Connolly’s flawed Marxism exploited by republicans for their own ends

INEVITABLY, the 90th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising last week found both the Fianna Fáil-led Government and Sinn Féin outbidding each other to exploit the event in order to justify their contemporary political programmes.

Perhaps significantly, neither made much reference to the role of James Connolly or the Irish Citizen Army in the Rising, or to the fact that the Citizen Army (described by Lenin as the first workers’ militia in western Europe) was not originally founded as a republican organisation. Rather, it was founded as a workers’ militia to defend members of the labour movement from attacks by scabs during the Dublin Lockout of 1913.

Neither the playwright Sean O’Casey, who was the first secretary of the Citizen Army and the most important figure in 20th century Irish literature, nor Jim Larkin endorsed the commitment of the Citizen Army to Pearse’s blood sacrifice in the GPO, and it may be time to ask a few hard questions about why James Connolly committed himself to this path?