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From Socialist Worker, No. 117, 12 April 1969, pp. 2–3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
FIFTY-THREE YEARS ago this Easter, on April 24 1916, a Proclamation was read in Dublin declaring Ireland a Republic.
The Republic maintained itself in arms for five days. With a massive use of armed force and the bombardment of Dublin, the ‘third city of the British Empire’, the uprising was defeated.
As the British troops moved in, Dublin’s middle class served them with tea and cake, then joined with the shawlies from the slums to hurl spit and sneers at the defeated rebels.
The end of the insurrection was the beginning of a wholesale execution of the leaders by the British Liberal government.
The surrender took place on Saturday April 28. By Wednesday May 3 firing squads under the command of General Sir John Maxwell were at work. Pearse, Clarke and MacDonagh went to their doom that day.
The executions continued until by May 10 all but three of the captured insurgent commandants had been done to death.
The remaining three were Eamonn De Valera, afterwards to be the chief gravedigger of the Irish revolution, Sean McDermott, a cripple, left-republican, professional revolutionary and one of the signatories to the proclamation, and the representative of the revolutionary working class in the uprising – James Connolly.
Why was Connolly involved? The short answer is that he was attempting to implement in Ireland the resolutions of the Second International passed by its pre-war congresses at Stuttgart, Copenhagen and Basle which called for the mobilisation of the working class in each belligerent country against imperialist war.
The Irish section of the Second International did not rally to the ‘defence of its national regime’ as was implied in a recent article by Jim Higgins (Socialist Worker, January 18 1969).
By contrast, in the next few days bourgeois Ireland rallied to the Empire. The Irish Times called upon imperialism to ‘use the surgeon’s knife’.
The bourgeois viewpoint was more clearly expressed by the leading daily paper, the Irish Independent. In a leading article entitled The Clemency Plea it said:
‘When, however, we come to some of the ringleaders, instigators and fomenters not yet dealt with, we must make an exception.’
‘If these men are treated with too great leniency, they will take it as an indication of weakness on the part of the government and the consequences may not be satisfactory.
‘They may be more truculent than ever and it is therefore necessary that society should be protected against their activity ... It would hardly be fair to treat these leniently because the cry for clemency has been raised, while those, no more guilty than they, have been severely punished
‘Weakness to such men at this stage may be fatal ... Let the worst of the ringleaders be singled out and dealt with as they deserve.’
Two days later this is precisely what happened to ‘the worst of the ringleaders’: the wounded Connolly, strapped to a chair, was shot with MacDermott.
The insurrection over, all shades of politics came forward to pronounce their verdicts.
The verdict of the British ruling class was given by Augustine Birrell, the Chief Secretary for Ireland. He felt confident enough to state in Westminster that the revolt did not express the wishes of the Irish people, who would never regard it as a landmark in their history.
The organ of clericalism, The Irish Catholic, wrote of
‘This extraordinary combination of rogues and fools. To find anything like a parallel for what has occurred, it is necessary to have recourse to the bloodstained annals of the Paris Commune.’
And the paper declared that:
‘What was attempted was an act of brigandage, pure and simple, and there is no reason to lament that its perpetrators have met the fate which from the very dawn of history has been universally reserved for traitors.’
The Pope sent a message expressing his regret. John Redmond, the leader of the Nationalist Party, was satisfied that the revolt was ‘artificial’ and so to be dismissed.
The British labour movement could not miss out on the imperialist chorus. Labour leader Arthur Henderson sat in the cabinet which ordered the death of Connolly, while the Newcastle-on-Tyne Conference of the Independent Labour Party condemned militarism, and included among the ‘militarists’ Connolly and ‘the Irish Citizens Army.’ Polluted with the twin prisons of pacifism and Great British chauvinism, the labour movement of this country was unable to rally any support to the great Dublin struggle and ended up supporting the execution of the General Secretary of the largest trade union in Ireland.
Dublin lay in ruins. 1,351 people were killed or wounded – officially – the jails overflowing, 15 leaders in quicklime.
In the city centre 179 buildings totalling 61,000 square yards had been irrevocably ruined.
But, as Pearse had predicted, the revolt had redeemed Dublin from many shames: the Dublin which James Joyce had so accurately described in Ulysses was dead, and what the poet W.B. Yeats was to call a Terrible Beauty was born.
Part of that terrible beauty was the tradition which told 30,000 factory workers to refuse to pass a picket for 4½ weeks last month until 1,300 maintenance men won a pay award of £3 10s a week.
Even some of the revolutionary Left took the position that the insurrection was a putsch.
Trotsky, while defending the Rising, thought that the basis for a national revolution in Ireland had disappeared.
Radek, in the columns of the Berliner Tagwacht [1] attacked the movement in a manner reminiscent of the attacks one reads in some sections of the Left-wing press on Che Guevara and the guerrilla movement in Latin America.
Lenin made a different estimation. He wrote:
‘The term “putsch”, in the scientific sense of the word, may be employed only when the attempt at insurrection has revealed nothing but a circle of conspirators, or stupid maniacs, and when it has aroused no sympathy among the masses.
‘The century-old Irish national movement, having passed through various stages and combinations of class interests, expressed itself, inter alia, in a mass Irish National Congress in America which passed a resolution calling for Irish independence – it expressed itself in street fighting conducted by a section of the urban petty bourgeoisie and a section of the workers after a long period of agitation, demonstrations, suppression of papers, etc.
‘Whoever calls such an uprising a “putsch” is either a hardened reactionary or a doctrinaire, who is hopelessly incapable of picturing to himself a social revolution as a living phenomenon.’
The verdict of the Irish masses was to vindicate Lenin. In the general election of 1918, Sinn Fein,the Republican party, won 73 seats out of 105.
Out of 84 seats contested, the Green Tories who had opposed 1916 won only six; the counter-revolutionary Unionists won 26. Elsewhere the opponents of the struggle and supporters of the imperialist war went down before a hurricane of popular indignation.
The death of Connolly and his failure to construct even the embryo of a revolutionary party, allowed the ruling class to dominate the national upsurge which followed.
The betrayal of the fight for freedom in the compromise of 1922 flows logically from the success of the bourgeoisie in gaining control of the movement, likewise all the subsequent betrayals.
The Irish working class is the only true inheritor of 1916. It must complete the struggle.
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I heard about Connolly when I was a kid. |
1. The paper that published Radek’s article was actually called the Berner Tagewacht.
Last updated: 15 January 2021