James Connolly(1868–1916)

James Connolly was born on the fifth of June 1868 at 107 Cowgate in the Irish quarter of Old Town Edinburgh, third son of John Connolly, a carter from County Monaghan, and Mary McGinn of County Monaghan, both Irish-Catholic emigrants of the Famine generation. He left the Cowgate parish school at eleven and was put to work in a printer's devil job in the Edinburgh Evening News, then at a Leith bakery and a Leith tile-works through his early teens. At fourteen, in 1882, he enlisted under his elder brother's name in the British Army (he was below the regulation age) and served seven years with the Royal Scots Regiment in Ireland, principally at Cork and the Curragh, which gave him his first sustained period in the country whose politics would absorb the rest of his life. He deserted in 1889, two months before discharge, returned to Scotland and married Lillie Reynolds of Carlow at Dublin in April 1890.

He took the family back to Edinburgh, worked as a carter and a council scavenger through the early 1890s, and in 1892 joined the Scottish Socialist Federation. By 1894 he was the federation's full-time organiser for Dundee and Aberdeen. In May 1896 he was offered the post of paid organiser of the Dublin Socialist Club, accepted, moved his family to Dublin, and on the twenty-ninth of May 1896 founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party at the small basement office at 138½ Thomas Street, the first explicitly Marxist political party in the country and the first to combine the national and the labour demand in a single programme. He launched the party paper, The Workers' Republic, in August 1898 and edited it for the next two years.

He emigrated with his family to the United States in 1903, worked as an organiser for the Socialist Labor Party and from 1905 for the Industrial Workers of the World in New York and New Jersey, and wrote the body of his mature theoretical work in those American years: Labour, Nationality and Religion (1910) and Labour in Irish History (1910), the founding work of historical materialist analysis applied to the Irish national question. He returned to Ireland in July 1910 at the request of the Socialist Party of Ireland, took the Belfast organisership of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union under James Larkin in 1911, and through 1912 and 1913 built the Belfast and Dublin docks-and-carting unions to the strength they brought into the Dublin Lock-Out of August 1913 to February 1914, the great half-year industrial confrontation in which the Dublin employers under William Martin Murphy locked out twenty thousand ITGWU members.

On the twenty-third of November 1913, during the Lock-Out, Connolly co-founded with Larkin and Captain Jack White the Irish Citizen Army, the small armed workers' militia raised initially to protect ITGWU pickets from the Dublin Metropolitan Police, and the first standing workers' army in the English-speaking world. When Larkin sailed for an American lecture-tour in October 1914, Connolly took the acting general secretaryship of the ITGWU and the commandantcy of the Citizen Army. Through 1915 and into 1916 he moved the Citizen Army into closer co-operation with the Irish Volunteer left and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, was sworn into the IRB and elected to the seven-man Military Council in January 1916, and at Easter 1916 was named Commandant of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Republic and Vice-President of the Provisional Government under Pearse.

He drafted the military plan of the Rising with Joseph Mary Plunkett, commanded the General Post Office garrison through the six days of Easter Week, was wounded in the foot and the shoulder during the fighting on Thursday the twenty-seventh of April, and signed the unconditional surrender alongside Pearse on the twenty-ninth. He was tried by field general court martial at Dublin Castle, sentenced to death, taken by ambulance to Kilmainham Gaol unable to stand from his wounds, and executed by firing squad in the prison yard at dawn on the twelfth of May 1916 in his forty-eighth year. He was buried in the quicklime grave at Arbour Hill with the other executed leaders. The Irish Transport and General Workers' Union became under his son-in-law Roddy Connolly and his daughter Nora the foundational institution of twentieth-century Irish labour; the union merged in 1990 with the Federated Workers' Union of Ireland to form SIPTU, the largest trade union in modern Ireland. Connolly Station, the central east-coast railway terminal of Dublin, has carried his name since 1966. The Workers' Republic and Labour in Irish History are foundational texts of the Irish socialist tradition. The Connolly name in modern Irish history carries the weight of the Cowgate-born organiser who put the Irish national and labour movements into the single political programme.