Interpreting James Connolly, 1916–23

Abstract

This question is put into James Connolly’s mouth by Margaretta D’Arcy and John Arden, the authors of a 24-hour dramatic cycle on his life, in the context of the poor support offered by British trade union leaders for the Dublin lockout of 1913. Though written in the 1970s, the puzzlement embodied in this query echoes Connolly’s own words in 1913:

I have spent a great portion of my life alternating between interpreting Socialism to the Irish and interpreting the Irish to the Socialists. Of the two tasks, I confess, that while I am convinced that the former has been attended with a considerable degree of success, the latter has not. At least as far as the Socialists of Great Britain are concerned, they always seem to me to exhibit towards the Irish working-class democracy of the Labour movement the same inability to understand their position and to share in their aspirations as the organised British nation, as a whole, has shown to the struggling Irish nation it has so long held in subjection.²

‘The red flag of the peoples of the world has no room in it for a single patch of green?’ ¹