response of Irish revolutionary socialists at
the time, above all James Connolly, has been a point of debate ever since. In
particular, the rise of historical revisionism has led to the resurrection of
the theme that Connolly abandoned socialism and became primarily a radical
nationalist in the last year or two of his life, the period between the
outbreak of World War I and the Easter rising. In essence, the critique of
Connolly is based on the revisionists’ hostility to Irish republicanism and
their sympathetic attitude to the ‘modernising’ mission of British
imperialism.
On the left, revisionism is based on a failure to understand Connolly’s
project as a coherent, consistent and revolutionary whole.1 We are supposed to
believe that Connolly - who was nothing if not hard and practical - was so
unhinged by the capitulation of the European socialist parties to their own
bourgeoisies in World War I that he decided to join them and capitulate to a
variant of Irish bourgeois nationalism. Their general failure to understand the
centrality of the national question to social revolution in oppressed nations,
and their profound lack of sympathy with revolutionary projects, especially in
Ireland, coupled with failures of scholarship - in the form of factual errors
and invented quotes - leaves the ‘left’ and ‘right’ revisionists’
reading of the course followed by Connolly and his comrades fundamentally
flawed.
Connolly and revisionists
The idea of Connolly abandoning socialism can be traced back to Sean O’Casey.
Before he became a famous playwright O’Casey was a railway worker and a
member of the army council of the early Irish Citizen Army. He left following
an unsuccessful attempt to force Constance Markievicz out of the workers’
army and, under the pen-name of P O’Cathasaigh, wrote a history of the ICA,
in which he alleged Connolly forsook socialism for nationalism.2 This idea is
repeated in JD Clarkson’s Labour and nationalism in Ireland and Sean
O’Faolain’s petty and vindictive biography of Markievicz.3 In more recent
times it has become an article of faith among leftwing revisionists, including
those who consider themselves Marxists. In fact their hostility to all forms of
Irish nationalism has led this particular ‘Marxist’ school to abandon also
Marx, Engels and Lenin’s views on Ireland.4
O’Casey’s view never gained much currency until the renewal of armed
conflict in Ireland at the start of the 1970s. Even then, a revisionist assault
on Connolly took some time. This is partly because Connolly’s own writings and
his labour movement activities show him as a practical and down-to-earth figure,
less vulnerable to attack than the nationalist hero Pearse, sections of whose
writings, particularly his earlier work, were full of easily-ridiculed
nationalist romanticism. It was far easier to present Pearse as a dreamer, away
with the Celtic mists and mythologised happy clan life of the Gael, and out of
touch with the real Ireland and real Irish people of his time.
With today’s liberal middle class in the south having favoured some degree of
social reform and having felt that the system had failed not only themselves
but also the poor, they were also less inclined to assault Connolly in the way
they were Pearse. Since the southern state had for decades wrapped itself in a
particularly reactionary catholicism and (falsely) claimed to be following
Pearse in this, the rejection of the social and political power of the church
by southern liberals was, not altogether unsurprisingly, therefore accompanied
by a rejection of Pearse, now seen as a catholic reactionary rather than the
advanced social thinker that he actually was.
Ironically, it was as the republican movement - particularly Irish Republican
Army activists in prison5 - began to study Connolly more seriously and this
became reflected, on paper for some years, in the Sinn Féin programme, that
the liberal middle class began to abandon their sympathy for him. It could also
be argued that the assault on nationalism and on Pearse was essential for
preparing the ground for the assault on Connolly. After all, if all Irish
nationalism was reactionary and if Pearse was a reactionary fanatic,
Connolly’s involvement with such people and his participation in the Easter
rising would discredit him at least by implication of the company he chose.
With such doubts cast upon Connolly, the ground was ripe for a full-scale
revisionist rewriting.
Austen Morgan’s ‘Marxist’ political biography sees Connolly as abandoning
socialism after World War I broke out. Although he views Irish nationalism as
marring Connolly’s politics at different times throughout the socialist
leader’s life, he argues that the defeat of the workers in the Dublin
lock-out of 1913 and the collapse of the Second International in 1914 led to
the collapse of Connolly’s socialism.
When the cause of class appeared to be hopeless, Connolly retreated into the
cause of nation and became a leading figure of the republican-nationalist
milieu. It was as a nationalist rather than a socialist that Connolly
participated in 1916, in Morgan’s view. Moreover, had Connolly survived,
“it would have been as a senior officer of the IRA, into which the ICA had
dissolved itself, and a potential leader of Sinn Féin”.6 Along with
Connolly’s activities, various of his articles are cited as proof of the
contention that he abandoned socialism for nationalism. Morgan also dismisses
the 1916 rising as “a putsch”.7
This characterisation was also made at the time by elements of the socialist
movement in Europe. One Marxist who had a different view was Lenin, who
attacked opposition to self-determination as a form of opportunism. In his
article on the 1916 rebellion, he wrote: “Whoever calls such an uprising a
‘putsch’ is either a hardened reactionary or a doctrinaire hopelessly
incapable of picturing a social revolution as a living thing.”8 Morgan has
obviously read this article, since he quotes from it to falsely claim that in
it the “Irish Citizen Army was dismissed as ‘backward workers” with
“their prejudices, their reactionary fantasies, their weaknesses and
errors”9 .
In fact, Lenin never mentioned the ICA anywhere in his article. What he did say,
in the two paragraphs following the sentence of his I quoted above, is:
“For to imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small
nations in the colonies and in Europe, without the revolutionary outbursts of a
section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of
politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against
landlord, church, monarchical, national and other oppression - to imagine that
means repudiating social revolution. Very likely one army will line up in one
place and say, ‘We are for socialism’, while another will do so in another
place and say, ‘We are for imperialism’, and that will be the social
revolution! Only from such a ridiculously pedantic angle could one label the
Irish rebellion a ‘putsch’.
“Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it.
Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what
revolution really is.”10
The reason for the distortion by Morgan is clear: Lenin is attacking - in fact
ridiculing - the very position which Morgan articulates seven decades later.
Morgan goes on to claim that “Marx and Engels had not even theorised an Irish
national revolution”; that Lenin’s comments on the rising “cannot be taken
as an endorsement of a putative socialist theory of the Irish revolution”; and
that nothing much can be inferred in relation to Ireland from any of Lenin’s
writings on the national question.11
Morgan also alleges: “Much has been made of the Leninist position on the
national question, though the specificity of Ireland as a colonial part of the
leading metropolitan power in Europe during the first world war is rarely
recognised, and Lenin never seriously dealt with the problem of strategy for
socialists in ‘oppressed nations’.”12 Here we have a whole set of
Morgan’s factual errors.
In contrast to Morgan’s claims about Lenin’s lack of theory on the national
question in its various forms, Lenin regarded Russia as an imperialist power
and “a prison house of nations”. Ireland therefore was not alone in being a
colonial part of a metropolitan, or imperialist, power. Most of the peoples of
the Russian empire were in the same position! The Bolsheviks were vitally
concerned about this question and championed the right of subject nations to
self-determination against the Russian empire. Lenin polemicised on this issue
against fellow revolutionaries such as Luxemburg and against those whom he
regarded as opportunists and centrists within the Second International.
After the revolution, self-determination was one of the main questions which
concerned the Communist International, as shown by both the records of its
congresses and its attempts to organise around the issue. In fact so concerned
were Lenin and the Bolsheviks about this, and especially about chauvinism on
the part of leftists in countries such as Britain, that when the Communist
International drew up its rules of membership it included the following
“A particularly marked and clear attitude on the question of the colonies and
oppressed nations is necessary on the part of the Communist Parties of those
countries where bourgeoisies are in possession of colonies and oppress other
nations. Every party that wishes to belong to the Communist International has
the obligation of exposing the dodges of its ‘own’ imperialists in the
colonies, of supporting every liberation movement in the colonies not only in
words but in deeds, of demanding that their imperialist compatriots should be
thrown out of the colonies, of cultivating in the hearts of the workers in
their own country a truly fraternal relationship to the working population in
the colonies and to the oppressed nations, and of carrying out systematic
propaganda among their own country’s troops against any oppressors of
colonial peoples.”13
Morgan, however, leaves the impression that Marx, Engels and Lenin had little to
say on these subjects and that nothing much can be inferred from what they did
say. In fact, they condemn the view now put forward by Morgan and by the left
economists who make up the major section of the British and Irish far left
today.
Revolutionary defeatismIn an attempt to undermine Connolly’s revolutionary
Marxist status, FA D’Arcy draws the following distinction between Lenin and
Connolly: “Lenin consistently called on socialists and workers to turn the
imperialist war on all sides into a civil war, whereas it is beyond question
that Connolly sincerely and insistently called for a German triumph.
Connolly’s prescription did not consider the likely fate of the Irish
socialist and labour movement in the event of an imperial German invasion and
victory.”14
Lenin, however, did not see Connolly’s position as at all inconsistent with
his own and fully supported the Easter rising.15 Moreover, Lenin’s position
of revolutionary defeatism meant that he regarded a Russian defeat at the hands
of Germany as preferable to a Russian triumph.16 Most importantly, Connolly was
attempting to do just what Lenin most favoured: turning the imperialist war into
a war on one’s own imperialist government. The imperialist government which
ruled Ireland was the British government, not the German government, so it was
against Britain that Connolly directed his fire, both figuratively and
literally. The ILP(I) appeal, for instance, clearly favours the defeat of
Britain.17
Marxists in Britain, such as the Socialist Labour Party (of which Connolly had
been the most important founder) and Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist
Federation - both strong supporters of the Easter rising and Irish freedom -
also preferred a British defeat, since this was seen as opening up greater
possibilities for revolutionary advance than a British triumph.18 By exactly
the same token and for exactly the same reasons, Marxists in Germany - such as
Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg - favoured the defeat of their own ruling
class.
Morgan goes to the extreme of claiming that Connolly “became a Germanophile,
and collaborated with a wartime imperialist state”19 - rather like saying
that Churchill became a Stalinist for collaborating with the Soviet Union
during World War II or that Lenin was a “Germanophile” for making use of a
German sealed train to return to Russia in early 1917. In fact, like Lenin,
Connolly recognised that it is good tactics for revolutionaries to take
advantage of inter-imperialist conflicts and get arms and any other support
they can from the enemy of the imperialist power against which they are trying
to organise their revolution.20
Morgan’s alternative course to Connolly’s supposed abandonment of socialism
for nationalism is that he “should have maintained his original course after
August 1914, involvement in the ILP(I), ITGWU and Labour Party being
touchstones of an independent proletarian position”.21 Yet Connolly had
already discovered the futility of economism. For instance, he described the
view that Belfast workers could be influenced by the same approach as workers
in Britain, as “a doctrine almost screamingly funny in its absurdity”.22
Belfast was “the happy hunting ground of the slave-driver and the home of the
least rebellious slaves in the industrial world” - the protestant workers
being “slaves in spirit because they have been reared up among a people whose
conditions of servitude were more slavish than their own”.23
There was no way around this problem, certainly not by pretending there was no
national question. Moreover, ignoring the national question for fear of
alienating unionist workers would have meant alienating the nationalists who
were the majority of the population in Ireland. The problem has been summarised
by Emil Strauss, who notes: “Belfast’s shipyards and textile mills were
integral parts of the British industrial system ...” This privileged position
would be lost in an independent Ireland. It was simply a hard fact of history
that “the interests of Belfast were diametrically opposed to those of Dublin
and Cork. Within the social framework of the time there was no escape from this
dilemma.”24
Connolly understood that the dilemma could not be escaped from, and could only
be dealt with by pursuit of the national question - that is, by uniting workers
around the goal of taking the lead of the struggle for national liberation.
Moreover, in this he prefigured the positions of the Third International in
relation to the role of revolutionary workers’ vanguards in the oppressed
nations.25
Connolly and ‘blood sacrifice’
A crucial element of the revisionist approach to 1916 has been the idea that the
rebels were fixated upon a ‘blood sacrifice’. They are said to have been
determined to shed their blood for Ireland, seeing this as a redeeming of the
country’s honour. In the case of Pearse, redemption through the shedding of
blood is often said to have outweighed any political consideration. The
‘blood sacrifice’ is also taken as a catholic ritual, in which the Easter
rising acted the part of Calvary and the leaders that of Christ.26 This is
used to further the argument that irrationalism is at the heart of Irish
resistance to British rule. Foster, for instance, sees the IRB’s decision,
when World War I broke out, to prepare for a rising as “a reaction almost
Pavlovian in its dogmatism”,27 while the 1916 leaders “relied on an
emotional and exalted Anglophobia”.28 But the rising was based on
fundamentally rational premises, as is clear from an investigation of the
rebels’ actual course of action, particularly Connolly’s.
On November 4 1915 Pearse gave a public talk reviewing the different political
tendencies at the time of the rather farcical attempt at rebellion in 1848.
Connolly described it as a “brilliant lecture”29 and effectively used
Pearse’s arguments against Irish Volunteers’ leader Eoin MacNeill - and, by
extension, the republican militants clinging to their alliance with him. As
Pearse had in the lecture, Connolly drew the conclusion from 1848 that “The
British government would not wait until the plans of the revolutionists were
ready. It has not held Ireland down for 700 years by any such foolish waiting.
It struck in its own time, and its blow paralysed the people.”30
In a blow at both MacNeill and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Connolly went
on to criticise those who talked of “premature insurrection” and provoking
the government, arguing: “Revolutionists who shrink from giving blow for blow
until the great day has arrived, and they have every shoe-string in its place,
and every man has got his gun, and the enemy has kindly consented to postpone
action in order not to needlessly hurry the revolutionists nor disarrange their
plans - such revolutionists only exist in two places - the comic opera stage,
and the stage of Irish national politics. We prefer the comic opera brand. It
at least serves its purpose.”31 Early in the new year, he declared: “While
the war lasts and Ireland still is a subject nation we shall continue to urge
her to fight for her freedom ... the time for Ireland’s battle is now, the
place for Ireland’s battle is here.”32
Firstly, then, Connolly was not committed to a grand sacrifice. In the same
article in which he referred to Ireland’s battle being “here” and
“now”, for instance, he made clear that if Britain was not at war an
attempt at armed revolution would be suicidal madness. Before the revisionist
floodtide made fashionable and dominant the view that the 1916 rising was a
grisly blood sacrifice, JJ Lee, for example, accepted that neither Connolly nor
the IRB militants had intended to throw away their lives in some exalted and
bloody martyrdom. The 1916 leaders, he noted, “accepted the possibility of a
blood sacrifice, but only as a contingency plan, not as the main objective of
all the preparations of the five preceding years.”33
Had the 20,000 rifles and accompanying ammunition on the Aud not been captured
off the Kerry coast on the eve of the rising, “a protracted struggle might
have ensued, with the possibility of increasing public support as fighting
progressed”.34 Furthermore the odds at Easter 1916, while certainly not
ideal, “were incomparably the best likely to occur for a very long time by
IRB criteria”.35
Some accounts note the way in which the 1916 rebels went behind MacNeill’s
back and/or repeat his argument that a rising was morally unjustified unless it
was defensive and/or had a reasonable chance of success. This argument was, in
effect, answered by Connolly as above. Lee has argued along similar lines,
asking: “If MacNeill deemed the circumstances of 1916 hopeless he was in
effect saying that a rising would never be justified, so what was the point of
acquiring arms in the first instance? And as the government would presumably
choose to disarm the Volunteers when it considered the circumstances most
propitious, the prospect of resistance would presumably be even less promising
than a surprise Volunteer initiative.”36
Moreover, new evidence suggests that MacNeill knew and had agreed to the rising,
while disdaining to take part himself. In the 1940s and 1950s, witness
testimonies were taken of people who had participated in the rising or had been
observers of the events of that Easter week. The testimonies were sealed for
decades and not finally opened to the public until 2002. So far, the only book
which has been published based on these accounts is Annie Ryan’s Witnesses.37
Several witness statements which appear in her book indicate that MacNeill had
been informed of the intentions for a rising, and agreed to it, although he
subsequently prevaricated and had to be visited and staunched up several times.
In the end, he got cold feet and issued the countermanding orders that appeared
in the press on Easter Sunday. The rebels had little choice but to go ahead or
end up ridiculed and discredited and, quite possibly, in British custody.Thus,
as Lee notes, the decision to go ahead with the rising “was partly a
defensive one prompted by the belief that Dublin Castle was about to arrest the
leaders, as it had swooped on the Fenians in 1865”.38 Only at this stage
“did the issue of a blood sacrifice arise. The leaders accepted the
challenge, but they did not welcome it”.39
Secondly, this view tallies with Markievicz’s own account, which appears to
have been ignored in all the historiography dealing with the rising. In an
article several months before her own death, Markievicz stated Connolly
“wanted to fight with a chance of winning, of course, but he was ready to go
out and fight and die, as Robert Emmet died, as he believed that Ireland’s
only hope of ultimate freedom lay in keeping the tradition of fighting alive by
raising the flag of revolt each time England was in difficulties”.40
Four years earlier, at the end of the civil war, she had also dealt with the
events of Easter Sunday, writing scathingly of MacNeill: “All the weary years
of preparation, all the fevered months of organisation, enlisting and drilling
were made to no avail by the stroke of a pen from a weakling.” The
alternative was to go ahead with as little hope of success as Emmet.
“Postponement,” she noted, was impossible. With a traitor alive, who had
intimate knowledge of them and their intentions, they knew that at any moment
he might carry his betrayal further and give all the information he had to the
enemy. His friend and adviser in treachery was under arrest by the Volunteers;
he could not be held for long, and was a menace either way.”41
A month later, Markievicz wrote again of the time “when professor Eoin
MacNeill and Mr B Hobson had treacherously acted a coward’s part, secretly
through the IRB, and publicly through the daily papers ...” Connolly, she
said, knew MacNeill’s action had taken away any chance of success “or even
of holding out for long enough to create that public opinion that might have
saved his life and the lives of the other leaders.
“Postponement of the rising had by now become quite impossible - too many
people had begun to smell a rat. Therefore this ‘call off’ had created a
situation out of which there were only two ways: the one way was to abandon all
thoughts of a rising; the other was to go on with it, though, for the leaders,
it was going out to certain death.”42
Notes
1. For an outline of Connolly’s strategy see my article in Weekly Worker June
28.
2. P O’Cathasaigh (Sean O’Casey) The story of the Irish Citizen Army Dublin
1919. See also S O’Casey Drums under the windows London 1945 and C Desmond
Greaves Sean O’Casey: politics and art London 1979.
3. JD Clarkson Labour and nationalism in Ireland New York 1924; Sean O Faolain
Constance Markievicz or the average revolutionary London 1934. At the time O
Faolain was shifting from republicanism to respectability and a hatchet job on
Markievicz was part of the price of his ticket. Far superior accounts of
Markievicz are contained in Diana Norman Terrible beauty: a life of Constance
Volume 4, Number 19
31 August 2007
E-mail newsletter of the
Irish Republican Socialist Party
1) Editorial
2) James Connolly’s strategy and the 1916 Easter Rising
3) Connolly and ‘blood sacrifice’
4) Letters
Editorial
In this edition we reprint articles on James Connolly. The articles were first
printed in the Weekly Worker a publication of the “Communist Party of Great
Britain” (www.cpgb.org.uk <http://www.cpgb.org.uk> ) and were written by a
former member of Sinn Fein (provisional) Philip Ferguson. James Connolly was
and still is the most influential Marxist in Irish revolutionary politics.
These articles are an articulate and influential response to those who would
revise and write out of history the essential revolutionary core of Connolly or
dismiss him as irrelevant. Irish republicans and socialists when in doubt as to
what direction we should take in the struggle should go back to Connolly and on
to socialism!
James Connolly’s strategy and the 1916 Easter Rising
James Connolly and his revolutionary circle saw the outbreak of war in Europe in
1914 as making rebellion in Ireland not only possible, but an imperative
necessity. “I will not miss this chance,” Connolly declared when war broke
out.[1] In September he asked, “Would it not be better for all capable of
bearing arms to resolve to fight and if need be to die for freedom here at home
rather than be slaughtered for the benefit of kings and capitalists
abroad.”[2] Connolly was also no doubt aware of the problems which beset the
British administration in Ireland at the opening of the war.
Indeed, the Irish Times argued just before war broke out that the state of
Ireland “Is desperately critical. The Administration is helpless and
discredited.”[3] As Young, who is hostile to the Connolly perspective, notes,
“From the outbreak of the First World War, Countess Markievicz and James
Connolly were waiting their opportunity to initiate a nationalist-cum-socialist
revolt. When the opportunity came in April 1916, they did not hesitate to
confront the might of British imperialism.”[4]
Far from being goaded into the Easter Rising, “Countess Markievicz and James
Connolly had decided upon the efficacy of a nationalist uprising in August
1914.”[5]
It should be noted that this was James Larkin’s perspective as well. Along
with calling on workers to fight for Ireland alone, he declared “England’s
need is Ireland’s opportunity”,[6] that “the guns must be got, and at
once”[7] and that Ireland “had now the finest chance she had for
centuries.”[8] Larkin also organised anti-war protests and told a rally of
7000 in Dublin that the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, the militant
union led by Connolly and himself, was prepared to help land weapons in Ireland.
The Dublin Trades Council, following the killings the evening of the Howth
gun-running on July 26, adopted a motion from ITGWU leader O’Brien which
included the view that “the only effective manner of dealing with this latest
action of the Government is for the people to meet force with force.”[9]
Most importantly, from the viewpoint of revolutionary socialists such as Larkin,
Connolly and Markievicz, the war and John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary
Party’s role in supporting it while acquiescing in the shelving of Home Rule,
provided militant labour with the opportunity to push past the bourgeois
nationalists and unite all the progressive forces behind the radical working
class movement.
The forces led by Connolly (and earlier by Larkin also) sought to detach the
republicans from the bourgeois nationalist Redmondites within the Irish
Volunteers and then the left-republicans from the timid elements around Irish
Volunteers’ leader (and university professor) Eoin MacNeill. When Redmond
pledged the Volunteers to Britain at Woodenbridge in September 1914, Larkin
described him as “The Irish Judas” and suggested he should be strung
up.[10] The following month, Larkin headed one of his editorials, “Redmond
Eats His Own Vomit”.[11] The Irish Independent Labour Party launched an
“Appeal to the Irish Working Class” asking them to remember they belonged
to the same class as the workers of the rest of Europe, urging a revolutionary
defeatist position on the basis that a British defeat would assist the struggle
for Irish freedom. As the actress Maire nic Shublaigh, an early activist in the
radical republican women’s group Inghinidhe na hEireann noted in her
autobiography, the suspension of Home Rule “raised a storm of protest” and
Redmond’s decision to back Britain despite this ensured “The young men were
outraged.”[12] In effect, the IPP sell-out opened the way for the initiative
on the national question to pass to the militant labour and republican
groupings. Connolly was determined not to let the opportunity pass.
In May, Connolly had written,
“We believe there are no real Nationalists in Ireland outside of the Irish
Labour Movement. All others merely reject one part or another of the British
Conquest - the Labour Movement alone rejects it in its entirety and sets itself
to the reconquest of Ireland. . .”[13] Barely two months into the war he
declared “a fight to the finish” with the Redmondites, noting “For some
of us the finish may be on the scaffold, for some in the prison cell, for
others more fortunate upon the battlefields of an Ireland in arms for a real
republican liberty.”[14] He was, however, optimistic, writing to Larkin six
days later, on October 9, “We are at present in a very critical stage for the
whole of Ireland as well as for the Labour movement. One result of this is that
we have an opportunity of taking the lead of the real Nationalist movement. .
.”[15] This was the heart of Connolly’s strategy up to the Rising, a
strategy in which his closest co-workers were Markievicz and Michael Mallin,
fellow members of the Army Council of the Irish Citizen Army, the workers’
militia which arose out of the Great Dublin Lockout of 1913-14.
Although sharing the view that Connolly moved away from socialism to
nationalism, Young notes the “nationalist-cum-socialist” nature of the
rebellion envisaged by Connolly and Markievicz. In fact, Connolly from the
beginning perceived the rebellion as having a wider significance than simply an
attempt at national liberation for one oppressed people (as important as that
was). Through an insurrection, “Ireland may yet set the torch to a European
conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last
capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of the
last war lord,” he wrote as war was declared on the continent.[16] Connolly
began, relates O’Brien, his ITGWU colleague, to seek out allies “with the
view to combined action in preparation for an insurrection.”[17] The logical
place to find them was in a section of the Irish Republican Brotherhood since,
as Strauss has noted, that group’s “left-wing approached the position of
the militant labour movement.”[18] Thus it was not just anybody at hand
whom Connolly sought out for an alliance.
Strauss’ point about the convergence of the politics of the IRB’s left,
exemplified by Pearse, Clarke and the other Easter Proclamation signatories,
with the labour radicals is especially important and largely ignored by critics
of Connolly. The alliance between Connolly and the republicans is usually seen
as being a convergence around nationalist separatism, or Connolly’s
subordination to it. Yet this overlooks the large degree of convergence on
issues of domestic Irish politics. Both the republicans and Connolly regarded
the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which wielded immense power in the
Parliamentary Party, as an excrescence in Irish political life.[19] Both
regarded the bourgeois nationalist IPP itself as, if anything, worse than the
British government since the Parliamentary Party was the enemy within - the
main organisation in nationalist Ireland without which British rule could not
have been maintained on any stable basis. Again, Connolly and the republicans
agreed that fundamental changes in the social and economic structure were
necessary and could only be carried out in an independent country.
Even before the Dublin labour dispute the IRB’s paper, Irish Freedom, had run
articles making clear that they sided with the plebeian masses. One article,
headed “The economic basis of a revolutionary movement” by “Northman”,
maintained that labour and republicanism “rest upon the same foundation, they
are but different manifestations of the same principle and would form a natural
and mutually helpful alliance.”[20] The class sympathies of the republicans
were also evident during the 1913-14 labour struggle, with all the future
republican signatories of the 1916 Proclamation siding with the workers.
During the dispute, for instance, Irish Freedom, in a front-page article,
described the police as “Irish Cossacks” and, following the clashes in
O’Connell Street, accused them of “the killing of two citizens of Dublin
and the wounding of about six hundred.” Of the workers, the paper said,
“If they claim the right to conduct a strike against their employers, no
reasonable man can object.” If the police and military were used to suppress
them, the workers “must act after consideration and deep thought. But they
cannot punish the police brutes with empty hands against batons, or stones
against bullets. We have often advised the people of Ireland to arm themselves,
and we shall press upon them the wisdom of this course upon every against
bullets.” (Sic)[21] In a column in the same issue, Pearse, backing the
workers, likened the Dublin employers to Marie Antoinette and her alleged
“Let them eat cake” comment about the starving poor. “Poor Marie
Antoinette did not quite grasp the situation in France,” Pearse noted. “In
the end the situation grasped her and hurried her to the guillotine.” Another
proclamation signatory, Eamonn Ceannt, had even lectured on several occasions
for Connolly’s Socialist Party.[22]
The extent of this convergence between the Connolly militant labour current and
the republican militants is clearly apparent in Pearse’s final and most
developed political tract, The Sovereign People, in which he builds upon the
ideas of Lalor, the most socially revolutionary of all the republican figures
of the 1800s and a hero of Connolly’s, and at last deals with “the material
basis of freedom”. In this work Pearse makes clear his view that
“no private right to property holds good against the public right of the
nation” and that the nation must
“exercise its public right so as to secure strictly equal rights and liberties
to every man and woman within the nation”.[23] Pearse view of equal rights in
relation to women extends to participation in the government itself. He
remarks,
“in order that the people may be able to choose as a legislation and as a
government men and women really and truly representative of themselves” they
would be wisest to adopt “the widest possible franchise - give a vote to
every adult man and woman of sound mind. To restrict the franchise in any
respect is to prepare the way for some future usurpation of the rights of the
sovereign people.”[24]
Pearse had only been a republican for several years at the time, was only in his
mid-30s and evolving rapidly politically.
All of this undermines Austen Morgan’s claim that the people with whom
Connolly united in 1916 were “a group of five, later six, petty-bourgeois
cultural nationalists, most of whom had only recently embraced physical force,
a conspiracy with the pretensions of a national bourgeoisie.”[25] Far from
having “the pretensions of a national bourgeoisie”, Pearse, Clarke,
Plunkett, MacDiarmada, Ceannt and Plunkett wanted to destroy the power of the
national bourgeoisie - whose party was the IPP - and gave their lives, like
Connolly, as much to that as to the ridding of Ireland of British rule.[26]
All through the period up to the Rising, Connolly never lost an opportunity to
impress upon the republican militants his view that the working class was the
driving force for national liberation and that anyone proposing to win
Ireland’s freedom could not succeed unless they recognised this. He never
lost sight of where his group stood - “we belong to the working class of
Ireland, and strive to express the working class point of view”[27] while
pressing his point that the Irish Citizen Army was “the only body that,
without reservation, unhesitatingly announces its loyalty to the republican
principle of National Freedom of which the Fenians stood.”[28]
One of Connolly and Markievicz’s first steps to build an alliance with the
republican militants following the outbreak of war was a meeting on September 8
in the library of the Gaelic League in Parnell Square. It was attended by all
seven future Easter Proclamation signatories, veteran republican John MacBride,
O’Brien and several others. Connolly advocated that they begin preparations
for an insurrection and suggested the setting up of two subcommittees to assist
this: one to make contact with Germany for military support and one to organise
open propaganda and recruit to the secret movement.[29] A possible fruit of
the September 8 meeting was a decision made by the IRB. According to O Broin,
sometime between September and November 1914 the IRB decided to stage an
insurrection before the war was over.[30] This would suggest that the IRB
decision would have been made after the meeting at which Connolly proposed this
course, pointing up the key role played by him in initiating the insurrection.
The open organisation agreed on at the September 8 meeting, meanwhile, was
established as the Irish Neutrality League, including Markievicz and Connolly,
O’Brien and Foran from the labour movement, the pacifist Francis Sheehy
Skeffington, republican figures Sean T. O’Kelly, Sean Milroy and J.J.
Scollan, and Sinn Fein’s Arthur Griffith.[31] It was primarily a group of
leaders, without a general membership and although it organised meetings and
produced leaflets for a couple of months British military restrictions made it
impossible for the League to continue.[32] However, it may have been that
Connolly had decided the time was right to move on to a more militant flouting
of the authorities. It is clear that Markievicz and Connolly were already
thinking along such lines before the INL was even launched. For instance,
plans were laid for Citizen Army and Irish Volunteers members to seize the
Mansion House on the night of September 24 and hold it for twenty-four hours in
order to prevent Asquith and Redmond from holding their advertised recruiting
meeting in the building the following day. Although the plan had to be
abandoned due to the strength of British forces, the militants won a victory
elsewhere that day. The IV’s original executive repudiated Redmond’s
nominees as, four days earlier, Redmond had promised the Volunteers’ support
to Britain during the war. The expulsion of the Redmond group led to a split in
which the Parliamentary Party took the vast bulk of the membership, reducing the
organisation to maybe 12,000 members. Connolly was delighted.
On October 10 he declared the “fight against Redmondism and Devlinism is a
fight to save the soul of the Irish nation” and exhorted the Irish Volunteers
to throw everything into the fight against Britain’s war effort and the
IPP’s betrayal, and to adopt “the daring appeal of the
Revolutionist.”[33] Two weeks later he declared that if Britain tried to
introduce conscription in Ireland through the Militia Ballot Act or any other
measure, the ITGWU and ICA “have our answer ready.” Resistance “must of
necessity take the form of insurrectionary warfare. . . barricades in the
streets, guerrilla warfare in the country.”[34]
The split with the Redmondites[35] , so desired by Connolly, had not left the
revolutionaries in control, however. Leaders such as MacNeill and the
ubiquitous Hobson were far from sharing the views of the militant republicans
and socialists. Connolly continued to try to drive a wedge into the Volunteers,
to detach the militants from MacNeill and Hobson and pull them towards his
militant socialist/labour current.
In May 1915 the republican militants took a further step forward, setting up a
military committee, comprising Ceannt, Pearse and Plunkett with the latter
reputedly being the military expert; Clarke and MacDiarmada joined later in the
year, Connolly in January 1916 and MacDonagh later again.[36] During this
period Clarke was IRB Supreme Council secretary, MacDonagh treasurer and Denis
McCullough president.
Mid-1915 also saw a new initiative of the Connolly forces. An anti-conscription
committee was formed, with Markievicz and Connolly occupying central roles. In
August Connolly claimed,
“We saved the lives of thousands, held together thousands of homes, and amid
all the welter and turmoil of a gigantic and unparalleled national betrayal we
presented to the world the spectacle of the organised Irish working class
standing steadfastly by the highest ideals of freedom, so that the flag of
Labour became one with the standard of national liberty.”[37] In October
the Dublin Trades Council, at the initiative of Transport Union delegates,
passed a resolution calling upon workers to join the ICA and IVs as the best
way of preventing the introduction of conscription. Discussions also took place
between the trades council and Volunteers in relation to a campaign against
economic conscription. “Connolly insisted that if the organized workers were
to pledge their support for a certain policy, the Irish Volunteers should also
be pledged to back that policy with military support should that be
necessary,” recalls O’Brien, but MacNeill would not agree.[38]
During this period recruitment in Ireland fell off noticeably. Between August
1914 and August 1915, Britain succeeded in recruiting 80,000 from Ireland. Over
the following twelve months this declined to a mere 12,000. Most recruits came
from Ulster. The lowest rates were in Connaught and Munster (the south and
west), where the land struggle had been strongest. Only 10.7 percent of the
relevant age group from Ireland served in the British Army, compared to 24.2
percent in England and Wales and 26.9 percent in Scotland.[39]
Connolly and Markievicz also upped the ante, with the Citizen Army increasingly
appearing on the streets with weapons. In July they even led it in a mock
attack on Dublin Castle. Meanwhile every hesitation by the IV leadership was
met with fiery denunciation, as when they gave in to a British order that one
of their chief organisers Captain Robert Monteith (who also had a reputation as
a labour sympathiser) leave Dublin.[40]
Connolly also made clear that ICA collaboration with the Volunteers was
conditional, stating “However it may be for others, for us of the Citizen
Army there is but one ideal - an Ireland ruled, and owned, by Irish men and
women. . . The Citizen Army will only co-operate in a forward movement. The
moment that forward movement ceases it reserves for itself the right to step
out of the alignment, and advance by itself if needs be, in an effort to plant
the banner of Freedom one reach further towards its goal.”[41] This message
was not directed at MacNeill, as Connolly had no illusions about an alliance
there, but at the republican militants. His strategy was to continue to pull -
and, where necessary, push - them forward until their alliance with MacNeill was
no longer sustainable and broke up. At that point, Connolly would have been
able to draw them to his own group, in effect uniting around the militant
labour forces all the most radical republican elements.
Indeed, Connolly lost no opportunity to drive a wedge between the revolutionary
republicans and the timid elements around MacNeill. For instance, on November
4, 1915 Pearse gave a public talk reviewing the different political tendencies
at the time of the rather farcical attempt at rebellion in 1848. Connolly
described it as a “brilliant lecture”[42] and effectively used Pearse’s
arguments against MacNeill - and, by extension, against the republican
militants clinging to their alliance with MacNeill.
As Pearse had in the lecture, Connolly drew the conclusion from 1848 that
“The British Government would not wait until the plans of the revolutionists
were ready. It has not held Ireland down for 700 years by any such foolish
waiting. It struck in its own time, and its blow paralysed the people.”[43]
In a blow at both MacNeill and the IRB, Connolly went on to criticise those who
talked of “premature insurrection” and provoking the government, arguing
“Revolutionists who shrink from giving blow for blow until the great day has
arrived, and they have every shoe-string in its place, and every man has got
his gun, and the enemy has kindly consented to postpone action in order not to
needlessly hurry the revolutionists nor disarrange their plans - such
revolutionists only exist in two places - the comic opera stage, and the stage
of Irish national politics. We prefer the comic opera brand. It at least
serves its purpose.”[44]
It might be further noted that at the same time Connolly was drawing in the most
militant and politically-advanced elements of the women’s movement. While a
number of former Inghinidhe na hEireann activists had already been integrated
into the ICA, and IWFL member Kathleen Lynn had been made medical officer,
holding the rank of lieutenant, in December 1915 Connolly took on a number of
radical suffragists to do ITGWU organising work.[45]
The other aspect of Connolly and Markievicz’s strategy was to continue to
challenge the authorities and push the limits of what they could get away with.
It seems to me that there were three main elements to this.
Firstly, they were preparing their followers for the insurrection through a
process of toughening them up. Insurrection is not a business for the
faint-hearted and Connolly and Markievicz wanted a reliable and hardened force.
In early 1916, for instance, Connolly summoned each member of the ICA
individually into his office and asked them if they were prepared to fight in a
rebellion, and alongside the Volunteers.[46]
Secondly, they were showing ordinary Irish people, who had long been taught to
think of themselves as inferior and powerless, that the authorities were not
omnipotent, that they could be challenged and that they only maintained their
power as long as people acquiesced in their own oppression. This attitude was
summed up in the motto Connolly took from Desmoulins, a French revolutionary of
the eighteenth century:
“The great only appear great because we are on our knees. Let us arise!”
Thirdly, the ICA’s activities made the British think twice about what they did
since any repressive actions they planned would be met with force. These three
elements were closely related to each other. For instance, whenever armed ICA
members prevented the British from taking some action, it would raise the
self-confidence of the workers’ militia and have a positive effect on public
opinion. O’Brien has commented, for example, the ICA “attends all our
Labour meetings and you would be surprised at the changed attitude of the
police in consequence.”[47]
While the Volunteers’ leadership usually capitulated when challenged by the
authorities, as in the Monteith case, the ICA evinced another spirit. For
example, following a police raid on Markievicz’s house, remarks O’Brien,
“the police came to the Countess and wanted her to register as an alien!
Being married to a Russian the Countess is technically a Russian subject but
she told the police, more forcibly than politely, that ‘she was an Irishwoman
and before she would register as an alien she would see the police in
hell.’”[48] On another occasion in early 1916, when police called at her
house to check she would not break an order banning her from speaking at a
meeting in Tralee, she warned them to keep away from her home as no-one there
liked them and, besides, they made “grand big targets”.[49] Connolly, who
faced constant difficulties producing a newspaper, finally moved a printing
press into Liberty Hall and placed an armed guard on it. Markievicz, who did
guard duty as one of her first soldierly works, relates, “Our instructions
were, if raided, to fight to the last cartridge.”[50] This might have been
some shoot-out given that she “had an army rifle, a ‘Peter’ and a small
Browning. My comrade also was well supplied.”[51] On another occasion,
March 24, 1916, when the British attempted to remove copies of The Gael, they
faced an armed Markievicz, apparently fingering her automatic, while Connolly
pulled out a revolver, saying “Drop them or I’ll drop you.”[52]
This spirit had, in fact, been manifest following the suppression of the Irish
Worker on December 4, 1914. Connolly managed, however, to bring out a two-page
leaflet headed Irish Work, in which he argued that repression was growing, and
the more tame people were the more emboldened the authorities would be.
He declared to the authorities, “our cards are all on the table! If you
leave us at liberty we will kill your recruiting, save our poor boys from your
slaughter-house, and blast your hopes of Empire. If you strike at, imprison,
or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will
thwart you, and mayhap, raise a force that will destroy you. We defy you! Do
your worst!”[53]
It seems to me that Connolly was continually trying to limit the ability of the
British to implement their initiatives, until he could reach the point at which
Ireland would be ungovernable by anything like ordinary means. In such a
situation conditions would be ripe for an insurrection.
The Easter Rising, I would conclude, was not simply a nationalist or even
radical nationalist insurrection. It marked the success of the militant labour
forces in “taking the lead of the real Nationalist movement”.[54] Unforeseen
circumstances, including the capture of the Aud and MacNeill’s countermanding
orders, ensured that the rebellion was far more limited in scope than the
revolutionaries had intended. O’Brien recounts, for instance, that the plan
was to hold a continuous line forming a loop through the centre of the city,
but the necessary numbers ended up not being available due to MacNeill and
Hobson’s actions.[55] Markievicz’s articles and Lee’s provide
convincing arguments that the leaders hoped for a better outcome and had their
preparations proceeded as planned a far more significant fight may well have
been possible and the leaders may have been able even to escape.
The Rising did, however, show the political weakness of the republican militants
as aspiring revolutionaries. Their secret, conspiratorial politics locked them
up inside the IRB and, in the Volunteers, in a crippling alliance with
MacNeill. Other options were open to them. For instance, fighting openly for
the leadership of the Volunteers at the time MacNeill capitulated to Redmond
may have put them in a much stronger position in the long-term. Even if, as is
likely, they had ended up with only a small fraction of the Volunteer
membership it could not possibly have been less than the small force of maybe
2000 they were left to lead out on Easter Monday following MacNeill’s
countermanding order. If they had have broken with MacNeill in mid-1914, they
could have even united their forces with the ICA, which would have given a
major boost to the overall revolutionary movement. The failure of the
republican militants to transcend revolutionary nationalism and develop a
class-based revolutionary perspective left them, like the IWFL feminists,
unable to achieve their progressive goals. In the case of the republicans, the
failure was paid for with their lives.
In the case of militant labour, the Rising represented its achievement of the
leadership role for which Connolly, Markievicz (and Larkin before his departure
to the US in October 1914) had organised. In fact, one of the most interesting
features of the period up to the First World War and the Rising was the way in
which Labour was the dominant force in anti-establishment politics.
When partition was mooted, it was not the IRB or Sinn Fein which mobilised
opposition on the street but the ITUCLP. It was also organised labour which was
represented in local government throughout the country, not Sinn Fein and the
IRB. Even in Dublin it was Labour and not the anti-parliamentary nationalists
who formed the main opposition to the Irish Parliamentary Party/United Irish
League machine which ran the city. The main voice of labour, the Irish Worker,
had ten to fifteen times the circulation of the SF paper and of Irish Freedom,
the revolutionary paper backed by the IRB. The labour movement could mobilise
thousands on the national question, provided security for suffrage marches and
meetings, and took up other political questions while the IRB and Sinn Fein
could mobilise almost no-one under their own banners. In addition, the best of
the republicans, such as those grouped around Irish Freedom, were being drawn to
the side of labour and increasingly becoming influenced by socialist ideas.
An alternative perspective for Irish labour has been posited by a number of
present-day left-wing social and labour historians, including Morgan, Young and
Keogh. Yet had the ITUCLP been blessed with their presence as party strategists
and stuck to bread-and-butter issues, as they suggest, it is likely the party
would have been annihilated. No party which aspired to lead the working class
could avoid taking a stand on the number one political issue of that period in
Ireland: Irish independence.
Taking a stand on the national question, women’s rights and other political
and social questions was essential if the working class was going to take the
lead in society as a whole. It is because they did this that the radical
labour forces prior to 1916 were able to reach the early stages of challenging
the IPP as the dominant party of the Irish people and the Unionists for the
allegiance of that section of the working class still attached to the Union
with Britain. Subsequently, Labour fell back and was replaced by Sinn Fein,
because the post-1916 Labour leaders, like the revisionist critics of Connolly,
lacked any revolutionary perspective and were basically what Connolly had once
described as “gas and water socialists”. In the vacuum that opened up, the
mantle of national liberation, which Connolly had united with the cause of
labour, passed to the reorganised republican forces. These had a much more
socially conservative leadership than in the period of Pearse and Clarke, but
were prepared to fight Britain for independence.
The result of the destruction of the Connolly perspective within the labour
movement was, ultimately, the settlement of 1921. For the masses of Irish
people, that settlement, which included partition, brought about exactly the
‘carnival of reaction’ on both sides of the border which Connolly had
foreseen.
The failure of the revolutionary left to integrate the national and class
questions at each decisive point since 1916, meanwhile, has ensured its
isolation during periods of mass struggle. Today, there is a profound need to
recover the Connolly perspective in the context of an overall partyist project
if there is to be any serious advance in the struggle for Irish national
liberation and socialism.[56]
Philip Ferguson
[1] See Connolly’s ITGWU colleague William O’Brien’s “Introduction” in
the collection of Connolly’s writings, Labour and Easter Week, p1.
[2] Irish Worker, September 5, 1914.
[3] Irish Times, July 27, 1914.
[4] James D. Young, “James Connolly, James Larkin and John Maclean: the Easter
Rising and Clydeside Socialism”, in Robert Duncan and Arthur McIvor (eds)
Militant Workers: Labour and Class Conflict on the Clyde 1900-1950, Edinburgh,
John Donald, 1992, p161.
[5] Ibid. Emphasis in original.
[6] Irish Worker, August 8, 1914.
[7] Irish Worker, August 1, 1914.
[8] Irish Worker, August 29, 1914.
[9] Irish Worker, August 1, 1914.
[10] Irish Worker, September 26, 1914.
[11] Irish Worker, October 17, 1914.
[12] The Splendid Years: Maire nic Shubhlaigh’s story of the Irish National
Theatre as told to Edward Kenny, Dublin, James Duffy and Co, 1955, p159.
[13] Irish Worker, May 30, 1914.
[14] James Connolly, “Redmond Cannot Deliver the Goods”, Irish Worker,
October 3, 1914. Reprinted in Socialism and Nationalism.
[15] The letter, written at the time of Larkin’s departure for the United
States, appears in O’Brien, Forth the Banners Go, p242. John Newsinger has
neatly summarised militant labour’s position, writing “The Irish Worker’s
opposition to the war was accompanied by an urgent resolve to take advantage of
the crisis to ditch Redmond and the Nationalist Party, capture the leadership
of the Volunteer movement, and use it to secure national independence while
Britain was embroiled on the continent.” (John Newsinger, “’In the
hunger-cry of the nation’s poor is heard the voice of Ireland’: Sean
O’Casey and politics, 1908-1916”, Journal of Contemporary History, vol 20,
1985, p94.)
[16] James Connolly, “Our Duty in the Present Crisis”, Irish Worker, August
8, 1914. Reprinted in Socialism and Nationalism.
[17] William O’Brien, “Introduction”, in James Connolly, Labour and Easter
Week, p1.
[18] Emil Strauss, Irish Nationalism and British Democracy,London, Methuen,
1951, p221. He also notes the IRB’s right-wing, typified by Hobson, was
“in many respects almost indistinguishable from the Sinn Feiners under
Griffith.”
[19] Connolly’s view of the AOH is succinctly put in “Mr John E. Redmond,
his strength and weakness”, Forward, March 18, 1911, where he states it
“has spread like an ulcer throughout Ireland, carrying social and religious
terrorisn with it into quarters hitherto noted for their broadmindedness and
discernment.” It had “organised the ignorant, the drunken and the rowdy
and thrown the shield of religion around their excesses” and represented
“the organised ignorance of the community placing itself unreservedly at the
disposal of the most insidious and inveterate enemies of enlightenment.”
[20] Irish Freedom, January 1913.
[21] Irish Freedom, October 1913. Presumably they meant to say something like
“upon every occasion they are up against bullets.”
[22] O’Brien refers to this in Forth the Banners Go, Dublin, Three Candles,
1949, p259.
[23] The Sovereign People is reprinted in Pearse’s Political Writings and
Speeches, Dublin, Talbot Press, 1952, pp331-72. The quote comes from p336.
[24] Ibid, pp342-3, emphasis in original.
[25] Austen Morgan, James Connolly: a political biography, Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 1988, p19.
[26] Irish Freedom, for instance, declared in a July 1914 editorial, “(A)fter
the British government the Irish Parliamentary Party in its later years has
been the most evil force in Ireland.”
[27] Workers Republic, July 15, 1915.
[28] From Connolly’s tribute to O’Donovan Rossa, “The Man and the
Cause!”, Workers Republic, July 31, 1915. Reprinted in Labour and Easter
Week.
[29] O’Brien, p270.
[30] O Broin, Revolutionary Underground: the story of the IRB, 1858-1924,
Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1976, p156. O Broin says the decision was made in
the autumn. Remembering that he is referring to autumn in the northern
hemisphere I have put the date between September and November.
[31] O’Brien, p270.
[32] Ibid, p271.
[33] James Connolly, “A Forward Policy for the Volunteers”, Irish Worker,
October 10, 1914. Reprinted in Socialism and Nationalism.
[34] James Connolly, “The Ballot or the Barricades”, Irish Worker, October
24, 1914. See also “The Hope of Ireland”, Irish Worker, October 31, 1914
and “Rally for Labour”, Irish Worker, November 14, 1914. All reprinted in
Socialism and Nationalism.
[35] The Redmondites set up a new, much larger group, the National Volunteers.
This group soon faded away however, many of them ending up fighting for Britain
in the European conflagration.
[36] O Broin, p166-7.
[37] James Connolly, “Wee Joe Devlin”, Workers Republic, August 28, 1915.
Reprinted in Socialism and Nationalism.
[38] O’Brien, see p275-6.
[39] See J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985: politics and society, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, p23 and J.M. Winter, “Britain’s ‘lost generation’ of
the First World War”, Population Studies, vol 31, no 3, 1976.
[40] See Connolly’s biting “Trust Your Leaders!”, Workers Republic,
December 4, 1915. Reprinted in Labour and Easter Week.
[41] James Connolly, “For the Citizen Army”, Workers Republic, October 30,
1915. Reprinted in Labour and Easter Week.
[42] James Connolly, “Ireland - Disaffected or Revolutionary”, Workers
Republic, November 13, 1915. Reprinted in Labour and Easter Week.
[43] Ibid. .
[44] Ibid.
[45] This is reported in Workers Republic, December 18, 1915.
[46] Frank Robbins, Under the Starry Plough: recollections of the Irish Citizen
Army, Dublin, Academy Press, 1977, p55.
[47] O’Brien, p253.
[48] Ibid, p252-3.
[49] Marreco, The Rebel Countess, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967, p196.
[50] Constance Markievicz, “1916”, The Nation, April 23, 1927.
[51] Ibid.
[52] O’Brien, p279.
[53] James Connolly, “Courtsmartial and Revolution”, Irish Work, December
19, 1915. Reprinted in Socialism and Nationalism.
[54] See, fn 11.
[55] O’Brien, p283.
[56] For a useful recent defence of Connolly, see:
http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/RecentAr...OfConnolly.html (http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/RecentArticles/RecentDebateInDefenceOfConnolly.html)
Dublin 1916 and the ‘blood sacrifice’
Philip Ferguson gives his view on some common criticisms of James Connolly
In the early 1900s the national question affected every movement for social
change in Ireland. For the labour movement, particularly those who sought to
lead it in a revolutionary direction, the national question posed the greatest
challenge. If the goal of the working class, in the view of the
revolutionaries, was a social revolution and the establishment of a workers’
republic, how should the political question of British rule in Ireland be
approached? Was the road forward for the workers in Ireland, a colonial
possession of an imperial power, the same as that in Britain? What was the
relationship between economic and political issues? Was the job of
revolutionaries simply to provide an analysis of capitalism and/or counsel
workers to be more militant in struggling for better wages and conditions? Was
a working class-based or, at least, working class-led, revolution possible?
Given the weakness of the working class - due to the historical
underdevelopment of capitalism in Ireland and the sectarian divisions which
stemmed from this underdevelopment - were there other social forces which could
be drawn to the workers’ side in a struggle for the revolutionary
transformation of society? The response of Irish revolutionary socialists at
the time, above all James Connolly, has been a point of debate ever since. In
particular, the rise of historical revisionism has led to the resurrection of
the theme that Connolly abandoned socialism and became primarily a radical
nationalist in the last year or two of his life, the period between the
outbreak of World War I and the Easter rising. In essence, the critique of
Connolly is based on the revisionists’ hostility to Irish republicanism and
their sympathetic attitude to the ‘modernising’ mission of British
imperialism.
On the left, revisionism is based on a failure to understand Connolly’s
project as a coherent, consistent and revolutionary whole.1 We are supposed to
believe that Connolly - who was nothing if not hard and practical - was so
unhinged by the capitulation of the European socialist parties to their own
bourgeoisies in World War I that he decided to join them and capitulate to a
variant of Irish bourgeois nationalism. Their general failure to understand the
centrality of the national question to social revolution in oppressed nations,
and their profound lack of sympathy with revolutionary projects, especially in
Ireland, coupled with failures of scholarship - in the form of factual errors
and invented quotes - leaves the ‘left’ and ‘right’ revisionists’
reading of the course followed by Connolly and his comrades fundamentally
flawed.
Connolly and revisionists
The idea of Connolly abandoning socialism can be traced back to Sean O’Casey.
Before he became a famous playwright O’Casey was a railway worker and a
member of the army council of the early Irish Citizen Army. He left following
an unsuccessful attempt to force Constance Markievicz out of the workers’
army and, under the pen-name of P O’Cathasaigh, wrote a history of the ICA,
in which he alleged Connolly forsook socialism for nationalism.2 This idea is
repeated in JD Clarkson’s Labour and nationalism in Ireland and Sean
O’Faolain’s petty and vindictive biography of Markievicz.3 In more recent
times it has become an article of faith among leftwing revisionists, including
those who consider themselves Marxists. In fact their hostility to all forms of
Irish nationalism has led this particular ‘Marxist’ school to abandon also
Marx, Engels and Lenin’s views on Ireland.4
O’Casey’s view never gained much currency until the renewal of armed
conflict in Ireland at the start of the 1970s. Even then, a revisionist assault
on Connolly took some time. This is partly because Connolly’s own writings and
his labour movement activities show him as a practical and down-to-earth figure,
less vulnerable to attack than the nationalist hero Pearse, sections of whose
writings, particularly his earlier work, were full of easily-ridiculed
nationalist romanticism. It was far easier to present Pearse as a dreamer, away
with the Celtic mists and mythologised happy clan life of the Gael, and out of
touch with the real Ireland and real Irish people of his time.
With today’s liberal middle class in the south having favoured some degree of
social reform and having felt that the system had failed not only themselves
but also the poor, they were also less inclined to assault Connolly in the way
they were Pearse. Since the southern state had for decades wrapped itself in a
particularly reactionary catholicism and (falsely) claimed to be following
Pearse in this, the rejection of the social and political power of the church
by southern liberals was, not altogether unsurprisingly, therefore accompanied
by a rejection of Pearse, now seen as a catholic reactionary rather than the
advanced social thinker that he actually was.
Ironically, it was as the republican movement - particularly Irish Republican
Army activists in prison5 - began to study Connolly more seriously and this
became reflected, on paper for some years, in the Sinn Féin programme, that
the liberal middle class began to abandon their sympathy for him. It could also
be argued that the assault on nationalism and on Pearse was essential for
preparing the ground for the assault on Connolly. After all, if all Irish
nationalism was reactionary and if Pearse was a reactionary fanatic,
Connolly’s involvement with such people and his participation in the Easter
rising would discredit him at least by implication of the company he chose.
With such doubts cast upon Connolly, the ground was ripe for a full-scale
revisionist rewriting.
Austen Morgan’s ‘Marxist’ political biography sees Connolly as abandoning
socialism after World War I broke out. Although he views Irish nationalism as
marring Connolly’s politics at different times throughout the socialist
leader’s life, he argues that the defeat of the workers in the Dublin
lock-out of 1913 and the collapse of the Second International in 1914 led to
the collapse of Connolly’s socialism.
When the cause of class appeared to be hopeless, Connolly retreated into the
cause of nation and became a leading figure of the republican-nationalist
milieu. It was as a nationalist rather than a socialist that Connolly
participated in 1916, in Morgan’s view. Moreover, had Connolly survived,
“it would have been as a senior officer of the IRA, into which the ICA had
dissolved itself, and a potential leader of Sinn Féin”.6 Along with
Connolly’s activities, various of his articles are cited as proof of the
contention that he abandoned socialism for nationalism. Morgan also dismisses
the 1916 rising as “a putsch”.7
This characterisation was also made at the time by elements of the socialist
movement in Europe. One Marxist who had a different view was Lenin, who
attacked opposition to self-determination as a form of opportunism. In his
article on the 1916 rebellion, he wrote: “Whoever calls such an uprising a
‘putsch’ is either a hardened reactionary or a doctrinaire hopelessly
incapable of picturing a social revolution as a living thing.”8 Morgan has
obviously read this article, since he quotes from it to falsely claim that in
it the “Irish Citizen Army was dismissed as ‘backward workers” with
“their prejudices, their reactionary fantasies, their weaknesses and
errors”9 .
In fact, Lenin never mentioned the ICA anywhere in his article. What he did say,
in the two paragraphs following the sentence of his I quoted above, is:
“For to imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small
nations in the colonies and in Europe, without the revolutionary outbursts of a
section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of
politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against
landlord, church, monarchical, national and other oppression - to imagine that
means repudiating social revolution. Very likely one army will line up in one
place and say, ‘We are for socialism’, while another will do so in another
place and say, ‘We are for imperialism’, and that will be the social
revolution! Only from such a ridiculously pedantic angle could one label the
Irish rebellion a ‘putsch’.
“Whoever expects a ‘pure’ social revolution will never live to see it.
Such a person pays lip service to revolution without understanding what
revolution really is.”10
The reason for the distortion by Morgan is clear: Lenin is attacking - in fact
ridiculing - the very position which Morgan articulates seven decades later.
Morgan goes on to claim that “Marx and Engels had not even theorised an Irish
national revolution”; that Lenin’s comments on the rising “cannot be taken
as an endorsement of a putative socialist theory of the Irish revolution”; and
that nothing much can be inferred in relation to Ireland from any of Lenin’s
writings on the national question.11
Morgan also alleges: “Much has been made of the Leninist position on the
national question, though the specificity of Ireland as a colonial part of the
leading metropolitan power in Europe during the first world war is rarely
recognised, and Lenin never seriously dealt with the problem of strategy for
socialists in ‘oppressed nations’.”12 Here we have a whole set of
Morgan’s factual errors.
In contrast to Morgan’s claims about Lenin’s lack of theory on the national
question in its various forms, Lenin regarded Russia as an imperialist power
and “a prison house of nations”. Ireland therefore was not alone in being a
colonial part of a metropolitan, or imperialist, power. Most of the peoples of
the Russian empire were in the same position! The Bolsheviks were vitally
concerned about this question and championed the right of subject nations to
self-determination against the Russian empire. Lenin polemicised on this issue
against fellow revolutionaries such as Luxemburg and against those whom he
regarded as opportunists and centrists within the Second International.
After the revolution, self-determination was one of the main questions which
concerned the Communist International, as shown by both the records of its
congresses and its attempts to organise around the issue. In fact so concerned
were Lenin and the Bolsheviks about this, and especially about chauvinism on
the part of leftists in countries such as Britain, that when the Communist
International drew up its rules of membership it included the following
“A particularly marked and clear attitude on the question of the colonies and
oppressed nations is necessary on the part of the Communist Parties of those
countries where bourgeoisies are in possession of colonies and oppress other
nations. Every party that wishes to belong to the Communist International has
the obligation of exposing the dodges of its ‘own’ imperialists in the
colonies, of supporting every liberation movement in the colonies not only in
words but in deeds, of demanding that their imperialist compatriots should be
thrown out of the colonies, of cultivating in the hearts of the workers in
their own country a truly fraternal relationship to the working population in
the colonies and to the oppressed nations, and of carrying out systematic
propaganda among their own country’s troops against any oppressors of
colonial peoples.”13
Morgan, however, leaves the impression that Marx, Engels and Lenin had little to
say on these subjects and that nothing much can be inferred from what they did
say. In fact, they condemn the view now put forward by Morgan and by the left
economists who make up the major section of the British and Irish far left
today.
Revolutionary defeatismIn an attempt to undermine Connolly’s revolutionary
Marxist status, FA D’Arcy draws the following distinction between Lenin and
Connolly: “Lenin consistently called on socialists and workers to turn the
imperialist war on all sides into a civil war, whereas it is beyond question
that Connolly sincerely and insistently called for a German triumph.
Connolly’s prescription did not consider the likely fate of the Irish
socialist and labour movement in the event of an imperial German invasion and
victory.”14
Lenin, however, did not see Connolly’s position as at all inconsistent with
his own and fully supported the Easter rising.15 Moreover, Lenin’s position
of revolutionary defeatism meant that he regarded a Russian defeat at the hands
of Germany as preferable to a Russian triumph.16 Most importantly, Connolly was
attempting to do just what Lenin most favoured: turning the imperialist war into
a war on one’s own imperialist government. The imperialist government which
ruled Ireland was the British government, not the German government, so it was
against Britain that Connolly directed his fire, both figuratively and
literally. The ILP(I) appeal, for instance, clearly favours the defeat of
Britain.17
Marxists in Britain, such as the Socialist Labour Party (of which Connolly had
been the most important founder) and Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist
Federation - both strong supporters of the Easter rising and Irish freedom -
also preferred a British defeat, since this was seen as opening up greater
possibilities for revolutionary advance than a British triumph.18 By exactly
the same token and for exactly the same reasons, Marxists in Germany - such as
Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg - favoured the defeat of their own ruling
class.
Morgan goes to the extreme of claiming that Connolly “became a Germanophile,
and collaborated with a wartime imperialist state”19 - rather like saying
that Churchill became a Stalinist for collaborating with the Soviet Union
during World War II or that Lenin was a “Germanophile” for making use of a
German sealed train to return to Russia in early 1917. In fact, like Lenin,
Connolly recognised that it is good tactics for revolutionaries to take
advantage of inter-imperialist conflicts and get arms and any other support
they can from the enemy of the imperialist power against which they are trying
to organise their revolution.20
Morgan’s alternative course to Connolly’s supposed abandonment of socialism
for nationalism is that he “should have maintained his original course after
August 1914, involvement in the ILP(I), ITGWU and Labour Party being
touchstones of an independent proletarian position”.21 Yet Connolly had
already discovered the futility of economism. For instance, he described the
view that Belfast workers could be influenced by the same approach as workers
in Britain, as “a doctrine almost screamingly funny in its absurdity”.22
Belfast was “the happy hunting ground of the slave-driver and the home of the
least rebellious slaves in the industrial world” - the protestant workers
being “slaves in spirit because they have been reared up among a people whose
conditions of servitude were more slavish than their own”.23
There was no way around this problem, certainly not by pretending there was no
national question. Moreover, ignoring the national question for fear of
alienating unionist workers would have meant alienating the nationalists who
were the majority of the population in Ireland. The problem has been summarised
by Emil Strauss, who notes: “Belfast’s shipyards and textile mills were
integral parts of the British industrial system ...” This privileged position
would be lost in an independent Ireland. It was simply a hard fact of history
that “the interests of Belfast were diametrically opposed to those of Dublin
and Cork. Within the social framework of the time there was no escape from this
dilemma.”24
Connolly understood that the dilemma could not be escaped from, and could only
be dealt with by pursuit of the national question - that is, by uniting workers
around the goal of taking the lead of the struggle for national liberation.
Moreover, in this he prefigured the positions of the Third International in
relation to the role of revolutionary workers’ vanguards in the oppressed
nations.25
Connolly and ‘blood sacrifice’
A crucial element of the revisionist approach to 1916 has been the idea that the
rebels were fixated upon a ‘blood sacrifice’. They are said to have been
determined to shed their blood for Ireland, seeing this as a redeeming of the
country’s honour. In the case of Pearse, redemption through the shedding of
blood is often said to have outweighed any political consideration. The
‘blood sacrifice’ is also taken as a catholic ritual, in which the Easter
rising acted the part of Calvary and the leaders that of Christ.26 This is
used to further the argument that irrationalism is at the heart of Irish
resistance to British rule. Foster, for instance, sees the IRB’s decision,
when World War I broke out, to prepare for a rising as “a reaction almost
Pavlovian in its dogmatism”,27 while the 1916 leaders “relied on an
emotional and exalted Anglophobia”.28 But the rising was based on
fundamentally rational premises, as is clear from an investigation of the
rebels’ actual course of action, particularly Connolly’s.
On November 4 1915 Pearse gave a public talk reviewing the different political
tendencies at the time of the rather farcical attempt at rebellion in 1848.
Connolly described it as a “brilliant lecture”29 and effectively used
Pearse’s arguments against Irish Volunteers’ leader Eoin MacNeill - and, by
extension, the republican militants clinging to their alliance with him. As
Pearse had in the lecture, Connolly drew the conclusion from 1848 that “The
British government would not wait until the plans of the revolutionists were
ready. It has not held Ireland down for 700 years by any such foolish waiting.
It struck in its own time, and its blow paralysed the people.”30
In a blow at both MacNeill and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Connolly went
on to criticise those who talked of “premature insurrection” and provoking
the government, arguing: “Revolutionists who shrink from giving blow for blow
until the great day has arrived, and they have every shoe-string in its place,
and every man has got his gun, and the enemy has kindly consented to postpone
action in order not to needlessly hurry the revolutionists nor disarrange their
plans - such revolutionists only exist in two places - the comic opera stage,
and the stage of Irish national politics. We prefer the comic opera brand. It
at least serves its purpose.”31 Early in the new year, he declared: “While
the war lasts and Ireland still is a subject nation we shall continue to urge
her to fight for her freedom ... the time for Ireland’s battle is now, the
place for Ireland’s battle is here.”32
Firstly, then, Connolly was not committed to a grand sacrifice. In the same
article in which he referred to Ireland’s battle being “here” and
“now”, for instance, he made clear that if Britain was not at war an
attempt at armed revolution would be suicidal madness. Before the revisionist
floodtide made fashionable and dominant the view that the 1916 rising was a
grisly blood sacrifice, JJ Lee, for example, accepted that neither Connolly nor
the IRB militants had intended to throw away their lives in some exalted and
bloody martyrdom. The 1916 leaders, he noted, “accepted the possibility of a
blood sacrifice, but only as a contingency plan, not as the main objective of
all the preparations of the five preceding years.”33
Had the 20,000 rifles and accompanying ammunition on the Aud not been captured
off the Kerry coast on the eve of the rising, “a protracted struggle might
have ensued, with the possibility of increasing public support as fighting
progressed”.34 Furthermore the odds at Easter 1916, while certainly not
ideal, “were incomparably the best likely to occur for a very long time by
IRB criteria”.35
Some accounts note the way in which the 1916 rebels went behind MacNeill’s
back and/or repeat his argument that a rising was morally unjustified unless it
was defensive and/or had a reasonable chance of success. This argument was, in
effect, answered by Connolly as above. Lee has argued along similar lines,
asking: “If MacNeill deemed the circumstances of 1916 hopeless he was in
effect saying that a rising would never be justified, so what was the point of
acquiring arms in the first instance? And as the government would presumably
choose to disarm the Volunteers when it considered the circumstances most
propitious, the prospect of resistance would presumably be even less promising
than a surprise Volunteer initiative.”36
Moreover, new evidence suggests that MacNeill knew and had agreed to the rising,
while disdaining to take part himself. In the 1940s and 1950s, witness
testimonies were taken of people who had participated in the rising or had been
observers of the events of that Easter week. The testimonies were sealed for
decades and not finally opened to the public until 2002. So far, the only book
which has been published based on these accounts is Annie Ryan’s Witnesses.37
Several witness statements which appear in her book indicate that MacNeill had
been informed of the intentions for a rising, and agreed to it, although he
subsequently prevaricated and had to be visited and staunched up several times.
In the end, he got cold feet and issued the countermanding orders that appeared
in the press on Easter Sunday. The rebels had little choice but to go ahead or
end up ridiculed and discredited and, quite possibly, in British custody.Thus,
as Lee notes, the decision to go ahead with the rising “was partly a
defensive one prompted by the belief that Dublin Castle was about to arrest the
leaders, as it had swooped on the Fenians in 1865”.38 Only at this stage
“did the issue of a blood sacrifice arise. The leaders accepted the
challenge, but they did not welcome it”.39
Secondly, this view tallies with Markievicz’s own account, which appears to
have been ignored in all the historiography dealing with the rising. In an
article several months before her own death, Markievicz stated Connolly
“wanted to fight with a chance of winning, of course, but he was ready to go
out and fight and die, as Robert Emmet died, as he believed that Ireland’s
only hope of ultimate freedom lay in keeping the tradition of fighting alive by
raising the flag of revolt each time England was in difficulties”.40
Four years earlier, at the end of the civil war, she had also dealt with the
events of Easter Sunday, writing scathingly of MacNeill: “All the weary years
of preparation, all the fevered months of organisation, enlisting and drilling
were made to no avail by the stroke of a pen from a weakling.” The
alternative was to go ahead with as little hope of success as Emmet.
“Postponement,” she noted, was impossible. With a traitor alive, who had
intimate knowledge of them and their intentions, they knew that at any moment
he might carry his betrayal further and give all the information he had to the
enemy. His friend and adviser in treachery was under arrest by the Volunteers;
he could not be held for long, and was a menace either way.”41
A month later, Markievicz wrote again of the time “when professor Eoin
MacNeill and Mr B Hobson had treacherously acted a coward’s part, secretly
through the IRB, and publicly through the daily papers ...” Connolly, she
said, knew MacNeill’s action had taken away any chance of success “or even
of holding out for long enough to create that public opinion that might have
saved his life and the lives of the other leaders.
“Postponement of the rising had by now become quite impossible - too many
people had begun to smell a rat. Therefore this ‘call off’ had created a
situation out of which there were only two ways: the one way was to abandon all
thoughts of a rising; the other was to go on with it, though, for the leaders,
it was going out to certain death.”42
Notes
1. For an outline of Connolly’s strategy see my article in Weekly Worker June
28.
2. P O’Cathasaigh (Sean O’Casey) The story of the Irish Citizen Army Dublin
1919. See also S O’Casey Drums under the windows London 1945 and C Desmond
Greaves Sean O’Casey: politics and art London 1979.
3. JD Clarkson Labour and nationalism in Ireland New York 1924; Sean O Faolain
Constance Markievicz or the average revolutionary London 1934. At the time O
Faolain was shifting from republicanism to respectability and a hatchet job on
Markievicz was part of the price of his ticket. Far superior accounts of
Markievicz are contained in Diana Norman Terrible beauty: a life of Constance