Irish history

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

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

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

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

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

Much more on and by James Connolly here. Building on the ideas of John Leslie (of the Social Democratic Federation) in his 1897 pamphlet Erin’s Hope, Connolly claimed that the essence of the national question in Ireland was a battle over “fundamentally different ideas on the vital question of property in land”. Between, on the one hand, a supposed Irish “primitive communism” and, on the other, an “alien social system” of private ownership. Drawing on the contemporary anthropological works of Lewis Morgan, which had also influenced Friedrich Engels, Connolly argued that a form of “primitive...

Michael Johnson continues a series on the life and politics of James Connolly. Much more on and by James Connolly here. Connolly's period in Dublin coincided with the period of the Gaelic Revival, and the rediscovery (and re-invention) of Ireland's historical, literary and cultural past. It also led to a deepening of Connolly's understanding of Irish history and the Irish national question, establishing some themes which, in various form, would be present throughout his political life. The Gaelic Revival was in full-swing when Connolly moved to Dublin in 1896, as sections of the Irish middle...

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

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

The Irish Transport and General Workers' Union's Irish Citizen Army The Easter Rising in Dublin started a hundred years ago, at noon on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916 (Easter falls on a different date each year). It ignited a train of events that led six years later, after a bitter Anglo-Irish war, to the foundation of the present 26 County Irish state. The military commander of the Dublin insurgents was the Marxist James Connolly. The Rising was an event of world, and not merely of Irish, importance. In a time of great empires opressing colonies all over the world, in the middle of a terrible...