The Irish Easter Rising: 1916

Ninety years ago, in British-occupied Ireland, socialists and republicans rose up against the biggest war machine in the world. Officially, it ended in failure and execution. But in truth, it nearly brought an empire crashing to its knees. Here, Charlie McGuire recounts what happened that Easter and explains why a working class Marxist like James Connolly saw fit to fight side-by-side with republicans.
This year marks the 90th anniversary of one of the most important events in Irish history, the Easter Rising. It was an attempt by Irish republicans and socialists to establish an independent 32-county Irish republic. After five days of fighting, the Rising was crushed by the British state and the leaders executed. But although a military defeat, the Rising was far from the end of the struggle for Irish freedom. Instead, it can be viewed more properly as the beginning of a seven-year period of revolutionary activity, which would see British imperialism rocked and almost destroyed by a series of explosive challenges by both labour and republicanism.
There were two forces behind the Easter Rising: The Irish Republican Brotherhood, (IRB) which wielded critical influence within the large Irish Volunteer organisation and the working class forces of the ITGWU and Irish Citizen Army (ICA), both led by revolutionary socialist James Connolly.
In January 1916, both of these forces finally came together and agreed a joint military venture to take place at Easter.
The plan was to seize a number of strategic posts in Dublin, fortify them against attack, and use them to retard the movement of British troops into the city centre, where a new provisional government was to be established.
With risings also planned for several provincial towns, it was hoped that the longer the centre could be held, the greater were the chances of sparking revolt throughout the country. German assistance was gained and a large consignment of arms was to be landed at Kerry on Good Friday.
The signal for the Rising would be a general mobilisation of the Irish Volunteers on Easter Sunday.
As Easter approached, plans were well advanced. But disaster struck when the ship carrying 20,000 German rifles, the Aud, was scuttled by its crew, following the failure of the republicans to land it and its eventual surrounding by a British patrol.
Republican hopes were thrown into disarray.
It was at this point that Irish Volunteers Chief of Staff, Eoin MacNeill, emerged to play a negative role. Not trusted by the revolutionaries,
MacNeill hadn’t been part of the secret military committee which planned the Rising. He eventually found out about the Rising on the Thursday before Easter and only reluctantly went along with it.
The scuttling of the Aud, however, changed all of this. In response, MacNeill cancelled the mobilisation of the Volunteers on Sunday morning, effectively calling off the Rising.
In response, the secret military committee held an emergency meeting and decided that it would take place the next day. They spread the word as widely as they could.
Although a large percentage of the ICA membership - 219 in all - showed for action, only 1300 or so of the 13,000 Irish Volunteers took part. This meant that the advance of the British in Dublin would be much swifter, with prospects of a general rising outside the city much weaker.
But by sticking as closely as possible to their original plan, albeit with much depleted forces, the republicans still clung to the hope that Dublin could be held and a more widespread rising fomented.
On Easter Monday, the Irish Republic was proclaimed, in the form of a document which claimed on behalf of the people of Ireland, the ownership of Ireland and equality for all.
A provisional government was established within the GPO in Dublin, under Connolly’s military command. Several other republican garrisons were set up throughout the city. Fighting began almost immediately, and the British army soon suffered the first of what would eventually be 106 fatalities.
On Wednesday, the British began a relentless bombardment of republican posts in and around what is now O’Connell Street. The following day, James Connolly was seriously injured, after ricocheting shrapnel shattered his leg and ankle. By Friday, it was all but over.
The centre of Dublin had been levelled by British artillery. The GPO was in flames and its 350-strong garrison, now under the skilful command of 20-year old Sean McLoughlin, was forced to evacuate, taking refuge in the tenements of nearby Moore St.  McLoughlin, who would later become a prominent figure within the first Communist Party of Ireland, wished to fight on but was overruled by Padraig Pearse, who decided upon a surrender on Saturday.
Following the surrender, most of the republicans were sent to British prisons. Fifteen leaders, including the seven signatories of the Proclamation, were executed. Among the last to be shot was the injured Connolly. The leader of Irish socialism was dispatched by a British firing squad in Kilmainham jail on 12 May, whilst strapped to a chair.
Almost since the day of his execution, the decision by James Connolly to participate in the Easter Rising has been a source of debate within and beyond the Left, internationally. The view has been expressed that by taking part in a military venture led by petty-bourgeois republicans, Connolly abandoned the red flag for the green.
The counter-argument to this is that Connolly in 1916 positioned the Irish working class at the head of the anti-imperialist struggle, with the instruction that the struggle must proceed towards socialism. According to this view, Connolly died as he had lived, a revolutionary socialist.
When attempting to understand Connolly’s decision to help lead the Easter Rising, one factor stands out above all others-the outbreak of an imperialist war in August 1914. 
His immediate response was to call for a European working class revolt, in line with the policy of the Second Socialist International, to stop it. Connolly advocated ‘a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture has been shrivelled on the funeral pyre of the last war lord.’ This did not happen, however, as most of the affiliates to the International chose to back their respective capitalist classes.

Revolt against the war

The collapse of the Second International was a serious blow to Connolly. He had seen it as an important weapon in the struggle for socialism throughout Europe. But Connolly did not abandon his socialist perspective as a result.
Instead, he began to explore the possibility of organising an Irish proletarian revolt against the war. Connolly was determined that even if the remainder of the European socialist movement was willing to participate in the slaughter of their comrades, the Irish would not. From that point on, he worked tirelessly to place all sections of the Labour movement in opposition to the war. Connolly had success here. The Irish Trade Union Congress and Labour Party (ITUCLP) became the sole trade union federation in Western Europe to view the war as an inter-imperialist conflict. Connolly’s Independent Labour Party of Ireland also took such a stand.
In October 1914, Connolly took over as leader of the ITGWU, following Jim Larkin’s emigration to the USA. This gave him control of the Irish Citizen Army, (ICA). The ICA was a workers’ defence force that had been set up during the 1913 Dublin lock-out, a gruelling six-month class war during which an unsuccessful effort had been made by the Dublin employers to destroy the ITGWU. Under Connolly’s leadership, the ICA became a streamlined, armed body dedicated to a socialist republic.
An Irish proletarian rising against the war had been on Connolly’s agenda from August 1914. As the slaughter continued, he became more and more convinced of the need for such a response. All around, Connolly could see the power of the British state increasing in Ireland, threatening the hard-fought but precariously held liberties of the working class. Newspapers were regularly suppressed and Liberty Hall, HQ of the ITGWU and ICA, was attacked by the RIC. In addition was the very real threat of conscription, which hung like a spectre over Irish workers, the reality of economic conscription, and the horrific prospect of partition, which Connolly correctly predicted would lead to ‘a carnival of reaction’ throughout Ireland. 
That Connolly increasingly saw the war years as an age of blood and iron, opening up revolutionary socialist possibilities, was made clear in two letters he sent to Glasgow socialist, Arthur McManus, in early 1916. Commenting on the letters in the Socialist newspaper in April 1919, McManus stated that ‘the one consoling fact to [Connolly], which stood out in the Government’s policies of persecution, was the potentialities of Social Revolution which their action developed’. He concluded ‘Jim Connolly was the first socialist I met who actually worked for the revolution and dreamt of its immediate possibility!!!’
Another critical factor in pushing Connolly towards a rising was his analysis of the causes of the war. Connolly clearly believed that the war was a response by British imperialism to its own economic decline. On one occasion, he likened its conflict with Germany to that of a ‘doddering old miser confronted with a lusty youth, a miser whose only hope is to purchase the limbs and bodies of others in order to protect her stolen properties.’

Bringing down the Empire

In the absence of a European proletarian revolt, Connolly hoped for a British defeat and the destruction of its empire, which would in turn allow for the beginning of social, economic, political and cultural development within its former colonies and retain intact what he saw as a more advanced German capitalist structure that he envisaged would soon be taken over by the German workers. But the flip side of this analysis was the disastrous consequences awaiting Ireland should Britain win. Connolly, like most European Marxists, although unlike the Bolshevik leader Lenin, who would later both defend the Rising but also consider that it had occurred prematurely, did not see the war as evidence of a general crisis of imperialism.
For him, it was simply a crisis of British imperialism. Thus, if British imperialism could win, it might stave off the effects of its own decay and rule unhindered, as Connolly put it, ‘for another generation’.
As a result of this analysis, Connolly was unable to foresee the convulsions that would rock European capitalism to the core, from Mayo to Moscow, from 1917 onwards. Instead, he feared that Irish workers, crushed under the heel of a militarised imperialist state that still had a chance of winning the war, might never achieve their freedom. For Connolly, this added to the need for a proletarian response in the here and now, whilst the revolutionary possibilities he felt were there still existed and before the window of opportunity was closed.
Connolly, of course, ultimately allied his ICA with advanced petty-bourgeois republicans and did not lead a purely proletarian revolt in 1916. For this, he has been criticised by elements within the Left. 
Most of these critics, however, not only routinely omit from their analysis Connolly’s own perspective discussed above, but also, as though it were irrelevant, the existence of a powerful national insurrectionist tradition in Ireland.

Opportunity for rebellion

It was inevitable that Irish republicans would view the war as an opportunity for rebellion. And with the most significant of their organisations, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), holding sway within the 13,000-strong Irish Volunteer movement, hopes were high within this quarter that enough numbers might be mustered to make possible a successful strike against imperialism.
Connolly faced certain realities. He wanted a rising; so too did the revolutionary petty-bourgeoisie. He wished to destroy British imperialism; again so too, it seemed, did the revolutionary petty-bourgeoisie. But whereas Connolly’s forces were debilitated as a result of both the lock-out and the war, those of the revolutionary petty-bourgeoisie appeared much stronger.
It was this recognition, coupled with Connolly’s growing belief that a rising had to take place soon whilst the opportunity was still there, that pushed him into the specific type of revolt that we saw in 1916. It had not been the rising that he had envisaged, but one, which because of the particular perspective he held, Connolly felt he had no option but to help organise.
This does not mean that Connolly traded his socialism for nationalism. Only those who convince themselves that there is an inherent conflict between the national and social questions in colonial states can hold such a view.
Throughout his life, Connolly had condemned the idea of the union of classes put forward by those nationalists who, as he put it, wouldn’t touch socialism. Recognition of the antagonism that existed between the bourgeoisie and proletariat was central to his politics. At no point in his life did Connolly ever recant that view. But he was also a socialist active in Ireland, a colony of British imperialism. This meant that the terrain in which he operated was different to that of socialists in, for example, England, France or Germany.
It was the realities bound up with being a socialist activist in an imperialist colony that pushed Connolly towards joint activity with Irish republicans. For Connolly, republicans were potential allies because, unlike the reactionary, pro-Empire, bourgeois-nationalist home rulers that he despised, they were actually striving to expel British imperialism. True, Connolly argued that this could only be done through socialism and most republicans, although often socially progressive, were not actually socialists. But Connolly did not respond to this by rejecting the republicans politically. He responded to it by supporting their republican aims and by working with them, as he did in the anti-Jubilee and Boer War protests in the late 1890s, whilst pointing out to them that the only republic possible in colonial Ireland was the workers’ republic.
Connolly’s decision to fight alongside republicans in 1916, therefore, did not constitute a departure from socialism to nationalism. On the contrary, it was the logical and coherent response of a socialist active in a colonial state, one that flowed from the imperatives he faced as a socialist activist in a colonial state, and one that was consistent with his previous political activity in Ireland.

Socialism Vs Republicanism

This is not to suggest that the 1916 situation Connolly found himself in was ideal. It clearly was not. The problem, though, was not that Connolly was working with republicans, but that the balance of forces within the joint movement was weighted heavily in their favour. Rather than the organised working class leading the Rising, pulling in behind it the revolutionary petty bourgeoisie, which would have been Connolly’s optimum outcome, it was the latter which would ultimately lead the weakened forces of the former.
But although forced to act from such an unfavourable position, Connolly remained clear about the important differences that distinguished him from his temporary allies. Seamus McGowan, a member of the ICA and later an Irish communist activist, recalled Connolly instructing the ICA to ‘hold onto your arms; if we are successful, your fight begins’. Equally, Joe Metcalfe, an ITGWU activist, remembered Connolly telling him on the eve of the Rising ‘don’t be under any illusions, the ones we are working hand in hand with are our biggest enemies’. These quotes show that Connolly recognised the need for the struggle to continue towards socialism and remained a Marxist to the end. 
James Connolly deserves to be remembered today as a socialist revolutionary of the highest calibre.
At a time when most European socialist leaders either ran for cover or gave support to their class enemy, he courageously placed a section of the Irish working class at the head of the struggle against the most powerful imperialist state in the world, with the instruction that they could only be successful if they established socialism. In modern-day Ireland, as in every other part of the world under capitalist imperialist control, his ideas and his example constitute a legacy of immense value to those who continue to fight for both national and social liberation.