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James Connolly
Labour in Irish History
(1910)
First published in 1910.
This text checked against the editions published by New Books, Dublin in 1973 and by Bokmarks, London in 1987.
Transcription and HTML Mark-up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
In this little book Connolly challenges the nationalist myths about the Irish struggle for freedom from British rule. Connolly’s aim was to convince the radical nationalists that their policy of a ‘union of classes’ would lead to disaster. He argued that Irish independence would bring little in the way of freedom and progress for the majority of the Irish people unless it included a fundamental challenge to the structure of society. He also shows graphically how the Irish capitalist class was always prepared to abandon and betray the struggle for liberation if its economic and social interests were threatened.
This book has become a classic not only because Connolly based his argument on a detailed hisorical awccount of Ireland’s struggle for freedom – an account bettered by few, if any, books since – but also because of its continued relevance to an Ireland still divided today.
Author’s Foreword
Chapter I
The Lessons of History
Chapter II
The Jacobites and the Irish people
Chapter III
Peasant rebellions
Chapter IV
Social revolts and political kites and crows
Chapter V
Grattan’s Parliament
Chapter VI
Capitalist betrayal of the Irish Volunteers
Chapter VII
The United Irishmen
Chapter VIII
United Irishmen as democrats and internationalists
Chapter IX
The Emmet Conspiracy
Chapter X
The first Irish socialist: A forerunner of Marx
Chapter XI
An Irish Utopia
Chapter XII
A chapter of horrors: Daniel O’Connell and the working class
Chapter XIII
Our Irish Girondins sacrifice the Irish peasantry upon the altar of private property
Chapter XIV
Socialistic teaching of the Young Irelanders:
The thinkers and the workers
Chapter XV
Some more Irish pioneers of the socialist movement
Chapter XVI
The working class: The inheritors of the Irish ideals of the past – The repository of the hopes of the future
Last updated on 12.8.2003