We Only Want The Earth

Today is the birthdate of Jim Connolly, a Scots Irish labour hero shot dead in 1916 during a failed rebellion against British rule.

I recently visited Kilmainham Gaol, and the very spot where Connolly was dragged from his hospital bed and shot. It’s in a different part of the killing yard from where the rest of the Easter rebels were shot. Right by a doorway. I guess they didn’t want to waste energy dragging Connolly through the gravel. I was profoundly moved.

Connolly’s decision to move forward in 1916 holds lessons for the present day in the US occupation of Iraq. For Connolly, substitute any number of local ideologues with militias. Everyone has limits. Given enough time, enough outrage, and enough chutzpah, some or all of them currently holding their goons back will lose patience with a governing regime seen as too accommodating or unresponsive to nationalist or ideological imperatives. The current government of Iraq (and I use that term in the loosest sense of the word) remind me of Redmond and the Home Rulers. Connolly was a practical man, aligning the ICA with an insurrection armed and primed by the German Empire. A big recruiting tool for his militia, the ICA, was that it provided shoes to its recruits (Dubliners tending to be so poor en masse!) and trained both men and women equally.

It’s notable that Connolly’s buddy, Big Jim Larkin, would probably have suffered the same fate had he remained in Ireland. But after their defeat during the Lockout, Larkin went to the US, helped set up a Communist Party there, then spent several years in Sing Sing for his troubles. He finally arrived back in post-SF Ireland, when everything had changed, utterly, and he found himself embroiled within the Irish Civil War.

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead