T.J. O’Flaherty was an Irish speaker from the Aran Isles and editor of the Irish People, Daily Worker, and Labor Defender.

‘Murder of a Revolutionist’ by Tomás Ó Flaithearta from The Daily Worker Saturday Supplement. Vol. 4 No. 104. May 14, 1927.

IT is now eleven years since James Connolly, military leader of the Easter Week rebellion of 1916 was taken out on a stretcher from a prison hospital, propped up against a wall and pumped full of lead from the guns of a British firing squad.

James Connolly, commander of the Irish Citizen Army, the military arm of the Dublin trade union movement, was the dynamic force behind the revolt that shook the mighty empire to her base at a time when her mercenaries were scurrying in retreat before the gray hosts of the Kaiser in Belgium and Flanders.

James Connolly could see no distinction between the two brands of democracy purveyed by the British and German governments and when the militarists sounded the war bugles in 1914, instead of burying his principles and deserting his socialist program as was done by the renegades in England and on the continent, he called on the workers to fight neither for British king nor German Kaiser but to fight—if they must fight—to save their own firesides from their historical enemy, to keep the food they produced for the use of their own people and to prevent the flower of their manhood from being turned into dust on the battlefields of Europe, so that a putrid empire, bloated with the blood of millions of subject peoples might survive the gruelling strain of war.

James Connolly, the son of a proletarian father, was born in the County Monaghan, Ireland. He was obliged to work at such an early age that he had to lie his way past the authorities charged with the enforcement of a child labor law. He was a rebel by inheritance and by nature. From the time he was old enough to make a public speech he was an active rebel and took an active part in the class struggle in Scotland, England, Wales and in the United States. But his heart was always drawn towards Ireland, the land of his birth and to the people whose moods he best understood. During the years of his exile in the United States he never lost touch with the revolutionary Nationalist and labor movements in Ireland. Always a practical revolutionist in the truest sense of the word he did not permit his knowledge of Marxist economics to excuse him from participating in the Nationalist struggle against the British Empire, as was done by others, who looked on the great rebel founder of modern socialism as a dried-up research worker interested only in facts, figures and theories and not the untiring warrior who never let slip an opportunity to put in a blow for the workers or to find some way of rousing them to struggle against the capitalist enemy.

Connolly labored effectively in the socialist movement in the United States. He was in at the founding of the I.W.W. and served that organization in the capacity of organizer. A tireless propagandist, he was constantly on the platform. His pen was always at the service of the cause. The extreme poverty in which his family lived did not swerve him from the only purpose in life that he considered worth a wrinkle of his brow.

Connolly was invited to return to Ireland by some of his old comrades shortly after the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union was organized under the leadership of Jim Larkin. When Larkin left for his speaking tour in the United States, which was prolonged beyond his expectations—he was eight and a half years here, part of the time as a guest of Governor Alfred E. Smith in the Sing Sing penitentiary for his association with the Communist movement—Connolly took active charge of the affairs of the Transport Union and from then on the headquarters of that organization became also the headquarters of the revolutionary preparations against British rule in Ireland.

In 1916 the Nationalist movement, split by the traitor John Redmond, who played the same role in Ireland that Chiang Kai Shek is now playing In China, was deplorably weak for the task that confronted it. Outside of Connolly and his associates in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the petty bourgeois Nationalist leaders who spouted about Home Rule in the British House of Commons never had any intention of resorting to physical force. The arming and drilling that went on from the time Sir Edward Carson and the present Lord Birkenhead imported arms from Germany to equip their cohorts to fight Home Rule, was to those playboys a chance to show off their excessive patriotism to the voters but when the time for action arrived they withdrew into the caverns of constitutionalism. This is a good place to draw attention to the monumental hypocrisy of the British government of the day—a liberal government under the premiership of that arch-fraud Asquith. The Irish Home Rule bill was on the statute book and signed by the king. But the Ulster reactionaries backed by the Tory party in England bluntly told the British government to go to hell and with arms imported from Germany proceeded to make good their threat. And the British government which is so mightily exorcised over the revolts of its subject peoples in India, Egypt and Africa permitted Carson and Birkenhead to go their rebellious ways flouting the government. For raising the banner of revolt against British imperialism two years later James Connolly, Padraic Pearse and many other Nationalist leaders were brutally murdered by the same government that honored Carson and Birkenhead with positions among the highest in the land.

When the shipload of arms sent by the German government to Ireland was seized off the coast of Kerry by a British cruiser, as a result of information supplied to the British government by the United States secret service, several of the leaders of the Irish revolutionary organization planning the revolt were in favor of calling off the rising. Connolly was determined that a blow would be struck; that even tho the attempt was doomed to temporary failure the time was ripe and the consequences of the event would have repercussions on an international scale. Connolly’s determination carried the day and the forces of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Citizen Army, a mere handful, hoisted the flag of rebellion on Easter Sunday and challenged the power of the mightiest empire that the history of the human was able to record until then. One thousand volunteer soldiers against millions!

The battle was short and swift. British gun boats shelled Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the revolutionists, British troops were brought from concentration camps, the city was bombarded and partially destroyed and after a heroic struggle that lasted seven days the survivors of the revolutionary army made terms with the perfidious enemy who violated his word as soon as the rebels laid down their arms.

Connolly was the last of the seven signers of the proclamation of the Irish Republic to be executed. And the Irish workers will not forget that an Irish capitalist newspaper, The Irish Independent, a “supporter” of the nationalist cause, reminded the British government two days before the execution that Connolly and Seam Mac Dermot were still living. Neither will they forget that Arthur Henderson, secretary of the British Labor Party, then a member of the Asquith coalition government, never protested against the reign of terror that was let loose by his government in Ireland and particularly against the execution of James Connolly, who, with Henderson, was a member of the Second International, that putrid fraud which today as in 1914 is busily engaged betraying the workers and stiffening the backbone of world imperialism.

The Irish labor movement for which Connolly shed his heart’s blood has not followed the path he mapped out for it. It is caught in the net of reformism like the labor movements of the rest of the world. Men who fought with Connolly in the early days of the socialist movement in Ireland have grown old and weary and are content to leave the political leadership of the official labor movement in the hands of men who would feel more at home in the company of the British MacDonalds. Thomases and Snowdens than in the company of the Connollys, Lenins, Liebknechts and Luxembergs.

A virile and militant minority movement such as has been thrown up in England due to the rapid decline of British imperialism and to the guidance and encouragement of the Communist Party, has not yet made its appearance in Ireland. Only a few scattered and disunited groups swear allegiance to the Communist cause. The defeat of the nationalist movement thru the treachery of those who accepted a fake Free State in lieu of a republic and because of the overwhelming power of Great Britain spread demoralization in the ranks of the labor movement. But there are signs of an awakening. And on the eleventh anniversary of the execution of Ireland’s greatest proletarian son, James Connolly, we permit ourselves the luxury of predicting that before the next anniversary comes around that the radical wing of Irish labor will get together under the leadership of the Communist International and in conjunction with the progressive elements in the republican nationalist movement, organize for the final overthrow of British imperialism in Ireland and the abolition of Irish capitalism as well.’

The Saturday Supplement, later changed to a Sunday Supplement, of the Daily Worker was a place for longer articles with debate, international focus, literature, and documents presented. The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1927/v4n104-may-14-1927-TNM-DW.pdf