Commemorating Connolly: contexts, comparisons and Celtic connections

Abstract

Now traditions may, and frequently do, provide materials for a glorious martyrdom, but can never be strong enough to ride the storm of a successful revolution. If the national movement of our day is not merely to re-enact the old sad tragedies of our past history, it must show itself capable of rising to the exigencies of the moment.It must demonstrate to the people of Ireland that our nationalism is not merely a morbid idealizing of the past, but is also capable of formulating a distinct and definite answer to the problems of the present and a political and economic creed capable of adjustment to the wants of the future. Joyce's parodies of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century commemorative rituals, while they acknowledge how such spectacles have become historical forces in their own right, also act as explosive de-commemorations. 2 Yet Connolly acknowledged that commemoration societies, along with language and literary societies performed "a work of lasting benefit to this country in helping to save from extinction the precious racial and national history, language and characteristics of our people".Jones is aware of the contradictions in Connolly's position, which are also the tensions explored in this collection, itself a commemoration that questions commemoration. As Jones observes of Connolly's subsequent call for the centenary of 1798 to be marked in his article "The Men We Honour", published in the first issue of The Workers' Republic on 13 August 1898:Echoing the nationalists' idealization of Wolfe Tone as the author of liberty, James Connolly linked the social and economic revolution he envisioned with the political revolution Wolfe Tone had hoped to achieve: "When the hour of the Social Revolution at length strikes and the revolutionary lava now pent up in the Socialist movement finally overflows and submerges the kings and classes who now rule and ruin the world, high up in the topmost niches of the temple a liberated human race will erect to the heroes and martyrs who have watered the tree of liberty with the blood of their body and the sweat of the intellect [a monument and] a grateful Irish people will carve the name of our precursor, Theobald Wolfe Tone".