United in arms; divided in dreams: James Connolly, Patrick Pearse and Easter 1916

Following the two men’s executions as leaders of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising, the stories of James Connolly and Patrick Pearse became blurred into a nationalist myth, moulded to serve the needs of republican politicians and paramilitaries for generations to come. The reality however was that Connolly and Pearse held sharply contrasting ideas about the nation’s past and present, and each had a particular vision for its future. In this fully referenced essay-length study, Mick Sinclair explores the circumstances by which the two men – one a socialist trade union leader; the other a seemingly non-political founder of an Irish-language school – found unlikely common ground in the years leading to the Rising, a process resulting from the industrial unrest of the Dublin lock-out and the Home Rule crisis that saw physical force become a major component of Irish political life. No other study among a vast historiography has examined the extent to which Connolly and Pearse really did share ideals as the Rising approached, or explored how the particular circumstances of Ireland from 1913 to 1916 caused them to be travelling the same road, even as their sights remained fixed on very different destinations.