Star of the Sea: A Postcolonial/Postmodern Voyage into the Irish FamineMain MenuAbout This ProjectStar of the Sea OverviewJoseph O'ConnorIn this section, you will learn more about Joseph O'Connor and the other works he producedPostcolonial TheoryPostmodernismThe Gothic in Star of the SeaHistorical FiguresLanguage and Music in Irish CultureBiology of the FamineLandlords, Tenants, and EvictionsIn the following pages, you'll learn about landlords, tenants, and evictions during the Irish Potato FamineGovernment Policies and EmigrationMediaMemorialsContributorsBrief biographies of the people who made this book.
James Brendan Connolly, 1906
12016-02-15T13:58:25-08:00Lindsey Atchison83d64a0adc970a64167d568092ae7f99962a9f0682201James E. Purdy [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commonsplain2016-02-15T13:58:25-08:00Lindsey Atchison83d64a0adc970a64167d568092ae7f99962a9f06
Audrey- I am not sure yet if you want text on this page. However, the names below are all links to these political figure individual pages. We can just delete them later if you want, but it might be useful if you have a paragraph about these individuals and then the user could click on the name as they read. These are here just in case you would like to use them. Also, there is a path at the bottom of the page for these political figures. This will connect all the individuals in the alphabetical order you wanted, and they will be able to link back to this page.
12016-02-15T13:47:19-08:00James Connolly9Political Figure from Cowgate area of Edinburgh, Scotlandplain2016-03-04T13:01:13-08:0055.95325, -3.18826
“Providence sent the potato blight but England made the Famine… We are sick of the canting talk of those who tell us that we must not blame the British people for the crimes of their rulers against Ireland. We do blame them. -James Connolly, co-leader of the Easter Rising against British Rule, 1916” (qtd. in O’Connor IX)
James Connolly was born in 1868 to Irish Catholic parents in Edinburgh, Scotland, 21 years after the events of Star of the Sea. He joined the army at age fourteen, and deserted seven years later, while stationed in Dublin. He married Lille Reynolds, an Irish servant, in 1890, and the couple moved to Edinburgh (Wallace 147).
In 1896, Connolly earned the position of organizer in the Dublin Socialist Club. In short order, he founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party and began to publish a weekly magazine, Workers’ Republic, in which he marked the hundred-year anniversary of the 1798 Irish Rebellion by arguing “that the principles of Wolfe Tone could only be realized in a socialist republic” (Wallace 147). He spent a brief period in the U.S. during which he “helped to found the International Workers of the World in 1905” and the Irish Socialist Federation in 1907 (Wallace 147).
Upon his return to Ireland in 1910, Connolly joined the Socialist Party of Ireland and began to publish political tracts, including Labour in Irish History, which named the working class “the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in Ireland” (Wallace 147). Further political involvement in the Irish struggle resulted in Connolly leading the Dublin members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood during the 1916 uprising. His leadership in the rebellion resulted in his death; he was shot and killed in a Dublin jail on May 12, 1916 (Wallace 148).
Within Star of the Sea, James Connolly doesn’t appear as an actual character in the novel, but a quote (reprinted above) is one of the novel’s four epigraphs. Connolly, along with John Mitchel, condemned Ireland’s role in the potato famine, and quotations from these men are contrasted with quotes from Charles Trevelyan and Punch magazine, which blame the Irish for the famine and compare the Irish to savage beasts, respectively. Connolly’s quotation dates from the 1916 Easter Rising, which he helped to lead, demonstrating that the famine and Ireland’s colonization continued to be issues far after Star of the Sea concludes.