At the annual James Connolly commemoration, SIPTU’s Adrian Kane delivered a stirring call to action, asking a question that haunts our movement: Where have all the revolutionaries gone?
Standing at the graveside of Ireland’s rebel dead, Kane reflected on Connolly’s enduring legacy, not just as a martyr for Irish freedom, but as a socialist who tied Ireland’s struggle to global fights against exploitation and empire.
“We stand at the graveside of revolutionaries on this bright May morning. This graveyard which holds our fallen dead can also claim with some legitimacy to be the birthplace of the Republic. The revolutionaries buried here all contributed to shape and mould our nation. James Connolly, stands apart however, both in his commitment to socialism but also most importantly in his contextualisation of Ireland’s fight for liberty in a broader international struggle.
Undoubtedly, he is our movement’s founding father and intellectual leader, whose words, political thought and actions inspired every subsequent colonial (liberation) struggle of the 20th century, from India, to the Middle East and indeed in many parts of Africa.
We have always believed that revolutions by their nature were the sole domain of the Left. Arguably, however, the most successful revolutions of the last 50 years have come from the other end of the political spectrum.
Thatcher’s revolution for example was about rolling back the state and the exaltation of individual desires over community needs, the Vance/Musk project is to a large extent about abolishing the state, or more accurately, reducing it to a Hobbesian security type function.
Parliamentary politics has been dispensed with, replaced with spectacle, and our tech overlords it appears will redesign our new dystopic reality where ultimately a type of techno capitalism can be freed from the chains of any semblance of democratic accountability. Trump, like Thatcher, is also a revolutionary.
He leads by entropy, taking the energy that could be used to do orderly work and releasing it in a chaos of noise and heat.
He has an uncanny ability to enable and embolden the worst instincts in humanity; – the grovelling global leaders prostrating themselves at his court, the corporate and university establishment ditching any progressive agenda relating to race, gender, equality, the race to rearm – which will only of course lead to more wars, like Chekov’s gun, ultimately the armaments must be used.
And all the while the crime of the century continues to play out in the killing fields of Gaza, Lebanon and the West bank as the world sits idly by. The deadly lethal logic of the last great settler colonial project, Zionism, grinds on relentlessly with its goal of the displacement and ultimate annihilation of the Palestinian people.
It was of course Edward Said, the Palestinian scholar and a disciple of Connolly who said that this colonial project was somewhat unique as in the colonisers appear to have no use of the native population. The continuing genocide against the people of Palestine will be a stain on western nations which will never be erased and the repercussions of the actions of the Biden and Trump administrations aided by the old Imperial powers of Europe will play out no doubt with deadly effect in the years, decades and centuries to come.
The Netanyahu regime is ultimately about only one thing, the obliteration of hope for the Palestinian people. Our job in the labour movement is to keep that most precious of all political ideals, ‘hope’, alive by mapping out an attainable future for the Palestinian people through an effective transnational solidarity campaign. And while at times it looks as though all is lost. We can never turn away. We haven’t earned the right to despair. We must go on.
At home we must continue to rebuild and renew our movement. The general election has given the party a credible platform to build on. The present government parties were returned simply because the electorate did not believe there was a credible alternative on offer. We can never allow this to happen again.
The Labour Party, Connolly’s Party, is uniquely positioned I believe to lead on and build a Common Left Platform.
Today, the urgency of a Common Left Platform is greater than ever. The crises we face a housing disaster, the erosion of workers’ rights, the rise of the far right, and the moral catastrophe in Palestine demand not just resistance, but a coherent alternative. This should start with agreeing on supporting a credible progressive candidate to contest the Irish presidency in November.
The Labour Party, the trade unions, environmentalists, and democrat socialists must find a way to transcend old sectarianisms and quarrels and craft a shared programme capable of inspiring and mobilising the disenfranchised and recapturing the franchise on hope.
This Government has discretely used the new reality shaped by the Trump administration to ditch any semblance of a progressive agenda and has recoiled from many of the commitments it made in the area of workers’ rights contained in the Programme for Government.
Sadly, the trade union movement all over Europe must deal with the aftermath of the advocate general’s opinion in relation to the Adequate Minimum Wage and Collective Bargaining directive.
Hopefully this will be overturned but the fight for trade union and collective bargaining rights remains allusive. The following motion from 1894 from the Irish Trade Union Congress of that year was brought to my attention recently and it read|:
“That this Congress supports the demand of the Dublin and District Tramways Union for a 9 hour working day and considers that a demand of the men to be received by the company as a body, and not as individuals in matters in dispute between the company and themselves is just and reasonable and should be acceded to.”
It was just and reasonable then, it is just and reasonable now. 131 years later that right to collectively bargain still does not exist in employment law in this country. Connolly of course stood with the tram workers in their struggle for the right to collectively bargain which played out to deadly effect some years later.
This fight goes on today and we must invoke his fighting spirit to ensure it becomes a universal right for Irish workers of this generation.
The reality is that more often than not we in the labour movement have not been in control of the levers of Government but despite that we have worked together to effect positive change we can do so again.
Go raibh mile maith agaibh.