The great betrayal

Thousands of spectators are expected to attend a ceremony outside the GPO in Dublin to commemorate the 1916 Easter Rising.President Mary McAleese and Taoiseach Brian Cowen will participate in the 30-minute ceremony.At midday, over 300 members of the Defence Forces, including two military bands, will honour those who fought in the Easter Rising 93 years ago.

Perhaps a different view of this historic event will be gleaned from reading this article .

"...In the Rising of 90 years ago which the political agents of Irish capitalism are commemorating this Easter, some 50 rebels were killed while more than four times that number of civilians died. It was the latter, innocent and, as it happened, uniformly poor, who were the real blood sacrifice and their deaths presaged even worse to come."

The Irish dramatist, Sean O’Casey, who was secretary to the Irish Citizens Army , said Connolly forsook the cause of the international proletariat for the insular romanticism of Irish Nationalism.

In fact, Connolly’s espousal of Irish nationalism could be more properly defined as a betrayal of the worker’s trade-union cause as what he brought the impoverished members of the ICA out to fight for on Easter Monday was the right of a fledgling Irish bourgeoisie to establish legislative independence that would afford it trade protection, in the words of Sinn Fein, “from English and other foreign capitalists”.

Connolly began to talk like the nutcase Patrick Pearse about the need for a blood sacrifice to save the soul of the Irish race, declaring that "no agency less potent than the red tide of war on Irish soil will ever be able to enable the Irish race to recover its self-respect" and that "without the Shedding of Blood there is no Redemption" (Workers Republic, 5 February 1916).
At least he practised what he preached and sacrificed his own blood. After his death he got his "red tide of war on Irish soil" in which thousands of Irish workers were killed to establish an Irish Capitalist state which did absolutely nothing for those who survived.