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James Connolly (Irish: Séamas Ó Conghaile; 5 June 1868 – 12 May 1916) was an Irish republican, socialist, and trade union leader, executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland. He remains an important figure both for the Irish labour movement and for Irish republicanism. He became an active socialist in Scotland, where he had been born in 1868 to Irish parents. On moving to Ireland in 1896, he established the country's first socialist party, the Irish Socialist Republican Party. It called for an Ireland independent not only of Britain's Crown and Parliament, but also of British "capitalists, landlords and financiers". From 1905 to 1910, he was a full-time organiser in the United States for the Industrial Workers of the World, choosing its syndicalism over the doctrinaire Marxism of Daniel DeLeon's Socialist Labor Party of America, to which he had been initially drawn. Returning to Ireland, he deputised for James Larkin in organising for the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, first in Belfast and then in Dublin. In Belfast, he was frustrated in his efforts to draw Protestant workers into an all-Ireland labour and socialist movement but, in the wake of the industrial unrest of 1913, acquired in Dublin what he saw as a new means of striking toward the goal of a Workers' Republic. At the beginning of 1916, he committed the union's militia, the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), to the plans of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and the Irish Volunteers, for war-time insurrection. Alongside Patrick Pearse, Connolly commanded the insurrection in Easter of that year from rebel garrison holding Dublin's General Post Office. He was wounded in the fighting and, following the rebel surrender at the end of Easter week, was executed along with the six other signatories to the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Biographers have debated the Connolly's role as a socialist in the Rising, and different left-wing and republican tendencies in Ireland have contested his legacy. Early life Connolly was born in the Cowgate or "Little Ireland" district of Edinburgh in 1868, the third son of Mary McGinn and John Connolly, a labourer,: 28  Irish immigrants from County Monaghan. Throughout his life he was to speak with a Scottish accent.: 636  He left the local Catholic primary school at age 10 to seek work.: 14  At age 14, following his eldest brother John, he enlisted in the army, falsifying both his name and age. Little is known about his military service. Desmond Greaves learnt that Connolly had reminisced about being on guard duty in Cork harbour on the night in December 1882 when Maolra Seoighe was hanged for the Maamtrasna massacre (the killing a landlord and his family).: 26  This is consistent with Connolly having joined the 1st Battalion, King’s Liverpool Regiment (which counted as an Irish regiment).: 15  If this was the case, in the years that followed, the teenage recruit may have helped enforce Land War evictions in Meath, patrolled the streets of Belfast during deadly sectarian riots, and war-gamed the army's defensive plans for Dublin. In 1889, months before the end of his enlistment, and in advance of rumoured deployment overseas, Connolly "discharged himself". In Dublin, he had met Lillie Reynolds, and in the New Year she followed him to Scotland where, with special dispensation (Reynolds was Protestant) they married in a Catholic church.: 15  Socialist republican Scottish Socialist Federation Again following in the example of his brother John, in 1890 Connolly joined the Scottish Socialist Federation, succeeding his brother as its secretary in 1893. Largely a propaganda organisation, the Federation supported Keir Hardie and his Independent Labour Party in the campaign for labour representation in Parliament. Within the SSF, Connolly was greatly influenced by John Leslie, 12 years his senior, but like him born to poor Irish immigrants. While Leslie did not envisage Ireland breaking the English connection before the advent of a socialist Britain, he was to encourage Connolly in the creation of a separate socialist party in Ireland. In 1896, after the birth of his third daughter, and having lost, while standing for election to the city-council, his municipal carter's job, and then failed as a cobbler, Connolly considered a future for his family in Chile. But thanks to an appeal by John Leslie, he had the offer of employment in Dublin as a full-time secretary for the Dublin Socialist Club, at £1 per week. Irish Socialist Republican Party In Dublin, where he first became a navvy and then a proof reader, Connolly soon split the Socialist Club, forming in its stead the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP). In what was then, if briefly, the "literary centre of advanced nationalism",: 44  Alice Milligan's Belfast monthly, The Shan Van Vocht, he published a first statement of the party credo, "Socialism and Nationalism"", This suggested that, even if a step toward formal independence, the legislature that the Irish Parliamentary Party wished to see restored in Dublin would be a mockery of Irish national aspirations.If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.By the same token, Connolly implied that there was little to be expected from the "Irish Language movements, Literary Societies or [1798] Commemoration Committees" of Milligan and of their mutual friends in Dublin (Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne, and Constance Markievicz whom Connolly was to join in "to-hell-with-the-British-empire" protests against Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and the Boer War).: 51, 66–69  There could be no lasting progress toward an Irish Ireland without acknowledging that, as a force that "irresistibly destroys all national or racial characteristics", capitalism was the Celtic Revival's "chief enemy".: 17  Milligan, who deferred to the Irish Republican Brotherhood (in 1899 they had her pass her subscription list to Griffith and his new weekly, the United Irishman, the forerunner of Sinn Féin), confined her response to Connolly's ambition to contest Westminster elections. Were the ISRP successful, she predicted "an alliance with the English Labour" no less debilitating than the courtship of English Liberals had proved for the Irish Parliamentary Party. In the event, Ireland's first socialist party, garnering only a few hundred votes,: 186  failed to elect Connolly to Dublin City Council and never exceeded more than 80 active members. Connolly was dispirited and at odds with the ISRP's other leading light, E. W. Stewart, manager of the par.... Discover the Rebecca Connolly popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Rebecca Connolly books.