Connolly and Pearse: The Triumph of Failure?

Abstract

David Krause Connolly and Pearse: The Triumph of Failure? Sacrificial leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising-the crucial event in modern Irish history-Patrick Pearse and James Connolly came to their heroic confrontation with revolt and death after having pursued lives of such acceptable character and beliefs that they would seem to have been miscast for Fenian martyrdom . How did Pearse, a shy middle-class schoolmaster and sometime poet with a pioneering vision of educational reform for young Irish students, emerge as a fiery patriot thundering about the special sanctity of war and bloodshed as he launched a revolution for Irish freedom? How did Connolly, a conscientious working-class union organizer and lifelong socialist dedicated to a ballot-box program of economic and social improvement for the Irish people, emerge as a diehard commandant-general of an insurgent nationalist army? An examination of what liies behind these paradoxical contrasts and questions may reveal some different and surprising discoveries about why these apparently reasonable men became part of a military action to liberate Ireland from centuries of British oppression and misrule. Connolly's political conversion to the cause of physical-force nationalism was more sudden and melodramatic than Pearse's mystical commitment to what became his messianic intimation of personal as well as national redemption . For Connolly, there was initially only one path to redemption for Ireland, and it had to follow the working-class principles of socialism rather than what he called the chauvinistic rhetoric of nationalism. During the organizational stages of the Rising, however, Connolly chose to remain strangely silent about the vital role ofsocialism in the country's struggle for freedom, and in the end he completely accepted Pearse's patriotic principles of nationalism to defend the honor of faith and fatherland. When Desmond Ryan, who turned out to be the keeper of the memorial flame for Connolly as well as Pearse, edited Connolly's writings in the posthumous Socialism and Nationalism (1948), he made the following comment in his introduction about this fundamental conflict between working-class socialism and middle-class nationallism: NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW /IRIS EIREANNACH NUA, 3:4 (WINTER/ GEIMHREADH, 1999), 56--84 Connolly and Pearse: The Triumph ofFailure? "Only the Irish working-class;' said Connolly, "remain as the incorruptible inheritors ofthe fight for freedom in Ireland:' The implications ofsuch astatement could never be accepted by the nationalist organisations.1 Yet, the Proclamation of the Irish Republic that Pearse read out at the General Post Office on Easter Monday, a sacred document signed and coauthored by Connolly, contained no reference to the working-class or socialism for which Connolly had devoted his life's work. Had Connolly become a martyr for the wrong cause, for the patriotic and religious principles of a middle-class nationalist republic in which significantly his own principles of socialism would thereafter never play a prominent role? Until a year before the Rising when he was emotionally converted to the heroic nationalism of Pearse, Connolly had been unwaveringly faithful to his plebeian roots and the urgent need for socialist reform, through his dedicated union organizing work and the regular publication of his prolific socialist writing, which remains today a testament to the cause of economic and social justice. Connolly was born in 1868 and reared in the slums of Edinburgh by Irish immigrant parents, his father an unskilled laborer, his mother a domestic servant . As the age of eleven he began working at menial jobs until, after a long stretch of Dickensian childhood ordeals, in order to survive he felt he had to take the last resort and joined the British army at the age of fourteen, having falsified his age. He was assigned to the King's Liverpool Reginient, an Irish Battalion, which was fortuitously shipped to Cork and then on to the Curragh near Dublin, where he spent the next seven years absorbing Irish culture. After his army experience, he went back to Edinburgh to work as a carter, meanwhile reading deeply in the radical literature of men like Fintan Lalor, Michael Davitt, and Karl Marx, and he soon became an active member of the Scottish Socialist Federation. He established himself as an articulate voice for the labor movement...