 James Connolyd yn ond, mae'n gwneud 155 yr ysgol ar y bydd yma ar 1868, a mae'n ddim yn oed yn dda i'r ymdano i'r hunan yn ystod. Mae'n 16 oed yn yr ymdano i'r ymdano i'r ymdano i Brithwyr yn cymryd. A'r Lennon yn ystod, rydyn ni'n fath o gweithio'n gweithio'n gwrthodd ymddangos ar y llyw o'r fath, .. a, ond, yma, yw'n cant i ddweud yr hyn yn ei ddeithas. Ac mae'n ceisio i James Connolly yma. Mae'n dweud yn gweld llawer o ddeithas... .. o bwrth gwrs, o ddod, sympath. O bwrth sympath, yma. Mae'n dweud yn ymwybod a'u dweud o'r lleol... .. mae'n gwybod hyn yn y bwyd... .. mae'n dweud o'r wybod bwyd. Mae'n grwmp othen yma yma a'r weech... .. eiswyd agurio, oedd, oedd, oedd... ac yn ymwneud y bydd y sgol. Felly, mae'n gofyn i gyd yn ymwyntio'r wath. Felly, mae'n gweithio ym 1868, oherwydd, yn Calgate, yn Edinburgh, yn ysgol i fynd i'r awrthau virus, yn ysgol i'r ardal, yn ysgol i'r ardal yn ysgol i'r ardal, mae'r frysgau'r ardal yn ymwyno i'r carter, ac mae'n gweithio'r ardal i'r amser o'r edrych, oherwydd o'r edrych ffordd. Mae'n gweithio'r sgol o'r 10 o 11, a dwi'n mynd i'r ei wneud i'r hoffa o dod o'r 11 yr adrodd 14. Fy hoffa i'r hyfforddiad yng Nghymru. Ond, y cwlau yn gyffredinol yn ysgrifiannol i'r hyfforddiad, yn Marksys, a'n mynd i'r hoffa o'r hoffa o'r hoffa, yn ffwrdd, mae hwn yn dweud o'r cynhyrchu a'r arddangoddegol o'r ddod o'r hyfforddiad ac yn llyfr. Rhywodd, mae'r hoffa o'r hoffa o'r hoffad o'r hoffa, S Deshalb, mae'n dweud o'r hwysio'r complex, a'r age of 14, ond dyna'i'n mynd i ymddai os yng Ngomroed dweud ac sefydlu'r Parae Brifes, dweud gweld i'r pwysig o'r hyffordi ar y dynod o yma, gweld i ddweud o'r awrfer y taith gyntaf o'r iawn, os yw o'r awrfer, i gyrmwys i ddweud o'r awrfer o'r awrfer o'r Cynyddu agofiant, i hynny sefydlu'r yma, Even of his years at the age of 14 would have been a revolutionary Irish nationalist because of these events which were radicalising the Irish population. But actually it's not a contradiction really. A lot of young Irishmen at that time would have joined the British Army precisely to learn how to use a gun with the intention of one day turning it on the British Empire itself. It was a fact that the Liverpool regiment that he joined they actually kept the guns and ammunition under lock and key because they didn't actually trust the majority of Irishmen who were in that regiment. And it was as part of the British army that he went to Ireland for the first time. He went to various parts of Ireland he ended up in Dublin and he would have met the Irish workers for the first time, gone to socialist meetings and that's also where he met his future wife Lillie Reynolds. yw'r cyfnodau oedd yma sy'n raddicolol wedi bod yn ystod yn cyfnodd ac yn ystod yn ystod yng nghymru yng Nghymru, a'r clywed y clywedau a'r clywedau i'w gynnyddio, rydym wedi bod yn gwneud o'n amlwgau yn y tŷ o Cynulliad Cynulliad Cynulliad Cynulliad, a'r ysgawdd ym ni'n gyngor, yn gwybod y cysylltiadol. Cynulliad Cynulliad Cynulliad Cynulliad yn ystod, os wrth hyn yn ei gwaith, mae'r byw yn bwyr mewn i'r gweithio bryd yn bwyr, mae'r byw yn bwyr o'r economiaf, lle yn ddiolch yn llafodol yn y lle. Mae'r byw yn bwyr yn bwyr, mae'n bwyr o'r byw yn bwyr o'r byw. Mae'n golygu o'n sesio ar y byw y Rhyw Llywodraeth, ac mae'n partad hon yn gweithio'r gweithio yma yn y fawr iawn. Mae gweithio'r byw yn gweithio'r gweithio ar y byw yn bwyr, island which started from the Norman conquest and this was not simply a national imposition it was not simply the imposition of political rule over island but you had the imposition of a new set of property relations of feudal and capitalist property relations upon island which previously existed in a you had forms of primitive communism existing in islands until very late in the historical record but yeah so you had this the imposition of these absentee landlords and the majority of the population were dispossessed and one thing to always understand the persistence of the Irish question the national question in island comes down to the fact that the connection with England was always a source of backwardness for islands this is one of the most important things particularly since 1801 with the union you had Irish industry in Cyprian Irish industry was crushed by competition from British imports except for a little bit in in the north around Belfast you had a bit of linen industry shipbuilding and so forth for them up for the most part island was held in a condition of agricultural backwardness supplying the new manufacturing towns in in England and therefore the majority of people simply to survive had to hold on to the land and you had this subdivision of the land into tiny little parcels and this absentee landlord class that developed a system of rack renting where they took huge amounts of the produce but gave nothing back to island keeping it in this condition of backwardness and by the 60s and 70s by Connelly's youth nothing had fundamentally changed really you still have this absentee landlord class but the world market was making itself more and more felt upon Irish agriculture competition from Argentina the United States was pushing down food prices but these rents were still being extracted and the the tenant farmers were unable to pay the rent so you had the explosion of class war in the 1870s on the countryside in Ireland the organisation of the land league under people like Michael David and Charles Stuart Parnell who yeah and you had this real intense period of class war where the the tenant farmers and the labourers were involved in withholding rent refusing to hand over agricultural produce and boycotting the most vile landlords and so forth in fact the word boycott actually comes from this period and yeah and yet the leadership of course was under middle class leadership basically people like Parnell and the Irish party were basically demanding they were demanding land acts and they were demanding some form of home rule some sort of Irish parliament and the liberal government at the time were completely unable to crush this movement and therefore they were forced to use they used all sorts of oppression Parnell was thrown in prison but Gladstone's government had to go negotiate him whilst with him whilst he was being held in Kilmaine and prison and he agreed he made a massive mistake he agreed to call off the land war and diverted the struggle into parliamentary means he was given all sorts of promises about a land act and a home rule bill but it was completely of course betrayed by the by the liberals and in fact the liberals went even further and using a really hypocritical pretext they demanded of the Irish party because of some scandal involving Parnell that they get rid of their leader they get rid of Parnell basically and they obliged the parliamentarians obliged they got rid of Parnell at the beckon call of the of the ruling class in Britain basically they betrayed their own leader if you like so this was these are the sort of events which would have been forming Connolly's consciousness intense class war coming under a middle class leadership and the middle class leadership itself betraying the movement and yeah so um yeah i have to be a little bit telegraphic here but in 1889 Connolly goes AWOL actually he leaves the the British army and he returns to to Scotland eventually making his way to Edinburgh and bringing his family over and he meets a guy called John Leslie and John Leslie for the first time induces him into the Marxist movement he wrote a wonderful little pamphlet actually on the Irish question and you can see the influence of this man on Connolly's ideas um and yeah Connolly really absorbed Marxist ideas into his into into his flesh really um now i don't have much time to really go into his his this period of his life but he uh he quickly became the centre of the Marxist movement the Scottish Socialist Federation in Edinburgh and also the independent Labour Party he stood in elections and he found himself victimised um and struggling to support his family he basically decided to go full time for the movement at this point and an advert was put out in justice the the Marxist paper in Britain and he was delighted to get a response uh from the Dublin Socialist Society actually got back in touch with him it was mostly an organisation a small organisation based in Dublin asked him to come over and turn their little group into a serious revolutionary organisation uh something he was delighted obviously to do so he he went over to Dublin with his family and he founded through a process of discussion um he he won over these young people to his own outlook if you like on the the the relationship between the national question and the class question and founded out of these discussions a new party called the Irish Socialist Republican Party and this party represents an absolute it's an absolutely unique party in Irish history up until this point um because all previous parties have basically seen the national struggle the struggle for self-determination in Ireland and the the class struggle the struggle for socialism um as basically two fundamentally separate and different struggles if you like uh all previous parties have essentially done this and Connolly not only um if you like fuse these two things he actually analysed the reasons if you like that these things had become radically separated and he showed it was the it was the role the historical role of the the middle class basically in Ireland the role that it had played uh caused this situation to develop and uh i'll quote from a number of articles here this is from erin's hope which was a collection of articles written in the 1890s where he explains this situation he says that the the Irish middle class uh by virtue of their social position and education stepped to the front as Irish patriot leaders they owed their wealth to the manner in which they had contrived to wedge themselves into a place in the commercial life of the Saxon enemy assimilating his ideas and adopting his methods so he showed how the Irish capitalist class really uh simply always really just formed a cog in the in the greater machine of British capitalism it was extremely dependent upon British capitalism um and then he goes on that uh their political influence they derived from their readiness at all times to do lip service to the cause of Irish nationality which in their phraseology meant simply the transfer of the seat of government from London to Dublin and the consequent transfer to their own or their relatives pockets of some portion of the legislative fees and lawyers pickings so he shows that really the basis of the nationalism if you like of the middle class in Ireland was a really just to sort of gain for themselves certain of the privileges which which or were currently with the British capitalist class that it was for that reason alone that they were uh um or for sentimental purely sentimental reasons that they sort of adopted nationalism and took up the leadership of the national struggle and he concludes with such men at the helm it is no wonder that the patriot parties of Ireland have always ended their journey upon the rocks of disaster the rock of disaster so you can see that what is being described here is uh a weakened dependent bourgeoisie dependence upon British capitalism uh which is unable to really carry out the basic bourgeois democratic tasks such as land reform such as protective barriers to protect Irish industry which would have been the consequence of a serious struggle for national self-determination and in in this what he what what he's doing Connelly is he's foreshadowing actually conclusions which were much broader really but the same fundamental conclusions that were made by Trotsky 10 years later in his writings on the the theory of the permanent revolution in the context of Russian capitalism talking about how that took there too you had a week and dependent bourgeoisie dependence upon international finance capital again particularly French finance capital and who were prepared to sort of come to a compromise with the old ruling class with the aristocracy with the landlords and so forth and were not capable of carrying on a consistent struggle for the rights of the nations to self-determination for democracy for the real basic the capitalist development of the country which the capitalist class in other countries had had achieved in in the the great bourgeois revolutions in previous periods but he makes this even more explicit in some of his later writings so this is from the introduction of uh to uh labor in Irish history Connelly says that the development of the system of capitalist society leads inevitably to the increase in conservatism of the non-working class element and so the revolutionary vigor and power of the working class so he also points out another element here this is in 1910 you'll see the context of this later on which is that the as as the as capitalism develops and it develops a revolutionary working class the capitalist class has another reason to step back from a serious struggle uh for you know away from its sort of um from revolution if you like and become increasingly conservative and he goes on that the middle class growing up in the midst of the national struggle and at one time as in 1798 he's referring to the united irishman uprising led by wolf tone uh through the stress of the economic rivalry of england almost forced into the position of revolutionary leaders against the political despotism of their industrial competitors have now also bowed the knee to Baal and have a thousand economic strings in the shape of investments binding them to english capitalism as against every sentimental or historic attachment drawing them towards a irish patriotism and he concludes importantly only the irish working class remain as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in ireland so he sees that if the as the bourgeoisie have been completely reactionary um it is left to the working class to carry on the struggle not just for social demands not just for economic betterment of the working class but against every form of national humiliation for every democratic right that has yet to be won that the bourgeoisie of having abdicated that struggle but he goes he explains uh and and similarly uh with uh trotski if you like that the working class isn't simply going to stop at the creation of a of a capitalist republic if you like it's going to go on to complete uh the socialist revolution and therefore he raises the slogan of a socialist republic of a workers republic and again this is a once more from the 1890s uh in in a famous article called socialism and nationalism he makes this explicit he says that if you remove the english army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over doubling castle unless you set about the organisation of the socialist republic your efforts will 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 so yeah um the problem was at this time however the majority of socialist parties up until this point had not connected the need for a revolutionary party of the working class to fight for both the socialist tasks and these democratic tasks and to take up the question the mantle of the fight for national self-determination which was a key task um and uh in fact they for the most part saw this as a concession to nationalism if you like and most parties at this time uh that were present in island socialist parties were connected to their british counterparts like the independent labour party in the social democratic federation and um yeah this was in this was in spite of the fact that uh uh marks and engels in fact had taken up the question of the need for irish uh independence and they had done so not from the point of view obviously of irish nationalism but from the point of view of the interests of the world revolution and from the interests of the socialist revolution and they laid out a number of reasons why it was necessary for socialists particularly in britain to defend the right of self-determination for the irish people on the one hand they would they saw that a strike for self-determination in ireland would mean uh an agricultural revolution and the death of landlordism in ireland which would inevitably mean the death of landlordism in britain and death and and would start would be the beginning really of a socialist the socialist revolution in england um but they also saw uh that it would clear the decks if you like of all of the national prejudice and hatred which had been stirred up as a result of the enforced possession of ireland by uh by britain um because as you had seen with with the one of the only places to go for the impoverished irish people was to emigrate and you had a large amount of emigration particularly to britain and in every city you had a little island you had a an irish working class alongside the english workers and this this continued connection with ireland was a deep source obviously of tremendous animosities and the bourgeoisie knew how to use this to divide the english and the irish working class and therefore marx and engels uh raised uh the the necessity of uh separation uh possibly uh followed by federation down the line but um yeah and in this lenin argued along very similar lines in connection to to russia um and he pointed out that and in a lot of polemics such as for example his polemics with rosa luxenberg who was an honest revolutionary and was struggling against polish nationalism in particular but in that struggle she went too far in the struggle against polish nationalism she denied the needs for the particularly the russian party to take up the question of the right of nations to self-determination and uh lenin explains that as as well as the the nationalism of the small oppressed nation there is also another nationalism if you like which almost is hidden um is or is under the sort of false flag of internationalism it is possible to slip into the position of defending a far more reactionary nationalism that is the nationalism of the oppressor nation the big nation of russia over poland in the case where lenin was polemicising with rosa luxenberg but in the case of a lot of british socialists in arguing against connelly's position they were really defending the forced um connection between england and island and really were defending the position of british imperialism essentially um and uh yeah so however i mean from the point of view of the irish socialist republican party the proof of the pudding was in the eating uh this was uh this party had a massive impact despite the fact it was almost entirely a youth organisation it never had more than 100 members but it had a high political level under connelly's leadership and it had a tremendous impact within the island in the jubilee protests against the jubilee queen victoria's jubilee it shot actually to international fame by organizing protests of thousands of people through dublin it participated in the bore war protests and even as a byproduct you had after parnel the irish party had fallen apart the bourgeois nationalist seeing the rise of the irish socialist republican party were forced to sort of fuse their ranks again and formed under the leadership of john redmond the the irish parliamentary party almost in fear and there's this constant thing this is a recurring theme of the of the bourgeois nationalist the constitutional nationalist losing the leadership of the national struggle to more radical elements to the working class elements if you like this was something that spurred them on now connelly of course was an internationalist and he was tremendously proud of the fact that in 1900 the irish working class for the first time was represented at an international congress by the delegates of the isrp but what he saw there was a split down the middle of the world working class movement at the paris conference and a split between reform and revolution between the genuine marxist elements and those moving in the direction of opportunism and connelly and the irish party were always on the left of the international and in fact it was in part to take up the struggle against opportunism that connelly first went on a speaking tour in britain and later in america and eventually he moved to america for seven years between 1903 and 1910 obviously i'm not going to be able to go into everything that happened in the course of those seven years sadly um rather i'll speak about what was going on in ireland whilst he was away this time in ireland um the period whilst connelly was away was a period of intense class struggle um the beginning of which was heralded by the the arrival of jim larkin in belfast uh who went over there sent over by the national union of dock labourers to organise the the unorganised workers there and larkin very quickly organised hundreds of dockers and brought them out on strike and unlike a lot of the more conservative british trade union leaders he took every spark of discontent and deliberately whipped it up into a huge firestorm through the means of the sympathetic strike bringing one section of workers after another out in solidarity with each other taking any grievance to sort of really intensify the class struggle and he terrified larkinism as it was called terrified the the irish ruling class who began to use the the sectarian cards that was there that was what they used to basically try and divide the working class along religious lines but they failed at this time in belfast in 1907 when you had this great strike in fact it was it was themselves who found themselves split the ruling class and their their organizations in connelly sorry not connelly larkin even managed to get the police to come out on strike and mutiny so it really struck terror into the hearts of the of the ruling class and obviously connelly was in america looking at these events going on and was desperate to really return to the scene of the fight essentially now the the the struggling belfast at the end of the day was sold out by the british trade union leaders basically this they went over the heads of larkin and the other workers in belfast and signed a deal with the bosses independently which infuriated larkin really embitted him and he founded the irish transport and general workers union as a result and this really starts a new chapter in the in the history of the irish working class and opens up a period really of intense class struggle in irelands and not just in irelands this is also a period of intense class struggle rising in britain the great unrest you have you have miners being shot in south wales you have strikes across britain and in ireland itself you have a huge explosive growth of the transport workers union in the in the in this period in 1911 it has 4 000 members by 1913 it has 300 000 members it's grown almost by 100 times over that's the that's the the the the degree to which everything is sort of been whipped up and the bosses are terrified and they begin organising they begin organising to to meet larkinism head on and to smash the transport workers union and so connelly returns in this context in 1910 and he goes he starts with a speaking tour for the socialist party of ireland which was founded by former members of the irish socialist republican party but yeah it's a very different it's a very different country in a lot of respects in in many of the places that he goes he finds himself being attacked by mobs that have been whipped up by local politicians local businessmen and groups like the ancient order of hebernians in other words a sort of catholic sectarianism you know they're attacking him as an atheist he's a he's a free thinker whenever he's in belfast he's a he's a catholic and so forth so he's obviously got nothing to do with religion it's a class question at the end of the day but the bosses you know the so-called nationalist progressive bourgeoisie here you show their real faces you know whipping up catholic sectarianism as the answer to sort of the protestant sectarianism that's been whipped up by the bosses in belfast and yeah he's met by these these sort of mobs in a number of places but yeah before the bourgeoisie really has time to have a showdown and with the transport workers union with the with the working class which increasingly Dublin's becoming the centre of the transport workers union the workers are organising to a greater and greater extent then a new crisis breaks out and a crisis which isn't altogether unconnected actually to the the growing class struggle in Ireland in this period because as I mentioned the towards the end of the 19th century with the declining importance of the if you like the the landlord class and the growing importance of finance capital the british ruling class decides to pass a number of land acts that basically pensioned off the old landlord class in in in islands and as a result they start moving in the direction of reform of granting reforms like home rule like the idea of an irish parliament and you have a home rule bill is passing through the parliament in 1912 but of course the context has now changed they're no longer able to grant reforms it becomes completely intolerable the idea of granting home rule to island in the context of a tremendous class struggle in islands and britain they could they see this as only I mean the possibility basically of a socialist revolution in islands and facing a socialist islands right next to their shores and therefore the ruling class begin preparing a rebellion against this home rule bill which looks like it's going to pass through parliament and the Tory parties at the vanguard of this rebellion against home rule they you have edward carson lord carson goes over to Ulster in the north and begins arming the Ulster volunteers basically a reactionary organisation much like the black hundreds in russia it's a lumpen organisation with aristocrats actually in the leadership and tens of thousands of the of the most backward layers in belfast are organised into this this Ulster volunteers and guns are imported in their tens of thousands to arm the to arm these groups meanwhile in reaction to this you have nationalist groups start to arm themselves then the liberal you know then the government comes down and stops arms imports into into islands but yeah you have a rebellion is being is being organised and at the cura you have a mutiny led by the tops of the army refusing to to obey the government basically and the liberal government at this time is softly is taking a very softly softly approach with this sort of mutiny by the by the the capitalist class basically so you see that the capitalist class always preach that the working class must follow constitutional norms must go through parliamentary means and so on but of course when it's a crisis which really affects their vital interests they showed as in 1912 1913 that they will they will use any unconstitutional non-constitutional extra parliamentary measures necessary but what was the response of this you know the nationalist bourgeoisie in in ireland what was the the nationalist middle class well john redmond actually started to go into negotiations directly with lord carston about the question of what they called home rule within home rule which basically meant a deal where uh carston and and you know the the the the bourgeoisie the unionist bourgeoisie in the north could could lord it over create a sectarian stateler if they want in the north and they can lord it over the the workers the workers there as long as the nationalist bourgeoisie in the south could lord it over the workers there basically in other words partitioning ireland this is what they began negotiating for and connelly said that this would this was a complete betrayal and the working class had to resist this even if it at the cost of their own lives because uh to partition ireland would mean a carnival of reaction in fact that has been the whole history of ireland since partition has been particularly in the north well two sectarian states were formed after the partition of ireland um but further more than this the the the nationalist bourgeoisie was starting to take advantage of the fact that you had pogroms in the north you had catholics being kicked out of their jobs and not just catholic trade unionists socialists were being kicked out of their jobs you had this general reaction in in belfast and the bosses in dublin began preparing to use the fact that the working class was on the defensive to strike their own blow and in august 1913 led by a the biggest capitalist really and a former nationalist mp william martin murphy 400 bosses in dublin locked out their workers um larkin was imprisoned and they they demanded of the workers that they resigned their membership of the transport workers union and 100 000 workers in their family were families were basically starved this was the methods of the bosses to starve the workers into submission to stop them from yet to break their organization and this really at this point connelly came down to dublin with larkin imprisoned to lead this struggle but this showed the real division uh within the you know the so-called nationalist camp because on the one hand you had you had the bosses uh you had armed scabs which were being brought over from britain to fight against the strikers and the pickets uh the the the upper echelons of the catholic church and many of the bourgeois the right-wing bourgeois nationalists like the likes of shin fein um leader arthegriffith and others like this uh and then of course the british state all in one camp and on the other side you had the transport workers union the working class of dublin and all of the the most revolutionary elements within the intelligentsia and the petty bourgeoisie um uh revolutionary the most revolutionary republicans began coming over to the side of connelly and the transport workers union and the side of the working class um and in in self-defence against these armed scabs you had for the first time the organization of the irish citizens army uh under the leadership of captain jack white i think it was and uh and james connelly um this was really a monumental step in in european working class history because it was the first time that you had the organization of a red guard uh anywhere as far as i can as far as i'm aware um workers arming themselves in self-defence against the the police against the uh the scabs that were being used by the bosses but ultimately the the thing went down to defeat um well i say a defeat uh the tuc in britain completely sabotaged the movement the only thing that could have made for a success of the on the side of the workers would have been if you'd have had sympathetic action in britain and indeed you had had spontaneous action uh in some among some of the dock workers in in birmingham i think some trans some railway workers refused to move irish goods and you had mass meetings i think there was something like 25 000 people came out to to a meeting in manchester um so the working class in britain showed tremendous instinctive class solidarity hundreds of thousands of pounds were raised to feed the starving uh people of working class of dublin and families even offered to take children into their homes to uh to look after these starving children um and the thing went down really to a stalemate though because the tuc refused to call coordinated action and the result was that uh whilst the bosses didn't get what they want um the working class uh began returning to you had a return to work by the start of 1914 um the transport workers union was uh bloody but unbowled um and so you'd had a stalemate essentially but at a tremendous cost for the working class uh incredible suffering that winter for the workers of dublin um but before long before you even have time to before the people even had time to draw breath a new crisis is starting to develop in europe of course um at the and in august 1914 you have the outbreak of the first world war um and uh a shocking situation because previously all of the leaders of the social democracy all the workers leaders across europe had promised to resist this war by any means necessary they'd all signed declarations and and so on and so forth and now you had the majority of the workers leaders were supporting this war uh in in germany uh the official social demo uh well we had a discussion on friday nights about that uh in france in one country after another only in a number of a small number of countries in in russia in syrbia and in islands did you have the leadership of the workers movement refusing to support their bourgeoisie uh in this bloody slaughter and connelly immediately understood the significance of this and was extremely embitted about this betrayal he said uh these are his words he says what then becomes of all our resolutions all our protests of fraternisation all our threats of general strikes all our carefully built machinery of internationalism all our hopes for the future were they all a sound and fury signifying nothing um but it wasn't just the leadership of the of the workers leaders if you like the betrayed you also had the the bourgeois nationalists uh the so-called uh the constitutional so-called nationalists people like john redmond and the home rule uh bourgeoisie uh also supporting britain in this war uh this this war for the self-determination of small nations like belgian with all their colonial possessions uh under the promise that if they did if they loyally supported the british empire during the war after the war they would get their independence and they would be rewarded for their uh civility not only that but redmond who'd managed to wangle his way into the leadership of the irish volunteers this nationalist force that had organised in to defend home rule against the austra volunteers um he even offered the service of the irish volunteers to go and fight in belgium actually and this resulted in a split in that organisation and the irish republican brotherhoods which was a revolutionary secretive organisation occupied the offices of the volunteers and the the organisation split about 15 000 went with the irish republican brotherhoods um but connolly as soon as he heard the news of the outbreak of the war it's incredible if you read his articles in august 1914 the conclusions he has already drawn he's already on the path to an insurrection against the british rule and against british capitalism um he already had drawn this conclusion within days of hearing about the outbreak of the war which placed connolly in a tiny in a camp of a tiny minority within the international workers movement a tiny minority who understood who were not just opposed to the war from pacifist reasons but knew that the only way to end the war was to turn it into a civil war was to basically turn it into a a class war uh and this was the same conclusion drawn by trotsky in vienna uh lenin in zeurich and a handful of other revolutionary genuine revolutionary internationalists and these are these are connolly's words he says this is in august 1914 i believe he says should the working class of euro rather than slaughter each other for the benefit of kings and financiers tomorrow proceed uh proceed tomorrow to erect barricades all over europe to break up bridges and destroy the transport service that war might be abolished we should be just perfectly justified in following such a glorious example and contributing our aid to the final dethroment of the vulture classes that rule and rob the world um but for him it wasn't just words he wasn't just uh i mean everyone was in in theory in favour of a revolution that brought an end to the war now even probably the official leaders of the social democracy in germany were probably in favour of it as long as you know as long as the uh the british workers started it or the russian workers started it if you like connolly wasn't simply a fatalist uh he he understood that it was the revolutionary duty of the irish working class and of the leadership of the irish working class to to act and act alone if necessary is words where the time for island's battle is now the place for island's battle is here and by such means he goes on island may yet set the torch to a european conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture will be shriveled on the funeral pyre of the last warlord um so you can see he has a he has a concept of a revolution in ireland uh that will bring an end to the war that will start the european wide revolution which is quite clearly a socialist revolution that's the content of it and connolly was uh extremely uh had a real sense of urgency about the need for this this uprising and uh you can see that where this stemmed from um connolly was very much aware of the possibility of striking too soon if if an interaction came too soon that it could fail but he'd also um he'd also studied irish history and he'd seen that in 1848 uh in 1882 uh in a number of occasions particularly under the middle class leadership you'd had situations where the the middle class leaders had talked and talked and talked and talked and then they had let slip a possibility to deliver a blow to british imperialism and that window would remain closed for another generation um and he saw that now that you had the war uh british imperialism was extremely exposed because its army was stretched all across the western front and there was an there was a limited window of opportunity to strike a blow and each day that passed uh saw um in uh saw uh if you like uh a real threat a real sword of damocles uh standing over the the working class particularly the threat of conscription um in ireland which was to come up again later but all all sorts of threats you have democratic rights that have been acquired over decades of struggle were being got rid of overnight um every day tens of thousands of socialist workers were slaughtering each other and then of course very ominously in ireland you have creeping prices going upwards and with the with the landlords having been pensioned off as i mentioned it wasn't going to be the tenant farmers now who would starve from a new famine it would be the irish working class that would starve the working class being the the class which has the future of humanity in its hands he saw that the future was one of socialism or barbarism basically and he could see the elements of barbarism in the situation so there was real there was a i mean what i'm trying to explain what i'm trying to get across is the reasons for this sense of urgency if you like gripping uh uh connelly um the only question was would the working class be ready for an insurrection would the working class be ready for a new uprising um now i want to address finally before coming on to the easter uprising itself one uh very uh pernicious uh distortion i think of connelly's ideas and this is something that the the the author of the best biography of of connelly that i'm aware of um c desmond grieves perpetuates the idea that he made um like an 11th hour conversion to a basically a conception of the uprising which was an uprising for a bourgeois republic basically and that he either converted to simple fhenian style republicanism or that he had become an unconscious Stalinist and was basically in favour of a a struggle for national self-determination first and then somewhere down the line uh you know the delay eventually you'd have a struggle for socialism when the conditions have matured the stages approach which is put across by uh uh Stalinists um well this is completely contradicted by any of uh if the the concept his conception of the of the revolution of the insurrection is it's contradicted by his writings all the way up until really you have the outbreak of the easter uprising um this is from january 1916 this is what he says uh in a in an article entitled what is our program which was aimed at the rank and file of the the uh the volunteers he said we realised that the power of the enemy to hurl his forces upon the forces of islands would lie at the mercy of the men who control the transport system of islands we saw that the hopes of island as a nation rested upon the due recognition of the identity of interest between that ideal and the rising hopes of labour um and uh yeah further further uh we have an explanation here of what had frustrated this possibility of such an insurrection and he blames he places the blame upon the so-called patriotic capitalist class uh the uh um you know the progressive bourgeoisie that the Stalinist would have exists he said that uh how do we not been attacked and betrayed by by many of our ffervent advanced patriots had they not been so anxious to destroy us so willing to applaud even the british government when it attacked us had they stood by us and pushed our organisation all over island it would now be in our it would now be in our power at a word to crumple and demoralise every offensive move of the enemy against the champions of irish freedom had we been able to carry out all of our plans as such an irish organisation of labour alone could carry them out we could at a word have created all the conditions necessary of striking a successful blow whenever the military arm of island wished to move now what is being described there in my opinion is an insurrection which is connected to a revolutionary general strike that is what connelly is basically talking about that that was his conception of of how an insurrection in ireland could take place um the problem was uh there are two factors which were not present at that time which are necessary for such an insurrection to be possible on that basis and they were on the one hand uh and this is something that is explained by trotsky and his history of the russian revolution there's a chapter on the art of insurrection and he says that you need to um on the one hand have an organisation which involves the mass of the workers basically brings them into the the mass element of the insurrection um such an organisation can't be brought into existence willy nilly uh it is the product of a revolutionary period itself uh soviets workers councils or or what have you um but it also what is also necessary is a party of the working class a revolutionary marxist organisation with educated marxist cadars at all level of the labour movement in the in in soviets or organizations like that within the unions within groups like the citizens army the transport workers union you would have needed a party like that to to coordinate basically the mass side of the insurrection and the conspiratorial military technical side of the insurrection if the two are to be harmonized and brought together as they were in the october insurrection in 1917 in russia there was only one problem with that and that was the fact that conley had no experience of the russian revolution because it didn't happen until a year and a bit later um it's very easy with with hindsight to explain how a successful insurrection can take place but what has to be understood is that the october revolution in russia was only possible on the basis of the failed 1905 revolution it was only but uh possible on the basis actually of innumerable attempts of uprisings insurrections i mean lenin talks about in left-wing communism how the bolshevism was the product of an unprecedented period of vast different experiences in in russia from 1903 to 1917 um the rapid alteration alternation between legal and illegal forms of work um and so on in other words this experience was absent for for conley he didn't have access to it and furthermore and this i think really increases his stature it doesn't diminish it all of the conclusions he drew on the national question the need for an insurrection uh the character of that insurrection were the product of his own independent creative thinking he had no contact with lenin with trotsky with rozerluxberg with the other great revolutionaries of europe of uh of the european marxist movement at that time and as a result uh he was he was forced therefore to uh to to compromise on on this uh this conception of an insurrection and to come to an agreement with the irish republican brotherhoods which had basically infiltrated the irish volunteers uh because they had far bigger forces he simply didn't have the forces to carry out this insurrection there were 300 members in the irish citizens army the the volunteers had um about 15 000 did i say 300 in the eyes yeah so they had about 15 000 members uh the problem was that this organisation did not have the same conception as conley of a of a politically prepared uh insurrection of a revolution they had a purely conspiratorial technique that it was a petty bourgeois organisation led by um you know very brave men uh people like patrick pierce josef blunkett and so forth um but they didn't have a clear class outlook a lot of their membership was working class but the the the class nature of the leadership was petty bourgeois uh and uh as such they had relied upon um uh yeah purely conspiratorial methods in fact after they had taken over the irish republican brotherhood took over the irish volunteers headquarters they deliberately left in place key moderates like oen mcneil at the leadership of this organisation to try and disguise the fact that they were preparing an insurrection by leaving these moderates in place but the the problem was not only might you disguise this from the british uh government you might disguise this from your own your own members uh from your potential allies people like conley who was actually preparing to go independently of the volunteers because he thought he thought that the irish republican brotherhoods were going to bottle it or make a botch of it um and therefore um yeah they left people like mcneil in the leadership of the irish volunteers which was a massive mistake um now the date of the uprising was set for east of sunday on nine in 1916 conley came to this agreement with the irish republican brotherhood but the problem was oen mcneil and other moderates were were eventually rumbled them but this that this conspiracy was in preparation and a countermanding order was sent which completely uh turned the thing into a disaster um it had a massive impact only a tenth of the irish volunteers came out one and a half thousand members came out uh they had to delay the uprising for a day monday the day after and there were other there were other unfortunate incidents there was a capture of arms that were being imported but nevertheless it was too late the thing had to go ahead because the arrests would have taken place and the thing would have been it would have been too late had they had they failed to strike and they did on on monday of east of week the the gpo uh became on o'connell street became the centre of the uh of the forces in dublin conley became the commandant of the forces in dublin and for six days they held out against the british forces i won't go into the technical details of the stir uprising uh the british were very were paralyzed at first uh but they eventually regrouped and uh they crushed the uprising a tremendous cost not just to the the the fighters but to dublin as a city was was turned was was set on fire um half of o'connell street was was was flattened the first building they they smashed was liberty hall the transport workers union headquarters and eventually after six days as I said the the revolutionaries had to surrender conley by this time had been mortally wounded he'd been hit in the uh in the ankle I believe and um um then uh at that time after the defeat of the these of the revolutionaries the the the the nationalist bourgeoisie were wholeheartedly on the side of the british cheering them on redmond the church all of the home rule press uh celebrated the british victory but very quickly they had to change their tune because the british were in for revenge at this point and they started a execution not just one or two of the leaders but uh one after another executing them executing them and then finally connelly himself was taken out already mortally wounded uh he was taken into a courtyard in kilmanum jail and he was strapped to a chair because he wasn't able to stand and uh he was shot dead and this this turned the mood of revulsion against against the british um but um yeah and uh and uh yeah that was uh as I say um now these events were misunderstood by a large number of people uh even so-called marxists people like plekinoff and raddeck uh in russia denounced these events as a putsch um and lenin had an answer for these people he it was at that point that he explains that uh you know unfortunately sorry to say but um when a crisis of capitalism emerges all of the different sources of rebellion aren't quite nice and harmonious enough to all go and flow into one stream all at once uh inevitably a period of revolution is uh is initiated by premature uprisings um and defeats setbacks um and he said that it's unfortunately revolutions don't happen where you have one army lines up over this side in favour of socialism another army lines up over that side in favour of imperialism and the two have it out and that's what a social revolution looks like he says such people pay lip service to socialist revolution um and when they don't even uh when they wouldn't know what it looked like if it bumped them on the nose that's not exactly what he said that's a paraphrase obviously um but as lenin explains the the real uh mis this is his this is what he said of the irish uprising he says it is the misfortune of the irish that they rose prematurely before the european revolt of the proletariat had come had had time to mature capitalism is not so harmoniously built that the various thought sources of rebellion can immediately merge of their own accord without reverses and defeats and that's precisely the the real um thing that was missing the working class or having had the stuffing knocked out of it in the Dublin uh lockout in 1913 it hadn't had time to recover its forces within a couple of years it had had time to recover its forces and there was a revolutionary movement exploded within islands you had in 1918 a massive general strike against the attempt to introduce conscription and a general election at which the irish parliamentary party was completely smashed um and shin fein rose uh on that basis why did shin fein uh managed to uh take the leadership if you like of the revolution in ireland it was because the labour leaders completely boycotted the election the leadership the second line uh and the third line of leadership within the labour movement in ireland was completely incapable of the task many of them were personally loyal to connelly but this was the biggest mistake i think of connelly's life was to to fail to build a bolshevik style party um of revolutionary cadres who could have led the working class in the socialist in a socialist revolution for which there was a huge potential in the period from 1919 through to 1922 instead the leadership fell to the petty bourgeois nationalist basically who diverted the whole thing into a guerrilla struggle and eventually it led with the betrayal and the partition of ireland into two sectarian states as i mentioned um so that uh that takes me over 50 minutes so i'm going to have to draw a line under that there uh there's plenty more that can be said but we can open it for a discussion now i think