On
Sunday the 28th, Lambhill Cemetery in Glasgow is to be the
scene of a wreath laying ceremony and commemoration for some of those who took part in Dubln's Easter Rising
rebellion and are buried in Glasgow. There may well be in addition to
Irish nationalists attending, some who call themselves socialists and
seek to remember the memory of James Connolly and the Irish Citizens Army. Let Socialist Courier disillusion you.
The
conditions for revolutionary action expressly did not
exist in 1916. They did not exist in Ireland and they did not exist
in Europe. In Ireland, the Citizen Army were only relatively few in
number. As a self-avowed Marxist, Connolly forgot that it takes the working class to change society, not a handful of individuals to
do it for them.
Connolly
used his charismatic authority as a party leader and a trade union
organiser, to drag his men behind him into an alliance with their
class enemies from only a few years earlier during the Dublin Lockout because his sights were set on action, no matter how
futile.
A
large section of the workers’ movement was destroyed and
into the vacuum stepped the nationalist opportunists, happy to lavish
praise Connolly, but even happier to divert the working class
struggle. Connolly had not fought for workers’ demands on the
question of hours of work, of wages, of factory conditions, or of
the ownership of the land and industry but for a purely nationalist
proclamation.
Those who advocate alliances between workers’
organisations and pro-capitalist political parties on the basis of
Connolly’s participation in the 1916 rising should heed the
consequences.
Post-war
Ireland saw the Limerick Soviet in the south and, in the north, the
Belfast 40-Hour Strike where “Bolsheviks and Sinn Feiners” were
leading astray many “good loyalist protestants” to the dismay of
the Orange Lodge, where the composition of the strike committee was a
majority of Protestant, but the chairman was a Catholic. Sectarianism
was being challenged. Working class militancy had entered the
Shankill Road and Sandy Row. The National Union of Railwaymen in a
resolution at a conference in Belfast stated:“without complete
unity amongst the working classes, (we should not allow either
religious or political differences to prevent their emancipation)
which can be achieved through a great international brotherhood the
world over, no satisfactory progress could be made.”
Instead
of a James Connolly to make the most of this opportunity for working class
unity and solidarity, we had De Valera declaring his policy of “Labour must
wait”, the interests of the nation must come first (read “the
interests of the capitalists”). It was to be national unity, not
class unity. By pressing their interests the workers were said to be
“endangering” the unity of the republican forces! On the land
where the tenants were seizing the estates, they found themselves
being held back by Sinn Fein and the IRA, who even went to the
lengths of carrying out evictions in order to break the back of the
land-seizure movement.
The
labour movement and working-class unity were the real victims of the
1916 Dublin Easter Rising when James Connolly subordinated their class interests to
the nationalist interests of Ireland's aspiring capitalists.
In
“The Story of the Irish Citizen Army”, Sean O'Casey rightly
explains that, in participating in the 1916 insurrection, Connolly
was not acting as a socialist.
“Connolly
had stepped from the narrow by-way of Irish Socialism on to the
crowded highway of Irish Nationalism”.
He
gave “fixing on the frontage of Liberty Hall a scroll on which
was written ‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland’” as
an example of Connolly’s “determined attachment to the
principles enunciated by Sinn Fein and the Irish Volunteers, which
were, in many instances, directly contrary to his life-long teaching
of Socialism”.
As
a result, O’Casey went on, “Liberty Hall was no longer the
Headquarters of Irish Labour, but the centre of Irish disaffection”.
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| THE COST OF IRISH NATIONALISM |
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