description: C. Desmond Greaves's The Life and Times of James Connolly, first published in 1961, is a major contribution to the history of Ireland's fight for freedom and is widely recognized as a standard biography of the greatest of all Irish Labour leaders. Connolly's work and ideas left their mark not only in Ireland but on the American and British labor movements. In his early manhood, he was one of the pioneers of the modern labor movement in Edinburgh, the city of his birth. The scene then shifted to Dublin, where Connolly founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party, whose program "The national and economic freedom of the Irish people must be sought in... the establishment of an Irish Socialist Republic." Then came a period of seven years in the U.S.A. where he worked with Daniel De Leon's Socialist Labor Party. A strong critic of De Leon's "sectish" tendencies, he became on of the founders of the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World). In 1910, Connolly returned to Ireland and played a leading part in the working-class struggles in Belfast, and in the great Dublin lock-out—the highest point reached by the class struggle in Europe in the period leading up to World War I. On the outbreak of war with Germany, Connolly "We have no foreign enemy except the Government of England...We serve neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland." Thus he set out on the path which led to the Easter Rising of 1916.
language: English
title: The Life and Times of James Connolly
titlecomplete: The Life and Times of James Connolly
characters: James Connolly
genres: Politics, Ireland, Biography, History, Nonfiction, Irish Literature
ratings_count: 45
places: Edinburgh, Scotland
publisher: Lawrence and Wishart