James Connolly: Myth and Reality (Review)

This essay in review challenges an account of the life and ideas of Irish Marxist James Connolly offered by Austen Morgan to the effect that James Connolly, after spending most of his life as an active socialist, made a 'transition' to nationalism. The alternative interpretation offered is that Connolly's hiberno-socialism was always a hybrid of nationalism and socialism at the heart of which lay the idea that the Irish nation was always more truly embodied in its most oppressed class. Innovative as this analysis was, it was also weakly underpinned analytically, and limited as a guide to action. It is contended that Connolly's ultimate involvement in the 1916 rising was not for him a case nationalist conversion but a desperate effort to challenge the British Empire in a time of war as a possible contribution to international socialis