James Connolly's court martial speech, in which he protests at the allegations made to him by the British Government of 'set purpose wantonly to injure unarmed persons' during the 1916 Rising, in addition to highlighting his political and sociological motivations.

Part of main body of text: "We succeeded in proving that Irishmen are ready to die endeavouring to win for Ireland those national rights which the British Government has been asking them to die to win for Belgium. As long as that remains the case the cause of Irish freedom is safe."

At bottom: "James Connolly, Commandant General. Dublin Division, Army of the Irish Republic." "Gaelic American," 12th August, 1916.

Item is stamped:"NLI 1933".

Physical description: 1 handbill ; 20 cm x 13 cm.

Connolly, James (1868–1916), socialist and revolutionary leader, was born in Cowgate, Edinburgh, on 5 June 1868, the youngest in a family of three boys. His parents were both born in Ireland, possibly in Co. Monaghan, and emigrated to Scotland. They lived among the Irish immigrant community in that slum quarter of Edinburgh.

An early beneficiary of the introduction of universal primary education, James attended St Patrick's catholic primary school in Cowgate until 1878. Thereafter he worked successively as a printer's devil, a bakery hand, and a factory labourer in a mosaic works. He became and remained an avid and reflective reader. In 1882 he followed in his brother John by enlisting in the first battalion of the King's Liverpool Regiment. Very little is known of his seven years or so in the army, though he may have served in India and almost certainly served in Ireland, probably at Cork, Castlebar, the Curragh, and Dublin. In Dublin, he met Lillie Reynolds, a domestic servant from a Wicklow protestant family. They married in Perth, Scotland, in April 1890.

Initially a practising Catholic, he abandoned religious practice and religious belief in the early 1890s, only returning to the Catholicism in the last days before his execution.

The time of his marriage and return to Edinburgh coincided with the upsurge of militant, mass-membership trade unions of general workers in Britain and Ireland. It also coincided with a significant growth of socialism, both Marxist and Christian. James was actively involved in both developments, joining the Socialist League in Dundee in 1889 and helping to organise trade unionism among the carters of Edinburgh in 1890. Having lost his job in 1894, Connolly became dependent on his developing abilities and energies as propagandist for socialism and the labour movement to support his growing family.

In 1896 he received of employment in Dublin as organiser for the Dublin Socialist Club, at £1 per week. His arrival in Dublin in May 1896 constituted a decisive break in his career, entailing as it did for any socialist the need to confront the challenge of nationalism. Connolly quickly arrived at a view that the future for socialism and the working class in Ireland lay in an independent republic rather than in continued union with Britain. He and his colleagues disbanded the Dublin Socialist Club and established in its place the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP). His manifesto for the new party was radical, calling for free education and child health care, nationalisation of transport and banking, and a commitment to the further extension of public ownership.

A successful lecture tour of America in 1902 made it possible for him to return to the USA in September 1903, where he would work as socialist agitator and union organiser for the next seven years.

In 1908 he considered the possibility of coming back to Ireland to be organiser for the newly emerging Socialist Party of Ireland (SPI). He went on in 1911 to become Ulster organiser for the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU).

His hopes for union growth and socialist progress in Belfast were quickly overtaken by the events of the lockout and general strike in Dublin from August 1913. He was summoned to Dublin to assist Larkin in the leadership of this conflict; when the struggle was lost and Larkin left for America in 1914, Connolly took over as acting general secretary of the defeated Transport Union. At the same time he took over the editorship of Larkin's Irish Worker paper, as well as being commander of the Irish Citizen Army, which had been set up in November 1913 as a workers’ defence force.

By late 1915 his increasing militancy at a time when the IRB had decided on insurrection caused them in turn to approach him; by late January they and he had agreed on a joint uprising.

In the event he led his small band of about two hundred Citizen Army comrades into the Easter rising of 1916. His Citizen Army joined forces with the Volunteers. As commandant general of the republic's forces in Dublin he fought side by side with Patrick Pearse in the General Post Office, until surrendering on 29 April. Badly injured in the foot, he was court-martialled along with 170 others, was one of ninety to be sentenced to death, and was the last one of the fifteen to be executed by firing squad. He was shot dead, seated on a wooden box, in Kilmainham jail on 12 May 1916. He was buried in the cemetery within Arbour Hill military barracks. His wife and six of his children survived him.

(Biographical details: Fergus A. D'Arcy. 'Connolly James'. Dictionary of Irish Biography.)