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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
8 April 2016
NEWS
Anti-bloodshed
brothers
Connolly and Pearse were united
primarily by aborrhence of WWI’s
blood sacrifice
by Frank Connolly
M
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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