prime concern; it is not their task on telling the Irish people how to complete their national revolution. The task in Britain is a lot less complicated, and is summed up in a conversation Connolly had just before the He was asked by a friend, her mind on spiritual matters: "Jim, do you think there will be anything on the other side?' Connolly's mind not being on thoughts of the hereafter, he misunderstood the question and replied: "The British Labour Party? They won't lift a Indeed they did not; in fact, there were cheers trom the abou benches when it was announced in the British Parliament that the leaders of 1916 had been executed Today they are still cheering; and today equally few fingers are being lifted to support those who continue to fight British imperialism.
For the working class in this country this is a major lesson of 1916 - and a major error that remains to be corrected. A solidarity movement supporting the right of the Irish people to self-determination has still to be constructed. No matter how much we praise the comrades of 1916, no matter how many articles we write in commemoration, the task is not to mourn; the task is to organise.
Geoff Bell is the author of The Protestants of Ulster, to be published by Pluto Press on 13 May Believing that the British Government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland, the presence in any one generation of irishmen of even a respec table minority ready to die to affirm that truth makes that Government for ever an usurpation and a crime again- inst human progress.
These lines represent the last testament of the Irish revolutionary socialist James Comony anu werc sooKen al the secret trial held before his execution 12 May 1916 for his involvement in the taster kising a lew weeks earner Connolly was a workers leader, committed to the international struggle for socialism, but his socialist comrades deplored his involvement in this rebellion. Connolly himselt understood that the socialists or the world would not appre Cale mIs monres Only Lenin and the Bolsheviks took up the defence of Connolly and the Irish al significance of the Easter Rising, explaining that its effect would be to sharpen the revolutionary crisis in Europe.
He declared that a blow struck against British imperialism in Ireland was of a hundred times greater political significance than a blow of equal weight in Asia or Africa. And in reply to the had described the Easter Rising as a putsch, Lenin argued: Whoever calls such an uprising a putsch is either a hardened reactionary or a doctrinaire hopelessly