Anti-bloodshed brothers - Village Magazine

8 April 2016

NEWS

Anti-bloodshed

brothers

Connolly and Pearse were united

primarily by aborrhence of WWI’s

blood sacriﬁce

by Frank Connolly

uch is made of the choice made by

James Connolly to join the Irish Cit-

izen Army (ICA) with the Irish

Volunteers led by Pádraig Pearse

for the Easter Rising in 1916.

Across the British and European Left, notably

but not exclusively among those on the side of

the allies in World War I, there was a mixture of

horror and disdain at the Irish merger of social-

ism and nationalism into a revolutionary force.

Within the ICA itself there was some opposi-

tion to any collusion by socialists with the

nationalists with one of its founders, Sean

O’Casey, to the fore in condemning Connolly

whom he described, retrospectively, in 1919, as

having “stepped from the narrow byway of Irish

Socialism onto the broad and crowded highway

of Irish nationalism”.

For many years since, and particularly since

the outbreak of conﬂict in the North in the late

1960s, Connolly’s decision to join the military

council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and

to set a date for the Rising after a three-day

secret meeting with Pearse, Sean MacDiarmada

and Joseph Plunkett in January 1919 has been

the subject of much criticism, including by many

on the Left.

However, in the light of so much recorded

material including the invaluable statements of

participants to the Bureau of Military History

becoming available since then, the rationale

behind Connolly’s decision, however reluctant,

has become much clearer. Equally, the motiva-

tion and coherence of Pearse and his comrades

in the Volunteers in striking a blow for freedom

is also now more credible than many of their

detractors would allow.

In 1915 Connolly did use the words “blither-

ing idiot” to describe anyone who would

celebrate the “red wine of the battleﬁelds” -

comments widely believed to have been in

response to Pearse’s exhortations. He said:

“No, we do not think the old heart of the earth

needs to be warmed with the red wine of mil-

lions of lives. We think anyone who does is a

blithering idiot. We are sick of such teaching

and the world is sick of such teaching”.

He was referring to a Victorian tradition in lit-

erature and poetry which was widespread in

Ireland and Britain as well as in mainstream,

including socialist, European thinking which

gloriﬁed blood sacriﬁce and martyrdom. What

is more important though is the practical oppo-

sition of Pearse and Connolly to the actual

blood sacriﬁce which saw hundreds of thou

sands of young men wasting their lives on the

killing ﬁelds of Flanders and beyond in an impe-

rialist war.

For this was the central reason why both men

found common cause in the Spring of 1916. As

President Michael D Higgins said at a commem-

oration for the ICA in Áras an Uachtaráin at

Easter:

“The suggestion that, when WWI broke out,

James Connolly scrapped his faith in socialism

to embrace pure nationalism is contradicted by

Connolly’s writing and journalism both before

and after 1914.

James Connolly was deeply concerned with

the context of turmoil in Europe and the world,

whose revolutionary potential was, in his view,

being squandered in defence of imperialist

adventurism. In Connolly’s estimation, a blow

against Empire was a clearing of the ground for

future socialist struggle.

It is important, therefore, not to rush to

judgement on what James Connolly's motiva-

tions were for orchestrating a joint action with

the Volunteers. One can understand how, in

despair at the collapse of his and other social-

ists' internationalist hopes after the outbreak

of the War, appalled by the breakdown of the

international proletariat into nationalities

which were slaughtering each other on the

Western Front and in the Middle East, James

Connolly resolved to seize the opportunity of

the war to strike a blow again the British

Empire”.

At the secret meeting in January 1916, Con-

nolly accepted an invitation to join the IRB

council and agree a date for the Easter Rising

while conscious of the ideological differences

that existed between the ICA and the national-

ists of both the Irish Volunteers and the larger

force of nationalists under John Redmond.

Connolly had worked with the trade union

movement against the capitalists in the US, and

on return to Ireland led the Dublin workers

against the brutal onslaught by employers,

some of whom were prominent in the national-

ist movement during the 1913 Lockout. That

struggle led directly to the creation of the ICA

the constitution of which inﬂuenced key senti-

ments of the 1916 Proclamation including its

Connolly stated, "The

moment peace is in the air

we shall strictly conﬁne

ourselves to the work

of turning the thought

of Labour to the work of

peaceful reconstruction"

April 2016 9

call for equality for women and children and

“the right of the people of Ireland to the owner-

ship of Ireland”.

Further ,Connolly was an internationalist who

understood that the world war was essentially

a contest between the great powers over global

resources.

Pearse clearly shared more in common with

this perspective than many of his former nation-

alist allies as he agreed to include the

progressive thinking of the ICA in the Proclama-

tion he drafted and read at the GPO, a document

that had of course been printed by union labour

in Liberty Hall the night previously.

Redmond on the other hand was prepared to

encourage tens of thousands of young, mainly

impoverished, Irishmen to their deaths in the

imperialist war in order to gain advantage for

his wealthy compatriots through the fading

promise of limited home rule.

As President Higgins remarked, “the ranks of

mainstream nationalists, and particularly those

of the Irish Parliamentary Party, comprised a

signiﬁcant number of industrialists and grazi-

ers who were happy to secure the advantages

of a political independence within the Empire

but who would resist economic, social, or as

both O’Casey and Synge would learn, cultural,

innovation”.

Many of those who fought heroically with the

Irish Volunteers during Easter Week went on to

reveal just how divergent their view of the type

of Ireland they were ﬁghting for was from their

comrades in the ICA, and indeed many in

Cumann na mBan.

Some of those drafting the 1922 Constitution

of the Free State just six years later described

how the proposed inclusion of Pearse’s words

on equality was dismissed as “Bolshevist” by

the British authorities to whom it was submit-

ted. The words were dropped.

As civil war threatened, Eoin O’Duffy of the

IRB told Michael Collins that only a military vic-

tory by the pro-Treaty forces would give notice

to “the Labour element and the Red Flaggers …

at the back of all the moves to make peace” as

to how any future Bolshevism would be dealt

with. He was responding to a threat by Labour

to withdraw its 19 TDs unless the Dáil was called

into session by an increasingly autocratic and

unaccountable free state leadership.

As Connolly perceptively predicted about

some inﬂuential nationalists as far back as his

1897 pamphlet entitled Erin's Hope:

“Their political inﬂuence, they derived from

their readiness at all times to do lip service to

the cause of Irish nationality, which in their

phraseology meant simply the transfer of the

seat of government from London to Dublin, and

the consequent transfer to their own or their rel-

atives’ pockets of some portion of the legislative

fees and lawyers pickings”.

In a further article, entitled 'The coming

generation', published in The Workers' Repub-

lic in July 1900, Connolly had outlined the

difference between the nature of his struggle

for Ireland and the basis on which the patriotic

feelings of many mainstream nationalists were

grounded. His thorough, indeed emotional,

concern for the welfare of Ireland's poorer

people surfaces in the words of the much

quoted passage:

“Ireland without her people is nothing to me,

and the man who is bubbling over with love and

enthusiasm for ‘Ireland’, and can yet pass

unmoved through our streets and witness all

the wrong and the suffering, the shame and the

degradation wrought upon the people of Ire-

land, aye, wrought by Irishmen upon Irishmen

and women, without burning to end it, is, in my

opinion, a fraud and a liar in his heart, no matter

how he loves that combination of chemical ele-

ments which he is pleased to call ‘Ireland’”.

None of this made ICA members or James

Connolly, irresponsible, bloodthirsty revolu

tionaries, as some like to portray them

contrasted to Pearse, MacDonagh and Clarke -

reﬂective, progressive thinkers on many issues

including education, culture and international

politics.

As Higgins said in his Easter address on the

subject:

“On 22nd January 1916, after he had agreed

that the Citizen Army should join an armed

insurrection together with the Irish Republican

Brotherhood and the Irish Volunteers, James

Connolly published an editorial which is at once

a call to arms and an embodiment of his con-

structive thought.

Entitled ‘What is Our Programme?’, this text

proves that Connolly issued the call for a Rising

as a socialist, as a theorist and practitioner who

never lost sight of his vision for an inclusive and

peaceful new society that could be created in a

post-imperialist setting. Yes, it would require

further struggle, but the conditions would have

changed. After the famous lines

‘The time for Ireland’s battle is now, the place

for Ireland’s battle is here’, Connolly went on to

write:

‘But the moment peace is once admitted by

the British Government as being a subject ripe

for discussion, that moment our policy will be

for peace and in direct opposition to all talk or

preparation for armed revolution. We will be no

party to leading out Irish patriots to meet the

might of an England at peace. The moment

peace is in the air we shall strictly conﬁne our-

selves, and lend all our inﬂuence to the work of

turning the thought of Labour in Ireland to the

work of peaceful reconstruction’”.

The alliance with the radical republicans of

the Irish Volunteers was not just a result of Con-

nolly’s view that to strike alone the ICA would

make little impact on British and capitalist rule

in Ireland. It was also a product of centuries of

experience of Irish rebellion when workers

fought the battle for survival and freedom

alongside intellectuals, poets, writers, and men

and women of property.

On this occasion the insurrection was

defeated but the British reprisals ignited a

longer war of independence which resulted in

partial victory, the treaty, partition and

counter-revolution.

The executions of Pearse, Connolly and the

other 1916 leaders robbed the independence

movement of some of its most progressive lead-

ers and contributed to the failure of their and

subsequent generations to realise the aspira-

tions of the Proclamation.

The executions of Pearse, Connolly and the

other 1916 leaders robbed the independence

movement of some of its most progressive

leaders and contributed to the failure of their and

subsequent generations to realise the aspirations

of the Proclamation

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