Connolly Commemoration Held at Arbour Hill
Saturday May 14th saw dozens of people gather at Arbour Hill Cemetery in Dublin to mark the 106th anniversary of the execution of James Connolly.
Lasair Dhearg Dublin’s Dáithí Breathnach delivered the main oration. After welcoming those assembled, Dáithí called on Missy Chan to lay a wreath on behalf of Lasair Dhearg. This was followed by reading of the names of those executed by the British state in the weeks and months after the Rising, by Jenny Martin.
A moments silence was then held to honour James Connolly and all those who have given their lives in pursuit of Irish freedom, as a four person colour party lowered their flags at the monument.
Dáithí delivered the following oration to the assembled crowd:
“It is an honour and a privilege for me to speak here today on behalf of Lasair Dhearg at the gravesides of those who led the 1916 Rising, to mark the 106th anniversary of the executions of James Connolly and Sean MacDiarmada.
Dublin, with its long republican history, like so many other towns, cities and counties across Ireland, has good reason to be proud of its contribution in every phase of the struggle for national liberation. This was the city that took on the British Empire, declared a Republic, and held back the might of that Empire as it fought for our Sovereignty. In the early decades of the twentieth century this city was the driving force of revolutionary struggle in Ireland.
And so we gather in Dublin today to acknowledge the sacrifice of those who fought and died at Easter week, and to commemorate all those martyred for an Irish Socialist Republic.
One hundred and six years ago, at 12 noon on Easter Monday, the women and men of the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers marched out together from Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union.
As they moved off to take different parts of Dublin city, a detachment outside the G.P.O gathered to hear the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.
That document was both radical and visionary. It declared the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland to be sovereign and indefeasible.
It guaranteed religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and it declared its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and to cherish all the children of the nation equally. It rejected the sectarian divisions fostered by the British government in the interests of maintaining its hold on Ireland.
One hundred and six years on, it is a vision that has yet to be realised.
Despite Britain’s vastly superior military forces, the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army fought courageously in defence of the Republic. Many paid the ultimate price for their stand and we are here today to pay our respects, to remember their sacrifice and to commit ourselves to the completion of the historic task of achieving Irish independence and socialism.
While the British state violently suppressed the Rising, executed our leaders and interned thousands in prison camps, they could not kill or imprison the ideal that inspired it.
An ideal that 106 years later continues to thrive, and its adherents organise for a 32 county socialist republic.
For there is nothing normal about the Ireland of today. Though both failed statelets on this island would have you believe that peace has been achieved and therein lies our salvation, the facts would tell us otherwise.
For the Ireland of today is one firmly wedded to imperialism and the capitalist economic system.
There is nothing normal about the fact that thousands of British combat troops continue to occupy the Six Counties, supported by over 7,000 members of the paramilitary police and hundreds of British military intelligence agents.
Combined, there are over 20,000 British security personnel maintaining Britain’s occupation of Ireland – fuelled by a yearly security budget of Billions from the British exchequer.
There is nothing normal about the fact that dozens of republican prisoners continue to be held in prisons where they are regularly beaten and strip searched. Denial of visits is a common occurrence. And the prison regime in the Six Counties continues Britain’s policy of criminalisation.
And there is nothing normal about the fact that a British Tory government, ably assisted by the Stormont puppet parliament, continues to impose a regime of real-term wage cuts, poverty, and a declining health service.
There is nothing normal about the fact that on an almost daily basis, international military flights continue to ship soldiers, machinery and heavy weaponry through Irish airports on their way to other global conflicts.
Indeed, there is nothing normal about hundreds of thousands of families living without a home as hundreds of thousands of homes lie empty, to be used not to house the people that need them, but as commodities with ever-increasing profits.
There is nothing normal about poverty, food banks, hunger and malnutrition.
There is nothing normal about capitalism.
Those grovelling dirt eating capitalists that Connolly railed against, continue to be in the ascendancy and like Connolly, our task is to destroy the parasitic capitalist system that continues to profit from our misery.
This is the context within which we find ourselves. It is why Lasair Dhearg was formed just a few short years ago.
At our inception, we were very conscious of the enormity of the decision we had undertaken and of the road that lay ahead.
We were conscious also of the very weak condition within which Irish Socialist Republicanism now found itself. We accepted that the revolutionary potential that existed just some decades ago had now been subverted and marched into the political cul-de-sac of constitutional nationalism. And we believed that this was only temporary.
We believe that that cul-de-sac exists primarily because the Republican struggle at large had failed to cultivate a revolutionary socialist understanding of the economic & political changes required in Ireland. It had failed to define the character of the Socialism we espoused – and in doing so, allowed others to define it for us.
There has been a failure to instill a revolutionary socialist consciousness within the broad Republican community with regard to the real nature of the struggle in Ireland. As always, the failure of our struggle, has been a failure to grasp, as Connolly attested, that: “A Socialist Republic is the application to agriculture and industry; to the farm, the field, the workshop, of the democratic principle of the republican ideal.”
The struggle for national independence has thus far failed because we ourselves have failed to make this demand a genuine and central element of the broader Republican programme.
Resistance to British rule must in essence be about the rejection of a philosophy that would hold the interests of one class as being superior to those of another.
Our struggle must be rescued from the reformist cul-de-sac in which it now finds itself.
Writing in An Shan Van Vocht in 1897, Connolly asserted how:
“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 idealising 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. This concrete political and social ideal will best be supplied, I believe, by the frank acceptance on the part of all earnest nationalists of the Republic as their goal”.
The challenge facing us all today, is the acknowledgement that the road that leads to the achievement of our objectives begins with the development of a Socialist Republican Movement. A Movement firmly embedded in the politics and economics of Connolly and Carney.
There is no other way to realise this goal.
Lest others define it for us, our Socialist Republicanism is the requisitioning of all empty homes, to be handed over to the people who need them. It is the routing of the capitalist class who would seek to exploit those homes for their own enrichment.
Our Socialist Republicanism is the nationalisation of all natural resources, where reserves of oil, gas and the natural environment are held in trust for the people.
Where the right to work also means the right to a real living wage. Where bodily autonomy, the right to choose, and the right to adequate healthcare is not just an empty promise.
Our Socialist Republic is anti-imperialist.
We desire a democratic state, but we DO NOT believe that that democracy should extend only as far as the laws within capitalist society allow.
We believe that democratic decision making should extend into every corridor, building and financial institution in every corner of these 32 counties. That economic democracy is the basis upon which a 32 County Socialist Republic will thrive. That decision making should not be reserved to the gate-keepers of the economy, but that every citizen should hold a key to the gate.
The working class has been forced for too long now to pay the gambling debts of a parasitic class of bankers and property speculators. Driven into debt slavery in order to rescue the rotten class privilege of the capitalist system.
Wages continue to drop in real terms across the island as inflation and the cost of living drive normal working people to food banks.
And this great tragedy is not one faced only by the Irish people. These issues and more are the daily concern of the global masses.
The Palestinian people have themselves suffered, and continue to suffer, a great tragedy.
Today falls on the eve of what the Palestinians call ‘Al Nakba’ – the catastrophe.
On the 15th of May 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced out of their villages, farms and homes, which they had lived in for many generations.
Tens of thousands were massacred by Zionist forces as part of a huge land grab of Palestinian territory. This coincided with the ending of British control of the Palestinian territory and the effective handing over of the land to zionist forces.
Britain had no moral, political or legal right to promise the land that belonged to the Palestinians to another people.
In recent days the situation in Palestine has again been brought into sharp focus.
Journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, 51, was shot in Jenin in the West Bank on Wednesday morning while wearing a helmet and a protective jacket labelled ‘press’ whilst working for Al Jazeera’s Arabic language channel.
Unarmed, she was shot down in cold blood by zionist foot soldiers intent on hiding the truth.
Not content with taking her life, they removed what dignity she had left by covering up the nature of her killing and then brutally attacking her funeral and those who mourned her.
These scenes are all too familiar to us in Ireland, having witnessed the brutality of the occupation here and its response to mourners at Republican funerals.
For decades Irish Republicans have supported the Palestinian people in their pursuit of a country free from foreign occupation.
Lasair Dhearg, in conjunction with other revolutionaries throughout the world, will continue in that support and we call on people throughout Ireland to remember Al Nakba and call for the expulsion of settlers from land they have stolen.
The Palestinian Nakba did not end in 1948. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is still happening, and so too is Palestinian resistance.
Like Palestine, we too must continue to resist. The business of Easter Week 1916 remains unfinished.
The task facing the present generation of Irish socialists and republicans is no less daunting than that faced by the women and men who marched out from Liberty Hall on Easter Monday 1916.
Capitalism and imperialism remain in the ascendant.
The Six Counties remains under British occupation.
Finance capital and its international agents rule the Twenty Six Counties.
The working class across Ireland continues to be sacrificed to rescue the rotten, corrupt system of capitalism.
We must all commit ourselves to uprooting that system and playing our part in completing that task commenced during Easter Week in 1916: the establishment of a Socialist Republic.
It is the only fitting tribute we can pay to all of those republicans and socialists who have gone before us.
Ar aghaidh linn le chéile. Beirigí bua.”
ENDS
