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BOOK REVIEW
| Charlie McGuire, Roddy Connolly and the Struggle for Socialism in Ireland, Cork University Press, Cork, 2008. pp. x + 318. €49 cloth.
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| Roddy Connolly's father, James, was perhaps the best-loved of the group of fine high-spirited and idealistic men, many scholars and poets, who were executed (turned into martyrs?) after the Easter Rising in 1916. He was a thoughtful and committed socialist who chose socialism over nationalism. The son, who at barely 15, functioned as his father's and Padraig Pearse's aide de camp in the Post Office during the Rising, was sent to safety by his father when the gunboat arrived in the Liffey. It is a tribute to the father's systematic education in socialism of his children from a very young age that Roddy, at age 19, was able to explicate Marxist economics confidently in public. Roddy worked as a socialist activist for the next six decades. He too privileged socialism over nationalism, arguing that socialism was the only escape route from both colonialism and also what was, until the end of the twentieth century, a third-world level of poverty for a considerable portion of Irish society. However, he was no mere sponge of others' ideas: McGuire makes clear that he had to adapt to conditions in Ireland not anticipated by James Connolly, and outside the political understanding of Moscow, especially after the Partition in 1921, and that he eventually had to make some tactical accommodation with the nationalists and with the Labour Party, though he joined it in order to implement Leftist agendas. |
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