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James Connolly (1868 - 1916) - Irish nationalist and Labour leader.
Connolly was born in Edinburgh, Scotland to Irish emigrant parents. He left school for working life at the age of 11, but despite this start to life he would become one of the leading left-wing theorists of his day.
He is believed to have joined the British Army at the age of 14, and was stationed in Dublin where he would meet his wife. By 1896 he had left the army and established his Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP).
While active as a Socialist in britain Connolly was among the founders of the Socialist Labour Party which split from the British Socialist Party in 1903.
He was executed by the British for his part as one of the main leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. Connolly was so badly injured in the fighting, that he was uable to stand for his execution, and was therefore shot in a chair. Survived by his wife and numerous children.
His legacy in Ireland is mainly due to his contribution to the nationalist cause and his Marxism has been largely overlooked by mainstream histories (although there is a present day Irish Republican Socailsit Party which claims his legacy, as do the Socialist Party, the Communist Party of Ireland and even the Labour Party). However, despite claims to the contrary, Connolly's writings show him to be first and foremost a Marxist thinker. In several of his works he rails against what he calls the bourgeois nationalism of those who claimed to be Irish patriots.
Connolly was among the few left-wingers of the Second International who opposed, outright, the Great War. This put him at odds with most of teh Labour leaders of Europe - but meant he was a co-thinker of those that would later come to call themselves communists, such as Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.
Apparently Lenin was a great admirer of Connolly, although the two never met.
In Scotland his thinking was hugely influential to socialists such as John Maclean, who would similarly combine his leftist thinking with nationalist ideas when he formed his Scottish Workers Republican Party.
There is a statue of James Connolly in Dublin, outside Liberty Hall, the offices of the SIPTU Trade Union.
