Welcome to the James Connolly Foundation

A hundred years before I saw the light of morn,
In Edinburgh's Cowgate James Connolly was born.
The streets of Little Ireland were his home for many years,
from the West Port to St Mary's Street, you feel him very near.

Footsteps of James Connolly
Gerry Mulvenna

Other titles on page: 1. Relevance of James Connolly in Ireland today by George Gilmore

2. Culture, Class, and Connolly by Terry Eagleton

By Jim Slaven

This June marks the 140th anniversary of James Connolly’s birth in Edinburgh. He led a truly remarkable life. Before transatlantic fights, telephones or the internet Connolly did not just join the fledgling socialist movement he instigated much of it. He was responsible for the formation of political parties, trade unions, workers armies and newspapers in Scotland, Ireland and the United States. He was a theoretician, military commander, propagandist, playwright, politician, song writer as well as father, husband, cobbler, labourer and street cleaner.

Indeed it is the scope and sheer ambition of Connolly’s writings, interests and activities that allow his significance to be distorted through cherry picking individual grapes from the vineyard of his life. For that reason I’ll resist the temptation to quote him at length and instead appeal to readers to view his life and work in totality. James Connolly was by his own description ‘an unrepentant revolutionist’. He judged every event by its potential to advance the cause of the economic reorganisation of society. This led him to take groundbreaking initiatives and adopt intellectual positions which often jarred with other socialists. He cared not a jot. Believing the role of revolutionary was to lead not follow.

He was unwavering in his support for women’s rights at a time when that was far from popular, even among socialists. Arguing feminists and socialists were ‘different regiments in the one great army of progress’. On religion, where his position is complex and often misunderstood, he rejected the orthodox Marxist view instead embracing a position closer to Feuerbach. While criticising (with some venom) church hierarchies he attempted to find progressive common ground with their congregations.

The great lesson of Connolly’s political philosophy is that the struggles for socialism and national liberation were not antagonistic but complimentary. He rejected the idea that a nation could be free while workers were enslaved or that workers could be free while their nation was enslaved. Furthermore he warned nationalists of the scourge of neo colonialism before the term had been coined. He argued that socialists should not just participate in the national liberation struggles but be in the vanguard. There are of course numerous examples of this phenomenon over the last century from Africa to Latin America.

Having declared during the Boer war that he ‘would welcome the humiliation of British arms in any conflict’ it is not surprising that at the outbreak of the 1914 war Connolly was one of few socialist leaders who opposed the war. Dismayed that other socialists did not oppose the imperialist war Connolly argued it was a great opportunity for revolutionaries in Ireland. This argument echoed Lenin’s call that the only ‘truly revolutionary’ position for workers was to ‘turn the imperialist war into a civil war’. For Connolly this opportunity was not to be passed up and he decided upon a course of action which would change Ireland forever.

James Connolly’s life will always be viewed through the prism of the 1916 Easter Rising. In a revolutionary action which challenged the Empire at its very core and inspired others from India to Egypt, Connolly’s role was crucial not just militarily but intellectually. His influence can be seen in the text of the 1916 proclamation which declares the ‘right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland’ and for a republic which ‘cherishes all of its children equally’. His execution by the British state has led to a distortion in analysis of his life. Nationalists focus on his position in the pantheon of Irish martyrs and socialists reject his involvement in the republican uprising as an aberration. Such partial interpretations have hindered a full appreciation of his contribution.

While it is right and proper that we should argue for Connolly to be recognised with a permanent memorial in the city of his birth, as he has been in Belfast, Dublin, New York and many other places. This should not be an argument only about bricks and mortar. The most fitting memorial to Connolly will be the end of the British state and the establishment of a socialist republic. The current constitutional and political juncture offer an opportunity to rescue Connolly from the political margins, recognising his life and work as an example which guides us towards the ‘reconquest’. As Scotland’s greatest poet Gael Sorley MacLean said:

‘The great hero is still
sitting on the chair,
fighting the battle in the Post Office
and cleaning streets in Edinburgh’

The Relevance of James Connolly in Ireland Today

by George Gilmore

It is hardly necessary to remind Irish workers of James Connolly's life-long work as a Trades Union organiser. There can be no question in our minds as to the relevance of that side to his work in the circumstances of today.

When, however, we come to consider as a more comprehensive question of the relevance of Connolly in 1970 we are thinking not only of his work as a Trades Union organiser, but of his whole political outlook in which that work was contained and, very much, of his view of Irish politics in relation to world politics.

There always have been, and probably still are, sincere and devoted Trade Union workers who see the function of working-class organisation as beginning and ending in the amelioration of the lot of wage-earning people within the capitalist system of society. If any of us accept that view of working-class struggle, we must, I think, dismiss Connolly's political teaching as irrelevant. He never held that view.

If, on the other hand, we believe, as he believed, that working-class struggle for better conditions within the kind of society in which we live must, to achieve a worthwhile result, be pushed ahead to the overthrow of the social system that rests on the exploitation of the working classes, and to the organisation of society on a socialist basis instead - if we accept that as our task - then we can, to some purpose, consider the question of the relevance of Connolly's teaching to the tactics of today.

I will not suggest that Connolly, or any other man, was invariably correct in his judgments, but I do contend that the more we study in his writings his attitude towards key questions that arose in the political movements of his own day the more we will be struck by the relevance of his judgments to the questions that arise today. The reason, I think, is that to him more than to most political leaders the Irish nation was the Irish people. His concern was with the realities of their lives - with the realities with which they were forced to contend - and he saw the political situation whole, both at home and abroad, as few of his contemporaries did. The subjection and oppression of the Irish nation was, to him, the subjection and oppression of the non-exploiting classes in Ireland by the capitalist society whose power centre and control was in London - whose interest was not in the Irish people but in the control of the Irish economy for the benefit of the British economy, emphasising especially the production of cattle for the British market. That recognition of the effect on Irish living conditions of foreign control was, surely, the essential thing differentiating him from many socialist leaders of his day.

He was well aware, of course, of that section of society in Ireland that held its privileged position in Irish life by its subservience to the British imperial requirements. He drew a sharp line between that section and the people he thought of as the oppressed Irish nation. In one of his last editorials (April 8, 1916) he wrote:

"We are out for Ireland for the lrish. But who are the Irish? Not the rack-renting, slum-owning landlord; not the sweating, profit-grinding capitalist; not the sleek and oily lawyer; not the prostitute pressman - the hired liars the enemy. Not these are the Irish upon whom the future depends. Not these, but the Irish working class, the only secure foundation upon which a free nation can be reared."

When he made his final stand for national independence his flag displayed the earthly agricultural plough as well as the starry constellation.

Connolly is so fully established now in the hearts of those Irish people that every politieal leader, of no matter what party, must need pay lip service to him, but he is well documented, and easily understood if we are willing to accept the difficulties of the task that he lays upon us. For the purpose of this discussion I shall only draw your attention to a few examples of situations in which his judgment was challenged by many people who shared his socialist objective, but who were less realistic in their approach than he was - situations in which I think that his judgment has great relevance today. In each case Connolly's differences with other socialists illustrate the special contribution that Connolly made to Irish politics - arising, as they did, from his better understanding of the meaning of the imperial link, and of the part that the national struggle against empire has to play in the general working-class struggle against capitalism.

But times, we are told, have changed. We must live in the present; not in the past. That of course, is right - unquestionably so, but my contention is that the changes that we see in the political situation since Connolly's day are very superficial changes; are, indeed, principally changes in the names of things; that the political situation in Ireland today is very similar basically to what it was fifty-odd yaers ago, and that the neo-colonialism of today serves the same exploiting interests that were served in Connolly's time by the more blatantly-stated imperialism.

On the home front - having progressed from Redmondism through Griffithism and, now, back to Redmondism - we have to make our choice again between Connolly and Redmond. On the international front we have still to make our choice between Connolly and the socialists of the Second International who denounced Connolly as a Chauvinist while they were themselves supporting their respective capitalist governments in a war of imperialist rivalries.

In 1914 the Irish will for independence was being met by a concession of Home Rule - a recognised national identity - an Irish parliament in Dublin having a flag of its own and a police force of its own, but having no powers, even theoretically, to develop an Irish economy. Under Redmond's Home Rule act our economy was to remain a subservient part of the British economy, and, in return for that sop, we were committed to the defence of that imperial economy against its rivals in the war that was about to erupt in Europe.

It was against that settlement - that completely phoney "independence" - that Connolly revolted in 1916. When he took command of the republican forces in Dublin, he, an internationally-minded socialist, spoke his last word on the question of the part that a national revolt against empire has to play in the general working-class struggle against capitalism. His concern was with the reality of empire - not with names or symbols; not with "a recognised national identity", but with the reconquest of Ireland by its people.

Connolly commanded the republican forces in Dublin in 1916, but - and this is important today - he was no war-monger. He met the war situation by means dictated by the war situation. You will find no glorifying or glamourising of war in the things he wrote about it. When his very close comrade, Patrick Pearse, wrote his notorious esay glorifying the butchery that was going on in Europe as an ennobling thing in itself Connolly pointed out that workers of Europe were butchering each other for the benefit of their exploiters. He told Pearse that anyone who held the views on war that Pearse had expressed must be a "blithering idiot". He urged the socialist leaders of Europe to cease their co-operation with their governments, and, if necessary, to fight their way out of that war. He told them that in doing so the price in blood that they would have to pay would be less than what they were already paying in defence of their masters' dividends.

It was not any kind of love of war, or ambition for martyrdom that influenced Connolly in his action in 1916. It was his understanding of the connection that there is between the imperial link and the capitalist grip.

The Rising, as we know, failed in its objective, but it did not, as we are sometimes told, "bring the gun into politics". The gun was always in politics. There were about 40,000 Irishmen killed in that war in defence of empire. On the contrary, in spite of its failure, the Rising put an end very largely to the drain of young men to the slaughter-house in Flanders, and it aroused a spirit of courage that made it possible to resist the conscription plans that the British government had for Ireland.

This discussion is not one about war or no war - that is a different question - but Connolly's attitude in 1916 does bring us close up to the question of involvement today in the military defence of the capitalists of Europe in the presently proceeding consolidation of their power in the European Economic Community.

It was not as a soldier that Connolly was denounced by the Second International socialist leaders of England and of the other countries. He was denounced by them as a Chauvinist because he advocated the breaking up of empires by the national struggle of subject peoples, as opposed to their policy - if it can be called a policy - of supporting the war efforts of their respective empires and working for reforms within those empires whose rivalries had erupted in war. He saw Irish independence, in his own words, as "the first requisite for the free development of the national powers needed for our class".

My second example of an issue on which Connolly differed from other socialists of his time is concerned with the partition of lreland and its relation to the imperial link and the capitalist grip.

The support given by the major part of the Belfast working class to the political Unionism of their employers has made it easy for the imperial government to ensure the continuing weakness of the anti-imperialist movements in Ireland - North and South. It was an important factor in frustrating Griffith's effort to develop an Irish capitalist economy as well as in frustrating Connolly's effort to create an Irish socialist republic.

Connolly was, in those critical years leading up to the 1916 Rising, working in Belfast as a Trades Union organiser, and so, with his views on the real nature of imperialism, it was inevitable that he should come into collision with imperially-minded leaders of the Belfast Labour movement - notably with William Walker, with whom he carried on a long and bittcr controversy in the I.L.P. paper, "Forward".

Walker, when standing for election as a Labour candidate, was sufficiently candid to describe himself as "a Unionist in politics". He sought to combine the political views of the Ulster Unionist Council with the social policies of the British Labour Party. While Connolly was working strenuously to unite the Belfast and Dublin working classes in all Irish Labour Party, Walker was urging a merger of the North of Ireland Labour movement into the British Labour movement.

Connolly said of Walker's policy that it was "scarcely distinguishable from imperialism - the merging of subjugated peoples in the political system of their conquerors". He saw the strength of the Irish working class to lie in the unity of the Labour movements of Belfast and Dublin. He saw the Walker policy as a partitionist policy - a barrier to Irish working-class unity, and a tower of strength to the capitalist classes of both Britain and Ireland.

We have seen recently some very significant developments in Belfast that must have reminded us of the old controversy between Connolly and Walker. We have seen the leftward forces in the Belfast Trades Union movement scoring a victory by preventing the pogram from spreading into the shipyards and factories. We have seen, too, the reaction to that victory by the more imperially-minded section in a revival of Walker's idea of merging the North of Ireland Labour movement into the British Labour movement.

Has Connolly's controversy with Walker any relevance today?

Just one more example. There is a natural tendency for Trades Unionists to think in terms of urban life, and to forget how much we are still - in spite of continuing clearances - a landward nation. It is not altogether easy for a socialist movement to see itself as leading the rural workers to a victory that would establish their position in the socialist society of the future.

In this connection I would draw your attention to Connolly's attitude towards agrarian struggle when he described James Fintan Lalor as "this Irish apostle of revolutionary socialism".

Connolly has been criticised by more than one commentator for having described Lalor in those terms on the grounds that Lalor was not a doctrinaire socialist. Lalor, of course, was not a doctrinaire socialist, and Connolly was a doctrinaire socialist, but Connolly saw the non-exploiting tenant farmer, whose emancipation was Lalor's chief concern, not only as powerful allies in the struggle against the imperial link - which undoubtedly they are - but as an essential part of the Irish population for whose emancipation he strove - as a section which could be integrated into the socialist society of the future, and without which the Labour movement could not hope to advance beyond an ameliorative role within the capitalist society. He referred, in the editorial that could be called his political will, to "the lrish working class, the only secure foundation upon which a free nation can be reared". When he described Lalor as "this Irish apostle of revolutionary socialism" he made it clear that he counted the non-exploiting farming class within that category.

If the Labour movement has advanced beyond the policy of amelioration - if it is thinking in terms of the reconquest of Ireland by its people - can we question the relevance, in the circumstances of today, of Connolly's attitude to Lalor?

With regard to the situation today: Connolly's political views, of course, never formed the policy of an Irish State. Griffith's political viees did become guiding lines in the Twenty-six Counties State under Fianna Fail rule. Within the past few years we have seen Griffith's policy of lrish capitalist development abandoned. We have seen what amounts to a return to Redmondism.

In this democracy of ours we are not told very much about what is being done with us, but the fact of the abandonment of Griffithism and the return to Redmondism, with all its implications, has become increasingly apparent.

If anyone is interested in ferreting out the facts leading up to the change in foreign policy - and in home policy to correspond, for they cannot be separated - I would suggest that he should study the newspaper reports relating to the manipulation of the Marshall Aid grants and loans, and the pushing into the background of the Minister for External Affairs whose policy was more representative of the old republicanism of the Fianna Fail rank and file by that section of the Fianna Fail Party Leadership that was more representative of the business interests that were willing to work closely with the capitalist rulers of the Anglo-American power bloc.

According to the newspaper reports of the time the crisis arose through the American government changing the terms governing their Marshall Aid plan, and insisting on the States to which they had given aid "without strings" giving now a guarantee of support to the political and military plans of the Anglo-American bloc.

Mr. Lemass, who had in his youth been a notably courageous soldier for independence, did not willingly abandon his attitude of non-alignment. He knew where the foundations of the State rested, and he appealed urgently to the Chambers of Commerce to come to the rescue. The Irish Independent quotes him as telling them that "questions of economic and financial policy which must be decided this year would divide the people between those who were willing to see the nation 'kept as a pet by somebody dependent on foreign aid' and those who wanted to see it able to stand alone and maintain its freedom."

The Chamber of Commerce, as might be expected, showed no enthusiasm for maintaining such freedom, and it was not long before Mr. Lemass's speeches showed that he had surrendered to the economic pressure.

There followed a period during which we heard totally contradictory statements by different Fianna Fail Party leaders as to their policy with regard to Irish involvement with the Anglo-American bloc. According to the Irish Times report in October 1962 it was in New York, in July of that year, that Mr. Lemass first announced his intention to abandon the policy of neutrality. He is reported as saying: "We are prepared to go into any integrated Union without any reservations at all as to how far this would take us in the field of foreign policy or defence commitments."

Mr. De Valera, who apparently was not keeping up with the changing times, stated, also in October 1962: "Neutrality remains our constant national policy. We would never allow any foreign State to use our country as a base.", and Mr. Lemass, just a few days later, while negotiating in Bonn for admission to the E.E.C., found it necessary to contradict Mr. De Valera flatly. The Irish Press of October 24, 1962 reports his as stating: "In the East-West conflict we are not neutral....We have made it quite clear that our desire is to participate in whatever political union may ultimately develop in Europe. We are making no reservations of any sort, including defence."

The Fianna Fail government, in short, had attempted to maintain an independent foreign policy on the basis of the Griffithite State and had found that that structure would not support it, so now, in spite of some difficulties of re-adjustment that have become very obvious recently, we are back to Redmondism - to "a recognised national identity" accepting once again to the political and military defence of that economy. That, I contend, is the big issue in Irish politics today. Other dangers there are, but they are minor ones. Capitalism is defending itself today - not by a return to the methods of thirty-odd years ago - but by a consolidation of its power in Brussels and Wall Street.

We see the British government working towards a solution to the troubles in the North which will, they hope, make the new Redmondism more acceptable to the Irish people.

We see the Twenty-six Counties government collaborating with that design in its own way - moving carefully, and sometimes with difficulty, because of the anti-partitionist feeling in its followers.

All the voices - newspapers and others - that represent the interests of Irish capitalism, both of the old Unionist and old Redmondite varieties, are urging upon us now the same course that Redmond urged upon us in 1914. The hook is baited with vague talk of a possible reunited Ireland within some kind of "federation" with Britain.

In 1914 there were voices, too, that claimed to speak for socialism urging the same things that Redmond urged. It was in defiance of those voices, with their accusations of Chauvinism, that Connolly rose in revolt against Redmondism in 1916.

So - we have Redmondism in Dublin again. We have Walkerism in Belfast again. We have land clearances again to make room for bullocks. The question of the relevance of Connolly depends for its answer upon whether the Labour movement of today is inspired by the spirit of Redmond - with his side-kick, Walker - or by the spirit of Connolly.

If we accept the reality of neo-colonialism as the over-all motive of the capitalist rulers in the situation of today, can we then question the relevance of Connolly versus the imperial link - of Connolly versus Walker - of Connolly's approval of James Fintan Lalor? He differed with many socialists on those interwoven issues. His attitude to them constitutes his special contribution to Irish political thought.

The Labour Party is presented with an opportunity - and a responsibility. It is just not good enough for some of its leaders to allow themselves to be diverted from the great issue of involvement in the Anglo-American defence of capitalism by the techniques - Paisleyite or Blaneyite - that are being used to influence simple people on both sides of the border.

Both Blaney and Paisley are appealing to deeply seated - and admirable - emotional survivals from the struggles of freedom-loving people in the past. Their efforts are harmful and destructive of working-class unity, but they are especially harmful and dangerous if we allow them to blind us to the return, by the less simple leaders of both sections - North and South - to the new Redmondism.

My contention is that the Labour movement still has that choice to make that Connolly had to make fifty-five years ago.

Paper presented to James Connolly Education Trust
Dublin, 17 May 2007

Culture, Class, and Connolly

Terry Eagleton

John Edward Taylor professor of English literature, University of Manchester

I am honoured to have been invited to deliver this lecture in the name of so mighty a hero of the Irish nation as James Connolly. Some Irish historians nowadays don’t much like the word “hero,” which they suspect of having nasty, macho, aggressive, romanticising connotations—these usually being the kind of historians who also see the Famine as a spot of food shortage, and Oliver Cromwell as the best friend Ireland ever had. Mysteriously, however, some heroes for these people are more heroic than others. Martin Luther King was a hero, but Thomas Clark was not. Steve Biko was a hero, but not Wolfe Tone. Sylvia Pankhust might just about qualify, but certainly not Constance Markievicz. Foreign-bred freedom-fighters may sometimes be heroes, whereas home-grown ones are always butchers and cowards.

Of the three mighty Cs I’ve been asked to speak on—culture, class, and Connolly—the third is perhaps the least troublesome. As far as class goes, it’s a notable Marxist joke (and there aren’t many Marxist jokes, notable or otherwise) that just when Marx comes to offer a definition of it in one of his works, the manuscript breaks off. It’s rather like never finding out what happens to Harry Potter in the end. An Irish sociologist once remarked that in the United States there was no such thing as class; in Britain there’s nothing else; and in Ireland there’s class all right, but nobody can work out what it is. As far as culture goes, well, it’s said to be the second most complex word in the English language—the most complex being “nature.” Anyone who wants to sort out the various meanings of culture could do a lot worse than consult a remarkably cheap, extraordinarily attractive little book called The Idea of Culture, written by no less a person than myself.

There are three main senses of culture, the first and most narrow being the arts. A second, rather broader meaning of culture concerns what we might call the whole distinctive web of meanings, values, beliefs, customs, practices and ways of doing things of a particular group of men and women. Culture in this sense is everywhere you look these days: we have deaf culture, police culture, gay culture, Microsoft culture, beach culture, military culture and no doubt Pearse Street culture as well. Then there’s a third definition of culture, which denotes a whole way of life, as in Mexican culture or Tasmanian culture—a kind of anthropological use of the term. If the first meaning of culture (the arts) is too narrow, this last one is arguably too wide. Words that can mean everything mean little or nothing.

Now all three of these senses of culture are relevant to the socialist and working-class movements, though some are more relevant than others. To my mind, there are few more precious and honourable traditions in Ireland and Britain than that of working men and women seeking against all the material odds to educate themselves. I was a tutor at Oxford University for thirty years, and none of my students were more devoted than those from Ruskin College, the trade union college at Oxford, where one teaches ex-dockers and miners and shopworkers. There used to be in Britain an outfit known as the Worker Writers’ Association, with which I used to have some small connection; and I once went to Bristol to talk about autobiography to a group of working-class men and women who were trying to commit their own life stories to paper. I gave what I hoped was not too difficult a talk, but when I sat down was dismayed to be asked rather imperiously by an elderly, half-blind woman at the back in her rich West Country accent: “What kind of language is that you’re talking?” I was just about to launch into a craven, breast-beating apology for sounding so high-falutin when she added: “Because I’d like to learn that language.” She must have been at least in her late seventies. Some time later she published a magnificent autobiography called Our Joyce, to which I added a preface. So anyone in the audience who’s planning to leap up the moment I sit down and announce self-righteously that you didn’t understand a word and you object to being patronised by bloody Sasanach intellectuals, just keep our Joyce steadily in mind.

Now despite the fact that this working-class tradition is in my view one of the most precious and estimable, I don’t think that culture in this sense of the word has been especially vital to the socialist and labour movements. However we may honour those mill girls in Victorian Lancashire who rose an hour before work to read Shakespeare together—and there were indeed such women—however we may honour their memory, I don’t think that socialism is in the first place about culture in this restricted sense of the term. And one reason it isn’t was supplied by Marx: those who monopolise the material means of production, he once wrote, tend to dominate the intellectual means of production as well. Naturally so: for cultural and educational deprivation among working people are structural facts of capitalism and couldn’t be radically transformed without a transformation of the system. Culture for capitalism largely means what to do with people when they aren’t working—and there are enough greedy profit-seekers on hand to provide false solutions, like the Sun and Sky TV.

In the end, to be sure, socialism is all about culture—or, better, leisure. The only good reason for being a socialist is that you can’t stand work. Socialism isn’t about dignifying labour but abolishing it. This is why that great socialist Oscar Wilde offered his own aristocratic indolence as an image of the liberated future. Just lie on a couch all day in loose crimson garments sipping absinthe with a lily in your hand and be your own communist society. Work, as the wise old adage has it, is the curse of the drinking classes. Equally, the only good reason to be a socialist, or any kind of radical, is to get to the point where you can stop being one. Radicals seek to bring into existence the conditions which will render them unnecessary. The point is to do oneself out of business. If there are still socialists or feminists around in ten years’ time, it will be a very sorry situation—and I don’t mean that in the sense in which Kevin Myers or Mary Kenny would mean it. We should object to the fact that we have been forced by our rulers to invest so much energy in class, race and gender—distinctions which shouldn’t fundamentally be all that important—and long for the day when the idea of racial or gender discrimination will seem to future generations every bit as bizarre and bemusing as burning witches. When that day comes we can just lounge around the place all day in various states of undress and be free to ask some really important questions, such as why are Prince Charles’s ears so astonishingly large.

When it comes to culture (in the sense of the arts) in Ireland, those of us who like myself are left-wing literary critics are faced with a grave embarrassment. You see, we spend a lot of our time trying to point out to our conservative opponents that we don’t think there’s a direct relation between literature and history. The arts aren’t just some sort of passive reflection of the history which produces them. Only so-called vulgar Marxists believe that, and vulgar Marxists are as rare these days as Americans who haven’t been abducted by aliens. When it comes to literature and history in Ireland, however, how can one not be a vulgar Marxist? It really is all very embarrassing. I mean, when does the first great national poet emerge? Bang on cue in the era of the United Irishmen (I’m speaking of course of Thomas Moore), who was a close friend of some of the revolutionaries. What do we get when the momentous Act of Union is passed? Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), again both bang on cue. What emerges for the first time as O’Connell’s Emancipation movement gets off the ground? Why, nothing less than the first major Catholic novelists, Gerald Griffin and John and Michael Banim. As the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy comes under increasing threat from Catholic nationalism and grows increasingly anxious and persecuted, what do we get? The Protestant gothic novel, from Maturin to Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, full of fantasy, terror, and paranoia, haunted by old crimes and corpses that won’t lie down. The death of the destitute, diseased James Clarence Mangan and the ravaging of his whole people in the Great Famine are events which occur cheek by jowl. The final collapse of the Ascendancy and the fall of that Oedipal son of it, Oscar Wilde, are almost simultaneous. And as if all that isn’t embarrassing enough, what about the emergence of Ireland’s greatest English-language poet right in the midst of the national revival? Or—even worse—the fact that the date of publication of Ulysses is also the date of the founding of the Free State? Not to speak of the fact that it’s only with the arrival of the Free State that a Catholic rather than Protestant theatre flowers into being, with Behan and later Friel. (It’s true that Seán O’Casey was a Protestant, but this was just one of history’s regrettable oversights. History doesn’t always get things exactly right. It tends to screw things up now and then.) As for Heaney and the Troubles—well, no, I think we’ve said enough.

When it comes to the second sense of culture—culture as a network of signs, values, meanings, customs, beliefs and so on—it’s a very different matter as far as radial movements are concerned. For culture in this sense means what you’re prepared to kill for. Or die for. Not many people are prepared to die for Seán O’Casey or Paul Henry, but plenty of people are prepared to die or kill for their culture in this sense of the term—for place, roots, identity, community, kinship, symbol, language, sect, tradition, doctrine, heritage and so on. The importance of culture in this sense is impossible to overestimate. Among other things, it is what beds down power. Any political power which doesn’t manage to entwine itself with the roots of people’s identities and emotional allegiances simply won’t survive. As the greatest of Irish political theorists, Edmund Burke, teaches, we must come to love the law like a father if it is to secure our obedience. The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy governed, sure enough—but they couldn’t capture that magical thing which Gramsci calls hegemony, couldn’t legitimate their governance in the affections and allegiances of their underlings.

If one looks at the three movements which have dominated the agenda of radical politics for the past decades—revolutionary nationalism, the women’s movement and ethnic struggles of one kind or another—a remarkable fact emerges. In all these political currents, culture in this broad sense of the word is absolutely central—as it isn’t so central, say, in the industrial struggle. In all three political currents, culture in the sense of language, value, symbol, identity, tradition, belonging and so on is the very language in which political demands are articulated. It isn’t just window dressing, the icing on the cake or an agreeable bonus. Now this is a momentous development, because traditionally speaking, for the rulers themselves, culture meant more or less exactly the opposite of this. Culture meant those fundamental values, shared by all men and women by virtue of their sheer humanity, which cut deeper than the petty things which divided them: class, gender, ethnicity and so on. This was a generous-hearted vision when it was first espoused by the revolutionary middle class; but it is also a deeply mystifying one, which denied the importance of conflict in a way mightily convenient to the rulers themselves. You find just this vision in a lot of liberal-minded Ascendancy thinkers, from Edgeworth and Isaac Butt to Yeats and Augusta Gregory, with their appeal to a common Irishness in contrast with which all real, material or cultural divisions supposedly fade into insignificance. It was convenient to have around the place a kind of tangible embodiment of these rather misty shared values, something you could touch and handle and carry around with you, a kind of portable version of civilisation itself—and this was known as literature. Literature distilled what, fundamentally, you stood for. And since it was portable, you could carry it off to the colonies to introduce the natives to the splendours of civility: child labourers, cholera, imperial genocide, the East India Company, women without votes—that sort of thing.

What has happened in our own time, in other words, is that culture has ceased to be part of the solution and has instead become part of the problem. Rather than acting as a kind of spiritual cement or consensus, it is now the scene of a pitched battle. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of revolutionary nationalism—the single most successful radical movement of the modern age, of which this country was of course the twentieth-century pioneer. Someone once remarked that nationalism was the invention of literary men, which might be overstating it a bit; but think of how many poets, writers and critics there were among the executed leaders of 1916. In England, the Romantic poets were perhaps the last moment when culture in the sense of the arts still acted as a political force. By the time of the Victorians, literature has become privatised: it no longer belongs to what one might call the public sphere. This was far from true in Ireland. From the United Irishmen to the Young Irelanders and then on to the Revival, culture in the form of ballad or broadsheet, newspaper or theatre, song or novel, is more political weapon, social ceremony or public ritual than private meditation. In this sense, it follows the pattern of religion, which in Britain means Protestant individualism and in Ireland public ceremony and collective institutions. This is also true to some extent of sexuality, which in the metropolitan nation is becoming increasingly privatised but which in nineteenth-century Ireland remains bound up with questions of dowry, match-making, birth rates, labour power, welfare, emigration, impartible inheritance and so on.

Culture at that time is more social, communal and material in Ireland than it is in Britain. It could still act as a political force. The great O’Connellite rallies were carnivalesque festivals as well as political events, popular spectacles or forms of street theatre in which music, banqueting, insignia, concerts and processions played a key role. It’s not for nothing that O’Connell himself was that most theatrical of all professional functionaries, a barrister. Poetry in nineteenth-century Ireland is less inward reflection than incantation, pledge, prophecy, national myth or political rallying-cry. Yeats was not only poet and playwright but cultural commissar, political organiser, public man of letters, canny operator, activist, rhetorician, man of affairs. Nationalism is the most “spiritual” or “poetic” of political currents, indeed one which is often somewhat cavalier about the dull, prosaic world of political arrangements. One would think twice before putting Patrick Pearse on the sanitation committee (let alone on the executive council of the Boy Scouts).

Finally, what about culture in the third sense, as a whole way of life, as in Mexican or Tasmanian culture?—culture as a matter of social institutions and relations? Raymond Williams writes in Culture and Society that working-class culture in this sense is not proletarian art, or council houses, or a particular use of language; it is rather the basic collective idea, and the institutions, manners, habits of thought and intentions which proceed from this . . . The working class, because of its position, has not since the industrial revolution produced a culture in the narrower sense. The culture which it has produced is the collective democratic institution, whether in the trade unions, the cooperative movement or a political party. Working-class culture . . . is primarily social (in that it has created institutions) rather than individual (in particular intellectual or imaginative work). When it is considered in context, it can be seen as a very remarkable creative achievement.

It’s a striking fact about Connolly, I think, that he appreciated the importance of culture without overinflating it. A nationalist couldn’t but recognise the centrality of culture, in the broad sense of the term; on the other hand, a Marxist couldn’t but recognise the natural and material forces which give shape to culture, unlike those post-modern thinkers today for whom culture goes all the way down. Connolly held these two perspectives in fine balance in his work, and this was merely one of his mighty intellectual achievements. But I don’t want to give an appraisal of his life and work here; instead, I’d like to end by turning from fact to fiction and reading you the final paragraph of my novel Saints and Scholars, in which at the outset Connolly miraculously escapes execution and has various adventures in the west of Ireland, but at the end finds himself back against the wall before the firing squad.

The hood trapped the mist against cheekbone and eye socket, the body sagging beneath. The last act, Connolly thought to himself beneath the blindfold; God send I don’t make a balls of it. The Fusiliers’ breath steamed rawly in the drizzle, while McGrath ran back through the execution shed to fetch a rope. Nothing to be done but sit it out. Finish it off so we can get started. Invisible hands trussed him around the chest; he was about to go on. You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. See this bungled charade through to an end. He heard the officer call the squad to attention and felt the priest and warders withdraw from his side. As the rifles were raised he was already fading, dwindling, fragments of his body flaking away to leave only an image beneath. When the bullets reached him he would disappear entirely into myth, his body nothing but a piece of language, the first cry of the new republic.

James Connolly Education Trust (Terry Eagleton)

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We Only Want the Earth

Some men, faint-hearted, ever seek
Our programme to retouch,
And will insist, whene'er they speak
That we demand too much.
'Tis passing strange, yet I declare
Such statements give me mirth.
For our demands most moderate are,
We only want the earth.