Remembering James Connolly. A natural rebel. An original thinker.

We gather here today to mark the death on this day 103 years ago of James Connolly, the former acting general secretary of The Irish Transport and General Workers Union, political activist, socialist agitator, writer and family man.

Due to his role as a key organiser and leader of the Easter Rebellion of 1916, during which he served as the commander of the Dublin forces in the GPO and as a signatory of the Proclamation, James Connolly was executed on 12thMay 1916.

He was the last of the leaders to be shot by the British army and his death, as he lay badly injured on a stretcher in Kilmainham jail, contributed much to the anger that erupted across the country and the world about the executions and ultimately to the War of Independence that followed in 1918.

Connolly was an original thinker and writer whose work was widely read by socialists across Europe and in the US where he laboured on behalf of workers of all races, gender and creed from 1903 to 1910 before he returned to Ireland.

His work with Jim Larkin in building the ITGWU among the lowest paid and most vulnerable workers in Belfast, Dublin, Cork, Wexford, Limerick, Sligo and other parts of the country is well documented and within two years of his return he was central to the mobilisation of the Irish Citizen Army during the Dublin Lockout, the historic battle with the employers of the city over union rights and recognition.

His central role in that epic struggle earned him the deep antagonism of the Dublin employers led by William Martin Murphy, whose newspaper, The Independent, called for Connolly’s execution two weeks after the rising and just two years after the Lockout ended.

For his part, the struggle with Murphy and the ruthless employers of Dublin during the Lockout, the need to mobilise union members in the Citizen’s Army as well as the appalling housing and living conditions of the working class in the city, and the widespread poverty and exploitation across the country under British imperial rule, reinforced Connolly’s belief that the struggle for the freedom of the nation and of his class were intrinsically connected.

His meetings with Padraig Pearse and the Irish Volunteers, his explanations in The Workers Republic newspaper he published from Liberty Hall in the months leading to the Rising, his decision to encourage the ICA to join with the Volunteers and Cumann na mBan on Easter Monday 1916, and his contribution to the Proclamation put a socialist and progressive stamp on the vision espoused by the revolutionary movement of the time.

Connolly said that revolutionary times require revolutionary action and at a time when millions of young men were losing their lives during the so-called Great War, and conscription to that bloodbath was now being imposed in Ireland, his decision to join forces with the Volunteers was both justified and courageous, despite the manner in which it was so brutally crushed.

It goes without saying that the legacy of James Connolly lives in the one big union he helped to form with Larkin and also in the political ideas he left behind in his voluminous writings and speeches and which have influenced generations of socialists and republicans on the island.

His perceptive warnings about the carnival of reaction that would result from the partition of the country and of the working class on sectarian lines, about the danger of raising the green flag over Dublin Castle without challenging the exploitation of labour by the Irish capitalist class, about the right of women to equality at work and in the home are as relevant today as they were in the first decades of the 20th Century.

In the coming months, we face into the uncertainty of Brexit and its potential to re-open wounds most of us thought were still healing, if not healed, since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. There is also the threat it poses to the jobs and incomes of tens of thousands of workers in both jurisdictions and we would be wise to heed the words of James Connolly as the shadow of a no-deal Brexit still looms.

Speaking of the danger of a simple exchange of masters, from British to Irish industrialists, in the event of achieving Irish independence he wrote:

“We would quickly find that under the conditions born of the capitalist system our one hope of keeping our feet as a manufacturing nation would depend on our ability to work longer and harder for a lower wage than the other nations of Europe, in order that our middle class may have the opportunity of selling their goods at a lower price than their competitors.”

He could also have been writing about the curse of precarious work — working harder, faster, for less.

The words of the Democratic Programme, the centenary of which we celebrate this year and which was heavily influenced by Connolly’s vision, are particularly resonant referring as they do to the reaffirmation that (and I quote) “all right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare.”

Across this State today over 10,000 people are homeless with more than 3000 children forced to live in circumstances that are damaging to their long-term health and well-being. More than 100,000 are on the housing list while the State has failed to provide sufficient public or affordable homes to meet the very basic need for shelter of our people.

We in SIPTU support the demands of the Raise the Roof campaign — an alliance of trade union, political, housing and community organisations — for a major local authority led investment in public housing, an end to forced evictions into homelessness, a legal right to housing and security of tenure and rent control for those who are forced into the hands of heavily subsidised landlords.

We are calling on the many hundreds of thousands of people affected by the housing emergency to join the major mobilisation and rally for housing in Dublin next Saturday, 18thMay. We are also asking people to give their vote to candidates who support the demands of the Raise the Roof campaign in the local and European elections on 24th May.

And to remember that in a vote on October 2018, on the day that the Raise the Roof campaign rallied outside Leinster House that Dáil Eireann voted in favour of its call for an end to the housing emergency through investment in public and affordable housing.

The housing emergency is, of course, intertwined with the crisis of precarious work with many people subsisting on wages that fall short of what it costs to put a roof over their heads, not to mention what goes on child care for many working families.

It is no accident that the current government led by Fine Gael look to the market, to private developers, vulture funds and landlords to deal with the housing emergency even when all efforts under its Rebuilding Ireland programme have failed three years after it was first launched.

This is not a mistake. It is not some error made by an official in some government department. It is a conscious decision to downgrade the role of the State in delivering public and affordable housing. Just as the creaking health care system has been undermined in order to promote private interests over public need.

Just as the survival of the planet is now under threat from climate change and the destruction of plant and animal life caused, in the main, by the all-consuming greed of private financial interests.

The right-wing will undoubtedly remind us that the market and the cost competitiveness it offers are the reason they are wedded to such private interests providing much housing, health and other public services, for profit.

I would suggest that the recent €1 billion and rising overspend on the National Children’s Hospital has been a financial scandal with the most vulnerable in our society, our sick children, lost in the noise about who mishandled the design and contract negotiations.

Equally, the Government decision to hand over the entire broadband infrastructure and its delivery over the next 30 years to private interests, at a cost of at least €3 billion with no clear idea as to how many rural homes will partake of the service, or at what price, is the height of fiscal irresponsibility.

It is time to vote for change, for public and affordable homes, a fair and efficient health system and for decent public services provided by workers in secure, properly paid employment. This includes ensuring that water supply and domestic waste collection are under full public control.

That is what James Connolly would demand today.

We should settle for nothing less.

Finally, I would like to welcome all here to a concert taking place in honour of James Connolly on the day he closed his eyes for the last time 103 years ago, at Liberty Hall theatre at 7.00 p.m. this evening.

Go raibh míle maith agaibh.