69 Facts About James Connolly

James Connolly was a Scottish-born Irish republican, socialist, and trade union leader, executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland.

James Connolly remains an important figure both for the Irish labour movement and for Irish republicanism.

James Connolly became an active socialist in Scotland, where he had been born in 1868 to Irish parents.

Alongside Patrick Pearse, James Connolly commanded the insurrection in Easter of that year from rebel garrison holding Dublin's General Post Office.

James Connolly 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.

James Connolly was born in the Cowgate or "Little Ireland" district of Edinburgh in 1868, the third son of Mary McGinn and John James Connolly, a labourer, both Irish immigrants his mother from Ballymena, County Antrim and his father from County Monaghan.

James Connolly spoke with a Scottish accent his entire life.

Greaves reports that James Connolly reminisced about being on military guard duty in Cork Harbour on the night in December 1882 when Maolra Seoighe was hanged for the Maamtrasna massacre.

In Dublin, James Connolly had met Lillie Reynolds, and in the New Year, 1890, she followed him to Scotland where, with special dispensation they married in a Catholic church.

Again following in the example of his brother John, in 1890 James Connolly joined the Scottish Socialist Federation, succeeding his brother as its secretary in 1893.

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, James Connolly considered a future for his family in Chile.

In September 1902, at the invitation of De Leon's Socialist Labor Party, James Connolly departed for a four-month lecture tour of the United States.

On his return, James Connolly had his resignation from the IRSP accepted without demur.

James Connolly returned to Scotland for the Social Democratic Federation, where, after witnessing the organisation's expulsion of "De Leonists", he decided on a future in America.

Under the influence of the IWW, a "mass movement, whose militancy was unequalled", James Connolly began to turn away from what was an "unashamedly vanguard party".

Four years later, James Connolly succeeded in bringing dockers out in sympathy with striking cross-channel seamen, and in the process to secure a pay increase.

ITGWU membership grew, and James Connolly was approached by women toiling in Belfast's largest industry, linen.

In June 1913, while claiming that "the ranks of the Irish Textile Workers' Union are being recruited by hundreds", with Carney, James Connolly produced a Manifesto to the Linen Slaves of Belfast.

James Connolly had to find some "corner of the Catholic ghetto outside the political preserve of Joseph Devlin MP".

Early in the conflict James Connolly freed himself from police detention through a week-long hunger strike, a tactic borrowed from the British suffragettes.

James Connolly, who had been wary from the first, cancelled the scheme, but nonetheless sought to score a point against the clericalist opposition by telling his people to ask the archbishop and priests for food and clothing.

James Connolly's departure left Connolly, in charge not only of the ITGWU with its headquarters at Liberty Hall, but of a workers' militia.

When it became apparent that James Connolly was gravitating towards an IRB strategy of cooperation with the Volunteers, O'Casey and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, the Vice President, resigned, leaving James Connolly in undisputed command.

In October 1914, James Connolly assumed the presidency of the Irish Neutrality League, but not as a pacifist.

James Connolly was urging active opposition to the war, which he labeled "fratricidal slaughter", and acknowledged that the opposition must amount to "more than a transport strike".

In December, the Irish Worker was suppressed and in May 1915 James Connolly revived his old ISRP title, Workers' Republic.

James Connolly cautioned that those who oppose conscription "take their lives in their hands".

James Connolly was aware of, but not privy to, discussions within the IRB on prospects for a national rising.

James Connolly was conscious that his new allies had, for the most part, been silent during the lock-out in 1913.

On 14 April 1916, James Connolly summoned Winifred Carney to Dublin where she prepared his mobilisation orders for the Irish Citizen Army.

Ten days later, on Easter Monday, with James Connolly commissioned by the IRB Military Council as Commandant of the Dublin Districts, they set out for the General Post Office with an initial garrison party from Liberty Hall.

James Connolly had contributed to the final draft, which declared "the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland" and, in a phrase that he had often been used, a "resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts".

James Connolly was among 16 republican prisoners executed for their role in the Rising.

Unable to stand because of his wounds, James Connolly had been placed before a firing squad tied to a chair.

James Connolly's body was placed, without rite or coffin, with those of his comrades in a common grave at the Arbour Hill military cemetery.

James Connolly is said to have returned to the Catholic Church in the few days before his execution.

James Connolly favoured industrial unionism as the method of approach to what he called variously, the Workers' Republic, the Irish Socialist Republic, the Co-operative State, the Democratic Co-operative Commonwealth.

The night before he was shot, James Connolly said to his daughter Nora: "The Socialists will not understand why I am here; they forget I am an Irishman".

Some of James Connolly's contemporaries suggested that there was no inconsistency: James Connolly's socialism was itself merely a form of militant nationalism.

Greaves proposed that with the onset of the European war, James Connolly's thought had run "parallel with Lenin's"; and reached the same conclusion: "Whoever wishes a durable and democratic peace must be for civil war against the governments and the bourgeoisie".

Greaves is the source for James Connolly's oft-quoted "hold on to your rifles" admonition to his ICA volunteers, which might suggest that James Connolly did see the Easter Rising as the prelude to this larger revolutionary struggle.

James Connolly was concerned, rather, with their quiescence in the war against Germany.

Lenin had praise for De Leon's contribution to socialist thought, but James Connolly broke with De Leon precisely on the issue of industrial unionism.

In 1908, James Connolly accused De Leon of knocking "the feet from under" his party's alliance with the IWW by arguing that, as prices rise with wages, the gains the union secures for labour are only nominal.

Since it suggests that within capitalism there is no prospect of the working class improving its position, James Connolly allowed that the "theory that a rise in prices always destroys the value of a rise in wages" sounds "revolutionary", but maintained that it was not Marxist and not true.

James Connolly made no attempt, prior to or during the Rising, to appeal to workers to join the insurgency.

At the beginning of 1916, James Connolly drew "a crucial distinction between the struggle for socialism and for national liberation".

James Connolly's calculation was not based alone on the strategic opportunity presented by Britain's engagement with Germany.

James Connolly had described John Redmond's pact with the government as "the most gigantic, deep-laid and loathsome attempt in history to betray the soul of a people".

In Erin's Hope, James Connolly had claimed that socialists would succeed where the Fenians, and the Young Irelanders before them, had failed, in preparing "the public mind for revolution".

James Connolly embraced "the conception of revolution that prevailed in the inner circles of the IRB: that a small minority must be prepared to sacrifice itself in order to save the soul of the nation".

In Erin's Hope, in Labour in Irish History and again in The Reconquest of Ireland, James Connolly had reinforced his conviction that socialism was Ireland's national destiny by characterising it as a "re-conversion" to the collectivism of the country's Gaelic and agrarian past.

Apart from what he may have witnessed as a soldier, James Connolly's only sustained experience of rural Ireland was three weeks spent in County Kerry in 1898 reporting on famine conditions for De Leon's Weekly People.

Unmoved by what James Connolly supposed was their "memory of the common ownership and common control of land by their ancestors", it was a status they would defend it with tenacity.

James Connolly replied that the only true socialist internationalism lay in a "free federation of free peoples".

Already, in 1913, in series strikes in Belfast and Larne, James Connolly saw evidence of Protestant workers returning to the class struggle.

James Connolly confidently predicted that suspicion of their Catholic fellow workers would "melt and dissolve", and that their children would come to laugh at the Ulster Covenant.

James Connolly argued that Irish Catholics could in all conscience reject their bishops' dealings with the British authorities, and proposed that Irish schools be free of church control.

James Connolly noted, for example, that the "enormous increase of divorces [in the United States] was almost entirely among the classes least affected by Socialist teaching".

In either case, James Connolly believed it was an unnecessary and strategic mistake for socialists to risk popular support by deliberately outraging religious opinion.

James Connolly had supported the Suffragette movement, and worked alongside women in the labour movement.

James Connolly sharply criticised the overtly anti-semitic tone of the British Social Democratic Federation's publications during the Boer War, arguing that they had attempted to "divert the wrath of the advanced workers from the capitalists to the Jews".

James Connolly married a Hugh Ward in Naas and had five children.

James Connolly was a founding member in the United States of the National Association for Irish Justice which, in 1969, gained recognition as the US support group for the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.

Connolly's great grandson, James Connolly Heron, has edited a compilation of his papers, and is active in the campaign to preserve the historical integrity of Moore Street, where Connolly and Pearse took their final stand in 1916.

James Connolly did not make public appearances but when she died in 1938 she was accorded a state funeral.

In 1996, a bronze statue of James Connolly, backed by the symbol of the Starry Plough, was erected outside the Liberty Hall offices of the SIPTU trade union, in Dublin.

In 1986, a bust of James Connolly was erected in Riverfront Park in Troy, New York, where he had lived on first emigrating to the United States in 1904.

In 2008, a full-figure bronze of James Connolly was installed in Union Park, Chicago near the offices of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers.