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James Connolly is remembered as ‘a son of Scotland’

JAMES CONNOLLY “should forever be remembered as a son of Scotland,” his great-grandson said in a message read out to a weekend conference in Glasgow marking the 150th anniversary of the Irish revolutionary’s birth.

James Connolly Heron said his great-grandfather’s vow to create “a full, free and happy life for all or for none” remained the challenge today.

He said the trade unionist and Easter Rising leader offered an analysis that “remains a valid description of the way governments continue to marginalise, ignore and abandon great numbers of citizens, leaving them in desperate circumstances.

“The failure of successive administrations to build a society based on need rather than greed — the evidence all around us in the hospitals, the hostels and homeless shelters.

“To end that was the struggle of his lifetime. It remains the struggle of our lifetime.”

The conference on Saturday, which was organised by the 1916 Rising Centenary Committee (Scotland), also heard talks on Connolly’s life and politics by historians Brian Hanley, Chloe Alexander, Allan Armstrong and Theresa Moriarty.

Born in an Irish immigrant slum in Edinburgh in 1868, he was crucial to the foundation of a number of British and Scottish left-wing organisations before he moved to Dublin in the 1890s.

In 1913 he founded the Irish Citizen Army, a key force in the 1916 Easter Rising.

Mr Connolly Heron added: “Scotland made him.

“Although a martyr for Ireland, James Connolly should forever be remembered as a son of Scotland and rightly so.”

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