Irish Citizen Army marching tune:

"We've got our guns and ammunition, we know how to use them well,
And when we meet the Saxon we'll drive them all to Hell.
We've got to free our country, and avenge all those who fell,
And our cause is marching on.
Glory, glory to old Ireland,
Glory, glory to old Ireland,
Glory to the memory of those who fought and fell,
And we still keep marching on."

Nora Connolly attached herself to the forces of the North for the planned Easter Rising, part of the First Aid corps as a leader, combatant and field nurse. Upon hearing that the Commmandant of North had ordered the gathered forces to stand down, that he had received demobilization orders, she travelled to Dublin to meet her father. The following is part of their interaction:

I walked along the corridor till I found the room and knocked on the door.
"Who is there?" called my father.
"Nora," I answered.
"What are you doing here? I thought you were with the North men."
"Let me in, father," I said. "I am afraid there is something wrong."
He opened the door and I entered the room. It was rather a small room, square and slightly furnished. There were but two chairs, a table, a cupboard and an army cot. My father was lying on the cot and looking at me in surprise. I went over to him and knelt down beside the cot to tell him why I was there.
"What does it mean, father? Are we not going to fight?" I asked him when I had fin- ished.
"Not fight!" he said in amazement. "Nora, if we don't fight now, we are disgraced for- ever; and all we'll have left to hope and pray for will be, that an earthquake may come and swallow Ireland up."


(The Unbroken Tradition, Nora Connolly O'Brien, pg. 91)

I have never been able to understand how it was that the authorities did not become aware that some- thing untoward was afoot. There were two dozen policemen detailed to attend the Citizen Army march and they hung around Beresford Place waiting for the march to begin. Surely they should have been able to sense the difference in the feeling of the crowds that were thronged around Liberty Hall all the day. There was no disguising by the people that they expected a different ending to this march than to all the other marches. Else why the haversacks filled with food, the bandoliers filled with ammunition, and the supply wagons piled high with supplies? The men and women were under military orders. They were no longer a volunteer organization, they were a nation's army. Their fathers and, mothers, their wives and children, their sisters and brothers, and their sweethearts knew that from that day forth their lives were no longer their own, but belonged to Ireland.

Pg.99

"Connollyism -- like Connolly's politics -- has a complicated structure, having developed, in several historical stages"

Austen Morgan is the author of James Connolly: A Political Biography. The following article, Connolly and Connollyism: The Making of a Myth appeared in Irish Review in 1988 and summarises Morgan's views on James Connolly and his political development. In short, he maintains that Connolly's ideology evolved over time, particularly after his time in America, ranging from internationalist, syndicalist and ultimately nationalist.

"In his first Irish period, he theorized a socialist revolution for Ireland... Connolly assumed that a nationalist answer was inevitable, at a time when the constitutional question was dormant. His socialist vision had its moments of nationalism, but he never articulated national independence as a completion of the bourgeois revolution, and it is a travesty to try to tease out a theory of permanent revolution from his writings."

" Connolly attempted to establish an Irish socialist tradition, only to retreat to the politics of the international sect...

...he became a syndicalist...And he remained one for the rest of his socialist life; Connolly stopped being a syndicalist when he set aside socialism...There was no talk of socialist revolution in Ireland from 1910, when he returned from the United States. "

"Connolly's nationalism had hardly dominated his twenty-five years of his political commitment; from August 1914 it would increasingly command his very being. His last twenty months are a matter of historical record. He became a Germanophile, and collaborated with a wartime imperialist state. "

"The Irish Citizen Army secured his admission to the Irish Republican Brotherhood's military council, and Connolly went to his death an unapologetic Fenian. There were many opportunities to articulate a socialist project, but there is no substantial evidence that he sought to do so."