Pearse himself refuses the designation in several places throughout his writings. He dreaded certain aspects of modern Socialist teachings, and would no doubt have damned them with the rest of modern evil. Many Socialists will be no doubt equally prompt to find evasions and unorthodoxies in his statement of his social creed. They will prefer to misunder- stand the idealistic and nationalist inspiration which swayed him. They will, unlike Connolly, continue to emphasise the phrases in the Republican Proclamation anent the right of the Irish people to the ownership of Ireland, and deem Irish destines un- fettered and uncontrolled a mere rhetorical phrase until another Pearse rises to confuse them. Perhaps the war will avert the need for another Pearse to confute them. Certainly they would never convert the idiots who babble about Connolly's materialism and Pearse's idealism without tremendous emphasis indeed. In Pearse they will find that breath of freedom's eternal spirit which has moulded all their systems and creeds.

In any case, let us have no more foolish comparisons or sickly idealisms which have been greater cloaks for evil than all the materialisms in history. Let us, in short, remember what Pearse's social ideals were, or we shall misunderstand his greatness. For even when we have returned to the Sagas and burned our rent-books as Pearse advised us, it is, at least, problematical whether we shall all dismiss Karl Marx as quite so finished an instrument of the devil as Pearse dismissed Adam Smith. But, assuredly we shall have travelled far beyond enduring social unrighteousness because men and nations do not live by bread alone. Two men in Dublin knew that once before, when a manly figure in green grasped the other's hand beneath the Post Office porch, crying, "Thank God, Pearse, we have lived to see this day!"



(The Man Called Pearse, D. Ryan, Chapter VII)

"Desmond Ryan had become Pearse's literary executor, and, in The Man Called Pearse (1919), he argued that his hero had moved towards Connolly in 1916. In reality, it was Connolly who had shifted"

- Austen Morgan

Austen Morgan, author of James Connolly: A Political Biography, describes how Connolly became increasingly more nationalistic and closer to Pearse's views in the final years of his life. This is in contrast to what Ryan described in his book (covered in the last number of posts on the channel) where Pearse leaned more towards Connolly's views. In any case, it is clear that Pearse and Connolly shared very similar outlooks, likely influencing and reinforcing each other's thoughts, and, as we have been pointing out repeatedly, Connolly was as much a nationalist as he was a socialist.

Morgan outlines how Connolly's political life is broken into periods; beginning as more of an international socialist, shifting to syndicalist and finally a fenian nationalist. In the last year's of his life "There were many opportunities to articulate a socialist project, but there is no substantial evidence that he sought to do so."

In one review of Morgan's book, Joe Larragy goes on to say "[Connolly] seriously compromised his socialism to the extent that he subordinated his politics to the propaganda and the conspiracy for revolution", noting that "there is no expression whatever of distinct working-class interests in the proclamation of the Rising."

The Proclamation is often pointed to by those on the Left as an example of a "progressive" document, inferring that certain phrases have a meaning that they obviously do not when the time and circumstances under which it was written are considered.

"The English slanderer never did as much harm as did these self-constituted delineators of Irish characteristics. The English slanderer lowered Irishmen in the eyes of the world, but his Irish middle-class teachers and writers lowered him in his own eyes by extolling as an Irish virtue every sycophantic vice begotten of generations of slavery."

#slander #slavery

"The seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were, indeed, the Via Dolorosa of the Irish race. In them the Irish Gael sank out of sight, and in his place the middle-class politicians, capitalists and ecclesiastics laboured to produce a hybrid Irishman, assimilating a foreign social system, a foreign speech, and a foreign character."

#Gael #foreign

"Fortunately the Irish character has proven too difficult to press into respectable foreign moulds, and the recoil of that character from the deadly embrace of capitalist English conventionalism, as it has already led to a revaluation of the speech of the Gael, will in all probability also lead to a re-study and appreciation of the social system under which the Gael reached the highest point of civilisation and culture in Europe."

#gaelic #civilisation

"In the re-conversion of Ireland to the Gaelic principle of common ownership by a people of their sources of food and maintenance, the worst obstacles to overcome will be the opposition of the men and women who have imbibed their ideas of Irish character and history from Anglo-Irish literature. That literature, as we have explained, was born in the worst agonies of the slavery of our race; it bears all the birth-marks of such origin upon it, but irony of ironies, these birth-marks of slavery are hailed by our teachers as ‘the native characteristics of the Celt’."

#celt#gaelic

"the Irishman frees himself from such a mark of slavery when he realises the truth that the capitalist system is the most foreign thing in Ireland."

#slavery #foreign #capitalism

All of the above are taken from the Foreword of Labour In Irish History (1910), one of Connolly's most important works. I would encourage everyone to read it in its entirety.