"The present crisis in Ireland is shattering many reputations and falsifying many predictions, but to the careful observer it is becoming daily apparent that it will leave intact at least one reputation, that of those who pinned their faith to the working-class as the anchor and foundation of any real nationalism that this country can show. Here and there the working class may waver, here and there local influences may exert sufficient pressure to weaken or corrupt the manhood of the workers, but speaking broadly it remains true that in that class lay the only hope of those who held fast to the faith that this Ireland of ours is a nation distinct and apart from all others, and capable of working out its own destiny and living its own life."

#nationalism #nation

"The Labour Movement in Ireland stands for the ownership of all Ireland by all the Irish; it therefore fights against all things calculated to weaken the hold of the Irish upon Ireland, as it fights for all things calculated to strengthen the grasp of the Irish people upon Ireland and all things Irish."

#irishpeople

Both quotes taken from The Hope of Ireland (1914).

"...arise an Ireland nationally free; an Ireland able to develop a real civilisation based upon that broad democracy of common ownership which the Celtic civilisation of our forefathers foreshadowed."

#celtic

Taken from Appeal to the Irish Working Class (1914).

Taken from War: What It Means To You (1914).

"Betrayed and deserted by all but a faithful few, Ireland was attacked by every poisonous agency ever brought to bear upon the mind and soul of a people. Her religion, her love of nationality, her strict sexual morality, her natural affection for the weak, her sympathy for suffering and distress – every high and noble instinct implanted in her by ages of suffering, was appealed to that her children might deny the past of their country, and surrender their hopes of moulding its future. Ireland was asked, nay, was ordered, to deny all that her martyrs had affirmed, to affirm all that her martyrs had denied. And this assault upon the soul of the country was planned and carried out in all its minutes and most revolting details by the men whom a cruel fate had allowed to become the leaders and guides of Irish public opinion."

#nation #martyrs #country

Taken from Ireland's Travail and Ireland's Resurrection (1915).

"At the present moment this Empire has dominions spread all over the seven seas. Everywhere it holds down races and nations, that it might use them as its slaves, that it might use their territories as sources of rent and interest for its aristocratic rulers, that it might prevent their development as self-supporting entities and compel them to remain dependent customers of English produce, that it might be able to strangle every race or nation that would enter the field as a competitor against British capitalism or assert its independence of the British capitalist."

#irishrace #nation

Taken from In Praise of the Empire (1915), this quote again highlights that Connolly uses the word "race" in the same way we use "ethnicity".

"Heartbroken in such a land where the amenities and gifts of life are reserved for those most sordid in soul, where the possession of public spirit damns the career of the possessor, the young men and women have been deserting her as life deserts the things of this world upon whom Death has set its seal.

But still the nation persisted in claiming its right to existence, in determinedly planning a future built upon those young people who remained."

#nation #existence

"But what is the price of war – the price as it must be paid by a nation? That all the young and vigorous men go out to be killed, and all the unfit and diseased stay at home to be fathers of the next generation. All those splendidly developed young Irish men whose bones now lie mouldering beneath the soil in Flanders or upon the shores of the Dardanelles – all those physically perfect Irish men would in due course have been the husbands of young Irish women, the fathers of Irish children inheriting the vigour and virility of their parents.

But now those young Irish women are doomed to go husbandless through life, or to mate with the diseased and unfit who stayed at home, or the diseased and crippled who will return."

#children #nation

"The perfect Irish children of perfect Irish parents will never be born. They who would have been their fathers lie dead in far off countries. Think of the colossal nature of this crime. The children of Ireland are being killed before they are born, the Irish race of the future denied an existence."

#children #irishrace #existence

"Upon the top of this sacrifice of the living comes the borrowing of money to continue the work of hell, and this borrowing means pawning the labour and genius of the future to the financial leeches and usurious money-lenders of Europe and America.

Generations yet unborn are to be taxed to pay for the blood madness of the rulers of this; our children and our children’s children are to be compelled to pay in sweat and blood and tears for our weakness in submitting to the criminal ambitions of our rulers."

#children #usury

"We did not all submit, a fact for which such of the Irish as exist in the future will bless us. Every Irish man or woman who helped to persuade a young Irish man to abandon Ireland and go to Flanders or the Dardanelles helped at the same time to assassinate Ireland, to rob her of her future children, to stifle the coming generation before it was born.

And every man who kept such a man at home helped by doing so to preserve the race, to keep for Ireland and for humanity the fathers of the future generation. That generation, those children yet unborn are the heritors of our hopes, the heirs of all those holy things for which our poets sung, our soldiers fought, our martyrs died."

#martyrs

The above passages are taken from Notes on the Front (1915). Here Connolly discusses the dysgenic effects of emigration and war on the future of the Irish race.