"I believe the Gaelic movement has great promise of life in it, but that promise will only be properly fulfilled when it naturally works its way into the life of the nation, side by side with every other agency making for a regenerated people.

The chief enemy of a Celtic revival today is the crushing force of capitalism which irresistibly destroys all national or racial characteristics"

#celtic #gaelic

Taken from The Language Movement (1898).

As with Keith Woods' analysis of the situation, Connolly understood that the destruction of distinct identities is a necessity for the expansion of capitalism. With this in mind, any reader of his work would have to be delusional or deliberately self-deceiving to arrive at the conclusion that Connolly would support what is currently happening to Ireland under neo-liberalism, which the modern Left do while claiming to oppose the system.

Take a look at Based James Connolly (@BasedConnolly): https://twitter.com/BasedConnolly?s=09

"When you talk of freeing Ireland, do you only mean the chemical elements which compose the soil of Ireland? Or is it the Irish people you mean? "

#irishpeople #soul #chemical #elements #Ireland

"As long as it was a question of Celt versus Saxon in Ireland the Celt (considering the enormous odds against him) held his own fairly well for six hundred years, without much deterioration in his national character – held his own so well that one hundred years ago many districts were as un-English as at the Norman Invasion.

But with the advent of capitalism all that was changed; the cheapness of its wares opened a way for English capitalism into districts where the political power of England had only excited aversion; the use of the English product paved the way for the use of the English speech, which in its turn made possible the debasing floods of cheap literary garbage.

Thus capitalism has done more in one hundred years to corrupt the Celt, and destroy his spirituality, than the previous six hundred were able to accomplish."

#celtic #norman

"...we [Socialist Republicans] cannot work up any enthusiasm for things spiritual while lacking things material, and we cannot forget that there are thousands of our brother and sister Celts so poor to-day that if they could barter their spiritual inheritance for a loaf of bread and a ‘rasher’ it would be a profitable exchange."

#celtic #family

These quotes are taken from Home Thrusts (1900).

This is a polemic against "every public speaker who finds himself too densely destitute of the faintest traces of originality to evoke the applause of his audience, or is too ignorant of the question under discussion to speak even tolerably upon it, falls back as a last and never failing resort upon an appeal to the spiritual inheritance of the Celt." In other words, opportunistic and superficial use of our heritage and identity in order to gain easy support for unrelated causes.

The quotes I have taken are Connolly's analysis that Capitalism is the most corrosive factor in the destruction of "the spiritual inheritance of the Celt", i.e. our distinct identity and character.

This is consistent with another recently posted quote:

"The chief enemy of a Celtic revival today is the crushing force of capitalism which irresistibly destroys all national or racial characteristics"

"We desire to preserve with the English people the same political relations as with the people of France, or Germany, or of any other country; the greatest possible friendship, but also the strictest independence. Brothers, but not bedfellows. Thus, inspired by another ideal, conducted by reason not by tradition, following a different course, the Socialist Republican Party of Ireland arrives at the same conclusion as the most irreconcilable Nationalist."

#nationalism #borders #immigration

"The interests of Labour all the world over are identical, it is true, but it is also true that each country had better work out its own salvation on the lines most congenial to its own people."

#borders #immigration

"The national and racial characteristics of the English and Irish people are different, their political history and traditions are antagonistic, the economic development of the one is not on a par with the other, and, finally, although they have been in the closest contact for seven hundred years, yet the Celtic Irishman is to-day as much of an insoluble problem to even the most friendly English as on the day when the two countries were first joined in unholy wedlock."

#irishrace #celtic #national #racial #irishman #political #tradition