Video portrait celebrates the life of Ireland founding father
Edinburgh-born Connolly fought for the rights of workers before role in Rising
HIS pledge to serve “neither King nor Kaiser” has left a contested legacy in his native Scotland, an intellectual pioneer with no official recognition in his home city.
But 100 years after his execution by firing squad, James Connolly, one of the founding fathers of the Irish state and key figure in Scotland’s fledgling Labour movement, is to be celebrated in a major work of art.
Produced by acclaimed contemporary artist Roddy Buchanan and featuring leading historian Owen Dudley Edwards, Understanding Versus Sympathy, focuses on Mr Connolly’s early life on Edinburgh’s Cowgate and his political activities before his pivotal role in Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising.
The film will be shown in St Patrick’s Church, the centre of Edinburgh’s “Little Ireland” during the 19th century and just yards from Mr Connolly’s birthplace and where he was baptised.
Reflecting a growing awareness in Scotland of Mr Connolly’s intellectual place in European history, the film is part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, which focuses on the themes of memorials and is linked to First World War centenary commemorations.
The work also marks another of Mr Buchanan’s explorations based around the theme of identity politics, including an exhibition on Loyalist and Republican bands at the Imperial War Museum, as well as a portrait of Mr Dudley Edwards, who has direct personal connections to Mr Connolly’s time in Dublin.
The film has already attracted the attention of Irish President Michael D Higgins, who requested a viewing during a recent state visit to Scotland, while Mr Buchanan had also a spoken about the project with former Herald columnist Ian Bell, a direct relative of Mr Connolly’s, who died last year.
Mr Buchanan said: “My idea was to celebrate James Connolly and place him in the context of Scottish political life, not just account for his demise. The project reflects on Connolly’s writings, his context and his community.
“The project combines two great figures in Scottish intellectual and cultural life. Dudley Edwards is also someone who should be celebrated, the elder statesman of Scotland’s historians.
“It was an opportunity for me to ask Owen Dudley Edwards the value of Connolly, someone whose name was still incendiary when I was growing up.
“You had to careful who you asked about James Connolly. Since Edinburgh City Council appear to ignore him I wanted to make something with someone who had a deep academic engagement with the subject.”
Born of Irish parents in Edinburgh in 1868, Mr Connolly was a British Army deserter.
He later became an acquaintance of Labour founder Kier Hardie, who helped his fellow Scot with the finances for one of his Irish socialist groupings.
Part historian and journalist, part trade unionist, he spent time in the US, becoming a prominent member of the International Workers of the World before returning to Ireland where his socialist group the Irish Citizens Army took part in the doomed Easter Rising.
Mr Dudley Edwards, a leading expert on Sherlock Holmes and Oscar Wilde, who has written a biography of Mr Connolly, said: “People think just about Connolly and 1916. But that’s not what’s animating Roddy and me.
“It’s about the human person who made fantastic human leaps in a culture which kept working people as ignorant cornered rats.
“Our job as historians is always to find new ways of wisdom and new ways for people to understand. Roddy’s is a tremendous approach, an unusual method to the understanding of a historic figure. Connolly was a pioneer. Roddy is also a pioneer who also works in new forms of communication.”