REMEMBERING CONNOLLY

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: february 2014 :: RMTnews 27 A remarkable collection of family papers relating to James Connolly, Ireland’s greatest modern revolutionary, entrusted to the Marx Library, fell out of view for many and have only now been published thanks to a partnership between RMT and GMB unions. RMT understands the nature of history – not as some dry museum piece, to be picked apart or locked away for a select band of academics – but as a dynamic force that enables the vast majority of women and men to better understand the forces that shape their lives and to effect radical change, in the present, for the good of the many rather than the few. Born in an Edinburgh slum, James Connolly – a lifelong Marxist and trade unionist – would perish, in Easter 1916, as the vice president of the provisional government and as commandant general of the armed forces of an Irish Republic that lasted little more than a week, and collapsed under the weight of artillery fire. This new illustrated book, James Connolly and the Re- Conquest of Ireland, explores Connolly’s conception of nationhood, its loss, and the continuing quest for social justice. It reproduces the manuscript of his last major work, together with a range of other documents that shed fresh light upon his re-envisioning of Irish history and culture, the struggle for women’s rights, and the fight to achieve an independent and avowedly Socialist Ireland. Through the building of the trade union movement in Ireland; to the Dublin Lock-Out of 1913; the outbreak of the Great War; and the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, James Connolly emerges as a leader of enormous integrity, whose instincts lay with the poor and the dispossessed, whose every energy championed the working class, and whose business – first and foremost – was always revolution. CONNOLLY COMPETITION Win a copy of, James Connolly and the Re- Conquest of Ireland by answering the following question. Which union did James Connolly lead before the Easter rising? Please send answers to bdenny@rmt.org.uk REMEMBERING CONNOLLY John Callow introduces his new book about the socialist James Connolly who led the Irish Easter rising in Dublin against British rule in 1916