The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #156771   Message #3696621
Posted By: Thompson
25-Mar-15 - 03:51 AM
Thread Name: Origins: James Connolly as sang by Mary Black
Subject: RE: Origins: James Connelly as sung by Mary Black
Spelling James Connolly's name properly is less important than understanding his principles and his actions properly surely? But yes, it would be useful for future searches if the name was spelled correctly in the thread title.
A couple of corrections, for those who don't know about Ireland, or about labour history:
1) James Connolly wasn't laid in his grave with union men on every side. On either side of Connolly are buried the two youngest of the 14 buried there: Con Colbert and Ned Daly. There's one other "union man", Thomas MacDonagh, who was one of the founders of the ISTA, the secondary teachers' union (secondary teachers, or high school teachers as it would be in the US, then being an exploited and underpaid class of teacher working purely for private institutions - there were no state secondary schools then).
2) There was no great crowd kneeling outside Kilmainham Gaol. Connolly was dying of gangrene in the hospital in Dublin Castle after a bullet exploded in his ankle on Thursday 27 April as he directed his fighters outside the GPO. On May 12, after 13 other executions had already taken place, he was rushed the 5km across the city in a military truck, propped up by soldiers around him, and into the old stonebreakers' yard in the disused jail. He was tied, semiconscious, into a chair - or rather across, his legs trailing at the front and his back draped across the back - and blindfolded and a paper target pinned on his chest, and after hand signals for "Ready" and "Aim", the officer directing the killers shouted "Fire", and they fired. The guns had been loaded with explosive bullets, which blew out his chest and the back of the chair. His cooling corpse was then rushed the 2km across the river to Arbour Hill, where it was put in a grave with the other dead leaders, and covered in quicklime - "a burning sheet of lime", as Oscar Wilde wrote of another jail burial. An officer involved in these burials made a sketch map of the positions of the bodies to show who was buried where - someone might want to know later, he thought. The widows, orphans and parents of the dead men tried to get the bodies back for proper burial; this was refused.