Sir,—I’ll let readers judge the relative merits of my Platform piece (HI 33.3, May/June 2025), ‘Greaves, Connolly and the British Army’, and Anthony Coughlan’s response in the last issue. However, I would like to comment on the May 1901 photograph of James Connolly and other members of the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP), reproduced on p. 13. It was most likely taken near the bandstand in the Phoenix Park, where the party held public meetings, usually on Sunday afternoons. On 12 May 1956 the Irish Times reproduced the photo on the anniversary of Connolly’s execution, naming each person in it. It was later republished in 1968 in Forth the banners go, the memoirs of William O’Brien, who was twenty years of age when the image was taken. He is holding a copy of Worker’s Republic in his hand, as are Goff and Stewart.
The photograph, though, is much more than just a snapshot of Connolly and O’Brien in 1901. The ISRP is sometimes treated as a one-man show, but in reality it comprised a quite determined group of socialists and radicals. Together they produced a small but significant body of work that has often been overlooked—with the notable exception of David Lynch’s 2005 monograph, Radical politics in modern Ireland. Thomas Brady, for example, wrote The historical basis of socialism in Ireland in 1905, pre-empting Connolly’s later critique of Daniel O’Connell by four years. Daniel O’Brien published a pamphlet on public health and capitalism in 1901 which has never been republished. John Arnall was an active public speaker for the party, as well as a photographer with his own shop at 69 Lower Camden Street. He took the publicity photograph for Connolly’s first US tour in 1902. Edward W. Stewart was the party’s first candidate in a local election. He later resigned from the party after an acrimonious split with Connolly, later becoming a virulent opponent of Jim Larkin, Connolly and the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union during the 1913 Lockout. Mark Deering (along with Daniel O’Brien and Stewart) was a delegate to the International Socialist Congress in Paris in 1900—the first to recognise Ireland as an independent nation separate from Britain. John Branagan (also spelt Brannigan) was a key figure not only in the ISRP but also in the Socialist Party of Ireland. He lived on Marrowbone Lane, a stone’s throw away from Connolly in Pimlico.
It is not unreasonable to say that, taken together, the men in this photograph constituted an avant-garde in Irish politics: anti-colonial, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist; campaigning on issues of health, housing, education and sanitation; championing women’s rights and opposing racism, at a time when the ne plus ultra of mainstream Irish nationalism was a docile, subservient home rule within a capitalist, extractive empire. They deserve to be rescued from the archives, as their analysis still speaks to us today. As a first step, let us at least mark their names.—Yours etc.,
Dr CONOR McCABE
Queen’s University, Belfast