James Connolly Rises Again… In Song
“No revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression” —James Connolly
James Connolly, the renowned Irish revolutionary socialist who was executed by the British for his leadership in the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin, was also a poet and a songwriter. He lived in an age of mass labor upsurge throughout Europe, which was also an age in which working people loved a good, militant song to create camaraderie and liven up their struggles. With a lyrical turn of phrase and great wit, imagination, and revolutionary fervor, Connolly—when his organizing work permitted—turned out some of the best heart-pumping songs of the era. Much of this material was published in newspapers of the time, or in pamphlets, which were buried in archives. For most of a century, this priceless cultural history was threatening to become lost forever.
The writings of Connolly fared a little bit better. For a long time, access to much of his voluminous output was spotty; but following an upsurge of interest in Connolly in the 1970s, particularly in Ireland, things began to happen. The Communist Party of Ireland published a two-volume Collected Works in 1987, and more recently, a new facsimile reprint of Connolly’s Labor In Irish History, originally published in Dublin in 1910 and republished in 1923, perhaps his major analytical work, is available in paperback. Also, a complete Internet archive of Connolly’s writings is available on Marxist.org.
The songs uncovered
Now the songs of Connolly have caught up, so to speak. Mat Callahan, is a musician and leftist from the San Francisco Bay Area, and founder of the world beat band the Looters, who lives now in Switzerland. Together with an international group of collaborators, Callahan has found and produced much of Connolly’s poetic and musical works, and put them together into both a booklet, Songs of Freedom, and a CD of the same title. The CD contains songs by and about Connolly, as well as other classics from the era, performed by numerous musicians including Callahan, and vocalist Yvonne Moore.
The Songs of Freedom, book and CD, is both a collection of stirring revolutionary songs, and a vital historic document. For the first time in a hundred years, the original Songs of Freedom, edited by James Connolly and published in the U.S. in 1907, appears in this collection. (Connolly lived in the U.S., from 1903 to 1910, where he joined the Socialist Labor Party of Daniel DeLeon, and the Industrial Workers of the World.) Callahan found the only known copy of the original Songs of Freedom in the National Library in Dublin.
Prior to that discovery. Callahan had turned up another almost-lost treasure, The James Connolly Songbook, which included material from various pamphlets and newspapers by Jim Lane of the Cork Workers Club in Ireland. This more recently published booklet (1972 and 1980 editions) included in its introduction a description of the events surrounding the commemorative concert of Connolly’s birth, held on the 5th of June 1919, three years after his execution. The event was scheduled to be held in the Mansion House, Dublin, but it was banned by the British occupiers. Street fighting erupted, and the concert was soon moved to the Trades Hall, where the event took place despite more fighting in the street. “While the police and the ‘Red Guard of the workers’ faced one another in the streets outside, ‘the joyous, defiant singing of revolutionary songs’ could be heard coming from the building.’”1
A third source
A third source of the newly recovered material, also suggested by Jim Lane, was the 1919 “Connolly Souvenir” program for the memorial described above, another document which had been unavailable for almost a century. The program is reprinted in the 2013 Songs of Freedom. Songs to be sung (at the 1919 event) included Connolly’s “A Rebel Song,” “The Watchword of Labor,” “For Labor’s Right,” and “The Call of Erin.” Also included in the program were the singing of “The International” and “The Red Flag.”
The Connolly Souvenir reprint contains numerous ads and notices by local businesses, and different branches of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU), which was formed on the one big union idea. Each branch of the union lists two or three dozen trades that it covers, from dockers and canal workers to saw mill workers and gravediggers. Also advertised was “The Storehouse of Knowledge,” a listing of revolutionary socialist literature that could be ordered by mail, including numerous entries by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, as well as Clara Zetkin and the German “Spartacus Union Declaration,” among others.
Callahan and Moore have been touring internationally, including in the Bay Area and New York. Their vigorous performances of the songs of Connolly and others have included some lyrics for which there was no available musical notation. In these cases, Callahan wrote music for the pieces, trying to keep true to the traditional musical styles of the time. All have been greeted by enthusiastic audiences, including at the Starry Plough pub in Berkeley, California. (The Starry Plough was the symbol and flag of the Irish Citizen Army, originally organized by Connolly to protect workers from the police in the 1913 Dublin lockout.)
“We Only Want the Earth,” Connolly In Song
From O SLAVES OF TOIL:
When man shall stand erect at last,
And drink at wisdom’s fountain.
And to the earth in scorn shall cast
The chains his limbs are bound in;
Then from his loins a race shall spring,
Fit peer of gods and heroes,
O, blest be they whose efforts bring
That day and hour more near us
Chorus
O, slaves of toil, no craven fear,
Nor dread of fell disasters
Need daunt ye now, then up, and clear
The earth of lords and masters
From BE MODERATE:
Some men, faint-hearted, ever seek
Our programme to retouch,
And will insist, when’er they speak
That we demand too much.
‘Tis passing strange, yet I declare
Such statements give me mirth,
For our demands most moderate are,
We only want THE EARTH.
The life of James Connolly
Best known for his heroic leadership role in the Easter Rising and execution at the age of 48, Connolly’s life prior to 1916 was a full one. Born and raised of Irish parents in Edinburgh Scotland, and after a stint in an Irish battalion of the British Army, Connolly became an active socialist by the age of 24. He joined the Social Democratic Federation, and wrote for its paper, Justice, all the while polishing his spelling and grammar with the help of his wife. By 1896 his articles had become well-known, and he was offered a full time job as an organizer for the Dublin Socialist Club. Having just lost his job in Edinburgh, and now having three children to feed, Connolly quickly accepted.
Within days of arriving in Ireland, Connolly formed the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP), the object of which was: “Establishment of AN IRISH SOCIALIST REPUBLIC based upon the public ownership by the Irish people of the land, and instruments of production, distribution and exchange. Agriculture to be administered as a public function, under boards of management elected by the agricultural population and responsible to them and to the nation at large. All other forms of labor necessary to the well-being of the community to be conducted on the same principles.”
The program included nationalization of railways, banks, and canals (a major form of transportation and commerce in the 19th Century); with “gradual extension” of public ownership to other industries. Also included was a 48-hour workweek, free maintenance of children, free public education through the highest levels, a graduated income tax and universal suffrage. (The complete ten-point program is reprinted in Callahan’s introduction to Songs of Freedom.)
War and antiwar, reform or revolution
Connolly’s attitude toward imperialist war took firm shape through events in this period. In 1899 Connolly, through the ISRP, organized the first public protest against the Boer War, a British imperialist excursion into South Africa. Connolly said this was a war “enabling an unscrupulous gang of capitalists to get into their hands the immense riches of the diamond fields.” The war ground on, but the campaign Connolly organized had considerable effect in curtailing British military recruitment in Ireland.
Within the Social Democracy (the 2nd International), Connolly’s influence was felt when two delegates from the ISRP attended the 1900 International Socialist Congress in Paris. This was the first international meeting to recognize Irish nationhood. But the main focus at the Congress was on a heated debate between reform or revolution. French socialist deputy Millerand had entered the French government, insisting he could achieve reforms thereby. But reforms were predictably illusory. Furthermore, the government included General Galliffet, known as the butcher of the Commune, for his violent role in suppressing the Paris Commune—called by Marx the first expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat. British, German and Austrian delegations—anticipating their later betrayals in 1914—favored reformism; the Italian, Polish and American delegations were divided, and only the Bulgarians and the Irish unanimously condemned Millerand’s action and proclaimed for revolution.
The National Question in the 2nd International
Connolly had another important difference with reformist social-democrats—the national question. Connolly is well known for the emphasis on both socialism and national liberation, which pervade his work. What is less well known is that much of official Social Democracy was against working class participation in national struggles, on the grounds that the struggle was for international socialism, and was therefore above all national struggles. But to Connolly, and Lenin, “international socialism” was a fraud unless it recognized the right of colonial and oppressed peoples to national liberation.
To the argument that “self-determination is not applicable to socialist society” because “socialism will abolish every kind of national oppression,” Lenin countered that “it would be a betrayal of socialism to refuse to implement the self-determination of nations under socialism.”2 The Russian Revolution carried out Lenin’s program by offering the oppressed nationalities freedom from the Tsar’s “prison house of nations,” while at the same time pursuing workers’ revolution as the only solution to national as well as economic oppression.
“Home Rule” schemes
For Connolly, the national question in Ireland was closely tied to a working class and peasant opposition to capitalism and landlords. Connolly and others like him condemned bourgeois schemes of “home rule,” which were being raised by Liberals in Parliament in the years prior to World War I, and which would maintain both capitalism and private ownership of the land. “Home rule” was a scheme for continued imperial domination, since home rule bills would have merely granted a “domestic legislature” which would possess only marginal power, while allowing the continued control by British capital over the Irish economy. While Connolly had some illusions in the inevitable development of socialism out of Irish nationalism, he nevertheless was clear that national “liberation” without overthrowing capitalism was worthless:
“If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle [the seat of government in Ireland], unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain.... England would still rule you.”3
The Liberal “home rule” schemes also came to involve partition of Ireland, in which the predominantly Protestant counties around industrialized Belfast (Ulster) remained with Britain. This was important to British capital, which had invested in Belfast to promote exports for the British empire, and which opposed any loosening of its control, even of the limp “home rule” sort. Belfast was the industrial heart of Ireland, while the South had remained mostly agricultural. Belfast was also important because of close ties to Liverpool and Glasgow, which were built up during the 19th Century.
Echoes of the “United Irishmen”
Connolly and his close friends and comrades of course always organized workers without regard to sectarian identity. Like most conscious Irish workers, Connolly held Wolfe Tone and the other heroes of the 1789 United Irishmen rebellion in high regard. Inspired by the French Revolution, and despite being weakened by government spies and arrests of key leaders, the United Irish rising had spread across several counties north and south, issuing a clarion call for united peasant and workers’ struggle against imperial and social oppression, and for the “Rights of Man.”
Belfast workers were crucial for unifying the working class of Ireland in union, anti-imperialist or revolutionary struggle, as well as for joint struggles with workers in Liverpool and Glasgow. James Larkin, an Irish union organizer who hailed from Liverpool and who was perhaps Connolly’s closest comrade, had great success in organizing dockers in Belfast in 1907. Protestant and Catholic workers remained united behind Larkin’s banner despite frantic efforts by the employers to divide them along sectarian lines, as well as the traitorous inaction of the union tops, who were headquartered in London (as with most Irish unions).
After returning from several years living and organizing in the U.S. (where Labor In Irish History was written, and Songs of Freedom was first published), Connolly waged a successful campaign to free Larkin, who had been arrested on trumped up charges stemming from his leadership role in the Belfast dockers’ struggle. In 1911 Connolly took up residence in Belfast, becoming the Ulster district organizer of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU), “one big union” which had been founded by Larkin, who had become disgusted with the English-based trade unions. Connolly led numerous struggles, including a mill girls’ strike in Belfast. He also worked to recruit members from the British-based Independent Labor Party, which was reformist and pseudo-internationalist, to the ISRP.
The struggle to save Irish working-class unity
A capitalist priority remained preventing the development of Irish working-class unity such as that represented by Connolly’s and Larkin’s work. They set Protestant and Catholic workers against each other by using Catholics, many of whom were desperate after being forced off their land by famine or eviction, as low-wage workers who thus became a threat to the better-off Protestant workers of Belfast. The Belfast rulers corrupted Protestant workers with “home rule means Rome rule” propaganda; and in 1913 they formed the Ulster Volunteers, a Protestant militia to defend Ulster’s union with Britain, and resist the six counties’ inclusion in any home rule scheme. Nationalists soon countered by forming the Irish Volunteers, associated with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, IRB (i.e., Fenians, a secret, oath-bound organization dating to 1857 and calling for an independent democratic Ireland).
Labor fakers, in both the North and South did their part to promote home rule, even on the basis of partition. Connolly took the lead in debating one William Walker, formerly of the Belfast Independent Labor Party, who left Labor to promote an openly anti-Catholic, pro-union (i.e., of Ulster with Britain) and Protestant ascendancy. Connolly used the debate to educate the majority of English socialists who, with the slogan of “international socialism,” were opposed to working-class participation in national liberation and anti-imperialist struggles.
“A carnival of reaction”
Connolly rightly saw the prospect of partition of Ireland as a great disaster for united class struggle. Partition, in his words, would sink “all hopes of uniting the workers, irrespective of religion or old political battle cries.” Partition, Connolly said, “would mean a carnival of reaction both North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish labor movement and paralyze all advanced movements while it endured. ....To it Labor should give the bitterest opposition, against it Labor in Ulster should fight even to the death, if necessary, as our fathers fought before us.”4
The Dublin lockout, 1913
The Dublin Lockout was a massive struggle in 1913-14, in which 25,000 workers were locked out by a cabal of 400 employers in an attempt to break the transport union. Connolly had helped lead a strike in 1911-12 in which the ITGWU had emerged victorious, and the bosses were out for vengeful union-busting. The lockout struggle pitted the working class of Dublin not directly against the British overlords, but against both the Irish bourgeoisie and the labor lieutenants of capital, both in Ireland and Britain.
The repression against the workers was massive and vicious, with attacks by cops and armed scabs, who fired pistols with impunity while workers were arrested on phony charges. Several picketers were shot, including a 16-year-old girl. The state threw every weapon they had against the unionists, even using the Catholic Church for intimidation and harassment. Police backed up mobs of priests and other reactionary scum such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who were mobilized to physically prevent women from sending their children to Britain to be looked after by supportive working-class families, so they wouldn’t starve in Dublin during the lockout. Apparently the Church thought they should starve rather than be exposed to Protestantism or atheism!5
After months of attacks by the union busters, Connolly and Jack White, a Protestant Ulsterman, formed the Irish Citizen Army, an armed unit to defend the union workers. Connolly saw this as a first step toward the overthrow of British imperialism in Ireland and the establishment of a workers republic:
“Hitherto the workers of Ireland have fought as parts of the armies led by their masters, never as a member of any army officered, trained and inspired by men of their own class. Now, with arms in their hands, they propose to steer their own course, to carve their own future.”6
Solidarity from English workers axed by labor traitors
Solidarity from the English working class was what was needed most to beat the lockout, especially solidarity strikes, and wildcat actions were quickly forthcoming in significant sections of the rank and file workers. Railwaymen in Liverpool led the way by immediately blocking all Dublin traffic. Larkin conducted a speaking tour of Britain, saying, “I am out for revolution!” Soon between 13 and 14,000 workers were locked out or on sympathy strikes across Britain, and thousands of pounds in aid was also raised. But the reformist union officials worked to quell the wildcat strikes, and stood in the way of official union actions.
Both Connolly and Larkin were arrested during the struggle. Connolly refused to recognize the court, denying the right of England to rule in Ireland. Sentenced to prison for three months, he was released after an eight-day hunger strike. Larkin got seven months, and Connolly took leadership of the union struggle. He travelled to Britain to raise support, and spoke at a gigantic meeting in London’s Albert Hall, together with George Bernard Shaw, Delia Larkin (Jim Larkin’s sister), and suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst (later to become an antiwar activist and left communist), to support the unionists of Dublin and demand Larkin’s release. Soon tens-of-thousands of British workers took up the call for a general strike to free Larkin.
“Still waters run deep”
According Sylvia Pankhurst in her book, The Suffragette Movement, (1931, reprinted 1977), the Albert Hall meeting was attended by 10,000 Laborists, Socialists, Suffragettes, “and reformers of every school.” Of Connolly, she said he was “a thick set, quiet mannered, serious-looking man,” who “gave a temperate, informative address, in striking contrast to the excitability of ... the other speakers.” She saw his speech as “an evidence of the old adage, ‘still waters run deep.’”
The widespread support for the Irish workers forced the hand of the Labor traitors. The British Trades Union Congress (TUC) called a special meeting to crush the solidarity, in which Ben Tillet, a key former ally who had spoken on the same platforms with both Larkin and Connolly, switched sides and supported the conservative TUC leaders in banning solidarity strikes. Still the Dublin workers held firm, despite scabbing from some British workers, especially in the Seamen’s and Firemen’s Unions. By early in 1914, however, the workers were starved out (despite token food donations from the TUC) and the ITGWU was defeated.
Onset of the “Great War”
At the start of World War I, Connolly was outraged at the capitulation to imperialist war by the major social-democratic parties, including the German Social Democrats, French Socialist Party, and the British Labor Party, which threw their antiwar resolutions out the window when it came to “defense of the fatherland.” Connolly watched the same Labor traitors who had betrayed the Dublin workers come out for the war, along with the same socialists who had denounced his demands for national liberation as “chauvinism,” in the name of “international socialism.” On the national front, all talk of home rule was shelved. Not surprisingly, the Ulster Volunteers immediately signed up to go fight for the British Empire. But Connolly also saw the nationalists do the same, as John Redmond, a leader on the Irish Volunteers’ ruling council, made a similar pledge, which trusted in the British to implement Home Rule after their presumed victory. Connolly commented:
Full steam ahead John Redmond said
that everything was well chum;
Home Rule will come when we are dead
and buried out in Belgium7
This little poem had an uncanny ring of truth, as very soon thousands of Ulster Volunteers lay dead on the German wire or on the ground following their offensive in the battle of the Somme, in which, typical for World War I, no ground was gained. Like Lenin, Connolly was determined to oppose the class traitors of the TUC and 2nd International, and saw a workers’ uprising as the only possible solution to the imperialist war:
“A great continental uprising of the working class would stop the war; a universal protest at public meetings would not save a single life from being wantonly slaughtered.”8
In October of 1914, Larkin, exhausted by the Dublin struggle, set off for America to raise funds for the Irish labor movement, and Connolly became the key leader of the ITGWU as it struggled to rebuild itself after the lockout, and as many of its members succumbed to the war fever and signed up for the British Army. He also headed the Citizen’s Army and edited the Irish Worker, a paper Larkin had founded in 1911. But Connolly’s main preoccupation now was a desperate desire to save the working masses from slaughter in the trenches, and this led him into a bloc with insurrectionary nationalists.
A Rising prepared
Connolly immediately saw the war as an opportunity for an uprising of workers against the war and imperialism, which would be a spark for similar national liberation and workers’ movements around the world, and a major blow against British imperialism. To bring this about, he oriented toward an alliance with the left wing of the bourgeois nationalists. While it is possible that a certain demoralization following the Dublin lockout and wholesale defection of labor leaders to the war effort may have played a role in Connolly’s thinking regarding working with nationalists, his focus on bringing about a working-class rising against the war hardly seems defeatist. And, there was an opening to the left coming up within the nationalists’ ranks.
Following John Redmond’s declaration for the war, the Irish Volunteers had undergone a split. The majority went with Redmond, with many volunteering for the slaughter, enticed by British recruitment posters proclaiming defense of “gallant little Catholic Belgium.” Those opposing the war, and the conscription which threatened to come with it, sought to defend Ireland and its right to self-determination. Connolly wound up being the chief military organizer of the Easter Rising.
The Easter Rising
The Easter Rising was planned to include not just an uprising in Dublin, but also support in the provinces which were to prevent troops from advancing on the city. The rising was supposed to be based on the forces of the Irish Citizen Army and the entire Volunteer movement, which were to go on maneuvers, or “parades,” as a signal to rise up.
However, things started to go wrong right before the rising was to begin. Aid which was supposed to arrive on a German ship got headed off by the British Navy, and over a hundred revolutionary leaders around Ireland got arrested. But most importantly, a leader of the IRB and founder of the Irish Volunteers, Eoin MacNeill, having discovered that the “parades” were really the start of an insurrection, promptly called the whole thing off in an article published in a major employers’ mouthpiece, the Sunday Independent!
As a result, most members of the Volunteers stayed home, and the uprising was almost entirely limited to a small force in Dublin. Connolly and the other courageous leaders pressed ahead, but faced with overwhelming odds and immense destruction of the city wrought by the British Army, the uprising was crushed in less than a week. Fourteen leaders were executed immediately, which was thought to be the end. But Labor traitor Arthur Henderson, then in government in Britain, screamed for Connolly’s blood. Severely wounded and unable to walk, Connolly was tied to a chair, where he was shot by a British soldier.
Politics and legacy of the Rising
Marxists defended the Easter Rising as a revolutionary antiwar national liberation struggle. Lenin was particularly clear in his polemics against socialists who had denied the right of oppressed nations to rise against imperialist domination, and who, such as Polish Social-Democrat and later Communist Karl Radek, had called the Rising a “putsch.” Pointing to the centuries’ long history of Irish struggle for independence, Lenin said that, “Whoever calls such an uprising a ‘putsch’ is either a hardened reactionary or a doctrinaire hopelessly incapable of picturing a social revolution as a living thing.” Lenin also said that, “It is the misfortune of the Irish that they rose prematurely, before the European revolt of the proletariat had time to mature.”9
Trotsky also criticized those who had denounced the Rising as a “putsch,” and sternly denounced the aging Social Democrat Plekhanov (the founder or Russian Marxism) for calling the Rising “harmful.”10
A political compromise?
An argument can be made that the Easter Rising was something of a political compromise for Connolly. Most of the Rising’s planned provisional government were nationalists, and Connolly was to be vice president, next to Patrick Pearse of the Volunteers as president. The flag hoisted by the insurrectionists over their headquarters in the General Post Office was the green flag of the nationalists, not the red flag or even the Citizen Army’s famous “Starry Plough.” And the Proclamation issued by the uprising’s leaders, signed by Connolly and six others, was a bourgeois-democratic document, which proclaimed an “Irish Republic,” and began, “In the name of God.”
Connolly’s socialist influence was reflected, if weakly, in the Proclamation when it declared, “the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible.” But the proclamation focused mainly on democratic demands, such as “religious and civil liberty and equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens,” and promised a national government “elected by the suffrages of all [Ireland’s] men and women.” (This last point reflected the left split in the nationalists, which had taken place before the Rising, as most nationalists, including John Redmond, opposed women’s suffrage. Women’s suffrage was eventually granted by the Irish Free State in 1922.)
A revolutionary against
imperialist war
As Trotsky explained in his theory of permanent revolution, petty-bourgeois nationalism and anti-imperialism is incapable of completing the democratic tasks of revolution in the colonial world in the modern era. Only working-class struggle for socialist aims can accomplish this. But would Connolly, had he lived, have allowed the Easter Rising’s legacy to be so strictly nationalist? While there is no mathematical certainty, it is hard to imagine that a man like Connolly, who had dedicated his whole life to working class struggle, and who always said that political nationalism could achieve nothing without a revolutionary social overturn, would have abandoned all that.
Most importantly, Connolly, in organizing and leading the Easter Rising, was carrying out a revolutionary defeatist strategy of opposition to imperialist war, by opposing his “own” government, and trying to light a “spark,” to turn the imperialist war into a civil war. The revolutionary left needs to promote this kind of class-consciousness within antiwar movements (and other generally reformist milieus) today.
The somewhat ambiguous “socialist”-sounding line in the Proclamation did not stop the nationalist (Sinn Fein) dominated government of the Irish Free State from adopting the Proclamation by unanimous vote in the First Dial (Irish parliament) in Dublin in 1919, in the attempt to tie labor to the nationalist cause—a fraud which was soon forgotten. Despite the setting up of soviets in some rural areas during the rebellion against the 1921 treaty and partition, “By the middle 1920’s, in social terms, counter-revolution was triumphant in Ireland, north and south.”11
Connolly stands tall in
working-class history
James Connolly was a towering figure, one of the great revolutionary socialist and working class leaders, upon whose shoulders revolutionists are proud to stand today. Had he not fallen prematurely in 1916, just one year before the Russian Revolution, there’s little doubt he would have been a part of the great upsurge of working class struggle which that Revolution engendered, which swelled to a peak in 1919. Any doubts about that will be assuaged, as you relive a piece of his struggles in the Songs of Freedom. Surely, he would have been beside Lenin and Trotsky as a key organizer for the world revolution that we still work for today.
1 From the introduction to the original James Connolly Songbook, reprinted in Mat Callahan, ed. Songs of Freedom, the James Connolly Songbook, PM Press, 2013, page 56.
2 Lenin, “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up,” July 1916, Collected Works vol. 22, p. 321.
3 Connolly, Nationalism and Imperialism, 1897.
4 Quotes from “The Exclusion of Ulster” and “Labor and the Proposed Partition of Ireland,” both from early 1914.
5 James Connolly, a Marxist Appreciation, Workers Hammer No. 195, 2006.
6 Workers’ Republic, October 30, 1915, quoted in the Introduction, P. Berreford Ellis, ed., James Connolly Selected Writings, 1973, p. 23
7 Connolly, quoted without source, Introduction, James Connolly Selected Writings, 1973. p. 25
8 Connolly, quoted without source, Introduction, James Connolly Selected Writings, 1973. p. 25
9 Lenin, “The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up,” CW vol. 22.
10 Leon Trotsky, On the Events In Dublin, July 1916
11 Liam de Paor, Divided Ulster, Pelican Books, 1971, p 98. And see p. 97 for the reference to the setting up of rural soviets.