The first dream was emptiness and the sound of waves. There may have been more to the dream while I slept but in the waking world I could only remember the waves. For a week, whenever I had a moment between thoughts the sound would come back to my mind's ear. Something was off about it. Isn't the sound of the water supposed to be so soothing you can sleep to it? One day I pulled up a few relaxation videos and apps to compare my waves to their waves. The relaxation recordings had waves hitting the shore at almost regular intervals, but not perfectly so. Each instant sounded unique or at least different from the one before it. The waves from my dream were uniform. I guess I could say it was a single wave hitting the shore of my consciousness over and over again. The sound and the interval never varied perceptibly. For a while I let it go. I figured there's no sense in letting a dream with such little substance occupy my attention. Sometime later, at least a few weeks later, I dreamed of the waves again. This time it came with the sensation of sand. I didn't just feel sand beneath my feet, I felt it all over me. Little grains of grit in every crevice of my body shifted with every move I made in bed. It was a surreal and frankly annoying experience. I made a concerted effort to wake up so this feeling could end, but I've always had trouble breaking out of a dream. You would think realizing I'm dreaming would make it easy, but it's as if the realization itself traps my in my head. I end up with some kind of sleep paralysis where I just open and close my eyes and feel like I'm bobbing around in zero gravity. The sandy dream only stayed with me for a day or so. I brushed my teeth an extra few times because I imagined a crunching on the sand whenever I happened to clench my jaw. Over time my other senses joined the party. There was a smell of a vast body of water with seaweed and fish. I tasted salt and I felt wind. All of these sensations made themselves known before I could remember seeing anything but the backs of my eyelids as I dreamed. It screwed with me, actually, to have this vivid recurring dream sprinkled between all of my normal ones. The beach, as I started to call it, didn't come to me every night. It hid in the back of my brain just long enough that I would start to forget about it, then pounce on me with a new layer on top. One night, the beach finally came with a semblance of sight. It was incredibly dim at first and sort of vignette, like I was squinting. The blurs of color were at least colors I expected. There was deep blue-green for water and sandy brown for, well, sand. Reflecting on it while I was awake, it reminded me of some rocks I had in my collection as a kid. Apache tears are these little black stones, and when you hold them up to the light you can sort of see through them. The beach as I first saw it was cloudy colored light that seemed far away. The image gradually cleared. It felt like it took weeks, but time is just screwy in dreams like that. For weeks, I just stood there, unmoving, feeling the scene and becoming intimately acquainted with the details it allowed me to grasp. When the beach finally came into focus, I felt that I was allowed to move, but when I tried to turn my head, I snapped back into consciousness. Why would my dreams tease me like this? Over the next several months the beach entered my dreams about once a week. Each new instance mirrored that long dream, I felt the sensations, waited until I was allowed to move, tried to move in some way, and was forced awake. I tried moving different directions and with different parts of my body. The result was always the same. I would jolt back to life without getting any closer to understanding the dream. Being the same thing and expecting different results is what they call the definition of insanity, right? So one night I resolved to wait. As usual I could feel the moment when I gained control of my body, but I continued to stand still. More than that, I stared unblinkingly. I made no attempt to look around. I didn't even breathe. Who needs oxygen in a dream? I waited there for years, the only thing alive among the salt air and monotonous wavesong. I began to descend. I had assumed my feet were on the ground to begin with because I could feel the sand, but apparently not. Eventually I felt the ground press up against the soles of my feet. Micrometers at a time, I was sinking into the sand. The sand was cold. I've never been to a beach on a cold day before. For sand to be anything other than scorching was a novel sensation. On and on, slowly, for several lifetimes, the sand enveloped me. It was easier to be still when I was cocooned in the sand. The sand filled my ears but the vibration of the waves still reached me. The ebb carried away my thoughts and an almost tangible nothingness flowed back into me. I didn't care if I ever woke up again. I'd be perfectly content to be one with my beach for eternity. Then, all at once, something changed. My mind was present again, and every fiber of my being screamed that I was in danger. I felt an urge to breathe for the first time in decades, but by this point I must have been a mile away from open air. I clawed my way out of the sand in a blind panic. Pain and adrenaline caused me to forget that I was dreaming. For hours, all I could feel was grit in my throat and in my lungs. Finally, I burst through the surface and flopped onto my side. I took some time to breathe. My eyes learned to understand light again. Thankfully the sun wasn't bright. Actually, a fog had settled. The familiar colors of the beach were muddy and dulled despite the clarity of my vision. All of that vivid sensory input I had experienced in every dream before was gone, but at least I could see. Able to move freely for the first time, I stood and surveyed my surroundings. There were dozens of prints in the sand, but no living thing in sight. As far as the eye could see in every direction there was only fog. No sights, sounds or smells to suggest civilization. The air was dense and damp despite the cold. It was the kind of biting cold that comes on a wind, except the air was still. The water was clearly visible for the first time, and it behaved just like it sounded. Infinitely in either direction the waves broke identically with each renewed motion and the swash came in and receded as one giant mechanical mass. I took one step, and then another. With the sea to my left, I began a hesitant stroll along the beach. The exaggerated sense of time that usually pervaded the dream had disappeared. I felt present, now, as I walked, some sense of urgency began to perk up in my brain. At some point I noticed there were no longer other footprints in the sand. It was imperative that I reach the end, whatever that meant. Hopefully, I would know it when I saw it. I waited through the fog, on and on. I have no idea how long I walked, or thought I had walked, before there was any change. The rigid swash lapped at my feet now and again. I honestly couldn't tell whether the tide was coming in or if I simply veered toward the water from time to time. Were the waves reaching for me? Or was I drawn to them? I paused a moment to watch the water rush around my ankles and my feet began to sink into the dark sand. The song of the waves was so familiar to me now, it was like a friend calling my name. A moment after that crossed my mind, I did hear my name. There was a voice in the distance. The voice was crisp. It blew away my returning stupor, noticing the water level was rising around me, I jumped and splashed my way to firmer sand. The water continued to creep closer and seemed to be gaining speed. The waves were no longer lapping, but gnashing, and the once gentle rhythm was rising into a roar. The sand, the water, the fog, everything was converging on me. It was time to run. I heard the voice a second time. I strained to push all other sensations from my mind to pinpoint the direction of the sound. The world was in chaos, and so was I, leaping, stumbling, splashing, gasping, blinking, groping. And then I was laid out on my bedroom carpet, staring into my sister's face. She had been crying, but for the moment allowed herself a smile of relief. Someone was on the phone in the other room. I was drenched in sweat, at least, I hoped it was only sweat. Over the next few days, I was diagnosed with a seizure disorder. Apparently it doesn't only happen to children and old people. Any person at any age can just, poof, start to experience alarming brain malfunctions. That's definitely a fact that I didn't want to know, so naturally, you need to know it too.  I haven't dreamed of the beach even once since then. But I can't shake the idea that I had an extremely close call during that infinite dream that felt more tangible than reality. I felt its presence long before any physical symptoms arose. Looking back, when I finally gave myself to the beach, I get the feeling that I was playing into its hands. As much as I wanted to experience more of the dream, the beach wanted to touch more of me. What lay beyond that fog or across that water? What force dragged me down deep beneath the sand? The only things that brought me back were my sister's voice and the human instinct of self-preservation. Without that intervention and without that fear, would anything have kept me from becoming one with the waves?


So now it's time for power worker, sorry. So power is a release engineer at Samsung on the Tizen platform, which is a mobile phone. And Pavel will talk about testing remote embedded device. Mike is yours. Thank you. Hello, everyone. As I was introduced, I work at Samsung R&D Institute Poland, and I'm currently involved in Tizen Release Engineering team. That's why we have to automate as much as possible in order to stay efficient with our day-to-day activities. That's also why we came up with the design for unification for testing automation on embedded devices, which we call Max Pi. And that's what I would like to share with you today. Let me start with a short introduction to what I will be actually talking about. Then I will summarize previous efforts in this matter. I will depict our idea for testing automation on embedded devices. Then I'll go through the hardware that we made, software, accompanying software as well. And I would like to share with you our future plans for the work that we still have to do. I will summarize it with a short conclusion, and then we'll have a Q&A session. So what do I actually do? I work with Tizen, which is GNU-Linux distribution for embedded devices. It is based on standard components, like GNU Tools collection, Linux kernel, obviously, Wayland server, Wayland display server, and Enlightenment Foundation libraries, or EFL in short, as the main graphics library. And Tizen is mainly used on consumer devices, like mobile phones, wearables as well, but also TVs, fridges, as in Family Hub. And since May 2017, with Tizen 4.0 milestone one, on IoT devices as well. But Tizen on those devices is a product one, great Tizen. What I do is work on platform, which is being developed by contributors all over the world with R&D centers in India, USA, South Korea, and Poland as well. That's why we need to develop our platform continuously with daily snapshots of merged software. But the fact that we release often in order to fail early does not mean that we take the QA stage lightly. Because we have to take care of devices for developers all over the world, we always check the software that we are to publish on actual devices before the images are published for everyone to use. And even though packages are equipped with internal tests and we run them on the daily basis, they are not enough. Because we want to know unexpected behavior of developers' devices, that's why we make sure that there is no. And how does it look like? Well, we monitor pre-releases of the software, download them, flash onto the target devices, then run test batteries, gather results, and then investigate if there were any failures or other indicators that the software should be stopped from being published. But in order to do that, it is much easier not to just have all of those devices, various devices, mobiles, wearables, or even fridges right on the desk of release engineers. It is much easier to have them being accessible remotely. It is especially important for the devices that are not published yet, that they really need to be start in a secure manner. But it also gives us the ability to have much less effort on the developer's side as for the maintenance of the devices, and all of them can be much better utilized when they are shared, when they are never pointlessly stored in some developer's locker once he or she goes back home. That's why we came up with this device. It's MaxPy, and it needs only two interfaces, two connections, in order to be accessible remotely, which are power supply, of course, and the Ethernet for network connection. Once connected to the target device such as Raspberry Pi 3 right here, it is already ready to use, and it's, as you might suspect, pretty easy to scale because it needs only two interfaces. So scaling up is as easy as connecting further MaxPy's with target devices to the network switch, and it unifies the access to the boards. So it's easy for Raspberry Pi's or other single board computers, such as Odroid, or even other types of target devices like mobile phones. And we will get back to the MaxPy's in a minute, but before, let me summarize real quick why did we came up with this design and what else can be used for automated testing. From software point of view, one of the most popular applications for that use is Lava, which stands for Linaro Automated Validation Architecture and is being developed by Linaro. It is an automation system for operating system deployments and supports both virtual and physical devices, and allows running bootloader and system level tests as well, although some additional hardware might be necessary for them to work properly. However, what was a problem for us was being able to run interactive sessions on boards that were connected to the Lava server. Lava has internal mechanism for interactive sessions, which is called hacking sessions, but it did not work for our use cases, which involved modification of bootloader or rerunning or restarting device over and over again. For us, it was to test recovery mechanism of Tizen platform. However, it is widely used at Linaro, of course, for automotive-grade Linux test lab system and for other popular GNU Linux distributions, such as Debian or Yocto as well. I believe the most popular use case is kernel CI with already three and a half million successful boots and counting, and that's not the only effort from Linaro to automate testing on embedded devices. In 2013, they also came up with LMPs, which are boards for both testing hot-plugging devices and checking how the software on embedded device react to hot-plugging, for example, SATA device or USB device, but also they were able to give much better control to the administrator of testing laboratory over the device under tests or that for short, but it is currently on hold and lessons learned from use of LMPs, especially of microSD card demultiplexer were published in the link down below. However, we also gave an attempt at creating microSD card demultiplexer or SD Max for short, and we've been using it since 2016. This board only gives you the ability to share access to the microSD card between device under tests or that for short and test server or TS. It also allows to control the power supply to the target device, and that's basically it. It does not know anything else about target device, and it only gives you these two small features. However, it was pretty useful for us and not only for us, Qt company and also Ableton, which you might have heard of, were able to recreate this setup because we thought it would be great to share it with others, and we published all these schematics and software and other related materials in the Git repository and use only open source software for that so that everyone can use it or even fork it, like Reslin.io, who thought that it would be great to have some indicators on board and created AutoHat board on the basis of our SD Max. Unfortunately, we ran into some issues using SD Max and the main issue that we got was the instability of the connection on the USB between the SD Max and test server. Every three to six months, the test server was unable to enumerate another devices on the USB hubs and that the 71 errors are protocol errors, which led to down times of our testing laboratory, which we were not all right with. That's why we took a step back, went back to drawing board and decided to bring a new idea to the table. We already knew what was working right, we also knew what wasn't, and that's why we decided that we will keep only replaceable medias, which were of the quickest in testing laboratory, so we still are using microSD cards for the deployments of operating system images, but we decided that there shouldn't be a situation where a failure of a single device causes a failure of the next ones. So we tried not to introduce any SPOF onto the setup and we also knew that there has to be no involvement of the USB connections on the test server side. We also wanted minimum external connections between the device under target or the board that controls it outside world and wanted to have it in a unified way. With the feedback we got from ResinIO, we decided that easy setup and maintenance would be a great plus and since we were back at the drawing board, we thought that maybe a whole user interface would be helpful and with increasing demand for measuring and lowering of course power consumption, we decided that it could be useful as well as having and as being able to write some EDID information to HDMI. It's pretty useful for the devices that you would like for them to think that they have display connected even though they don't. That's why we came up with this design but I think it would be easier to describe it on the schematics. We started with the Gold Alt SD Max which has already a simple UI, edit to the board itself and of course the power control and power consumption measurement on board as well. Everything is under control by the Nanopinio board which is a single board computer ARMV7 and of course a microcontroller for low level features of the board itself. With the MaxPy board, we are able to demultiplex the connection of microSD card between DAPT and TS. We are also able to switch power supply and that's what SD Max already gave us. We are also able to switch dynamically jumpers on the DAPT which is pretty useful if your device has some buttons which are required to be pressed in order for that to boot up or to be put into the download state for flashing device or so. We also have got hardware for measuring power consumption and the ability to write fake ID to the device under test over HDMI connection. We also provide multiple ways of connecting to the device under test via USB, Ethernet, microSD card of course or if you need a serial console directly to your device under test that's also available as well. We wanted the MaxPy's to be able to interact with testing laboratory maintainer. That's why it is equipped not only with activity LEDs such as SD Reader LED or Power LED which were suggested by ResinIO but also RGB LEDs on the bottom left corner for indicating state of the device not only MaxPy but also device under test and also OLED display for simple messages. We also put a couple of buttons to be able to interact quickly with the whole setup. It gave us easy maintenance over the... over the dryad which we call MaxPy board connected with target device but we knew that not everything can be predicted before those boards go into production. That's why we decided to be able to extend them from start and that's why we use the prototype boards for quick setups if there is a need for a new device or mode or just rearrange something quickly. With all that we've got finally an independent... independent controller for devices under tests which does not require any test server which is aware of its state and can indicate any failures or unexpected behaviors which is also easy to maintain and extensible from the ground up if there is a need to be extended and if you'd like your own you'll have to equip yourself with a NanoPy Neo for controlling it for about 10 bucks with pads for the MaxPy board and the $80 price was initial batch which was about 30 boards but also some high soldering skills and a lot of patience but if you're still interested go ahead to get TizenOrc to our repository and to check the SCAM attacks out but hardware is not everything that had to be provided in order to have the automating testing laboratories for embedded devices we also had to implement some accompanying software and with previous efforts I mentioned for example Lava which is Monolith we decided that it is hard to extend it in future so multi-tier architecture was chosen for the software to control test farm we also wanted to follow the Unix philosophy and each tool does only one thing but we hope that it does it well we wanted them to be able to communicate and to be easily swapped if there is a need to provide a new tool so they all communicate over HTTP APIs but still we wanted to have a simple and similar solution stack and everything is written in Go language and as I mentioned earlier how does the testing look like that's why we provided for layers for testing laboratory I mentioned that we have to monitor and download all of the software to be tested and who knows how to do that that's the role for Perun Perun is a character from Slavic Legends it's demigods who has the most power and most responsibilities of all others and who knows which actions are necessary that's the work of Velez Velez in Slavic Legends is the one who takes care of the underworld as for the tasks where can it be done that's the work for Boruta Boruta is a caretaker in Slavic Legends and takes care of all living creatures in forests and as for how to actually do that that's the work on hardware level and actually MoxPy which does not follow the Slavic Legends because it was invented independently much earlier and let's begin with MoxPy which actually allows us to create automatic testing laboratories it manages single device under tests and is fully aware of its capabilities whether it has display connected or not which interfaces does it provide and so on and so forth it requires only two interfaces as I mentioned before which are power supply and the Ethernet for network connection together with device under tests we call it Dryad which also is from Slavic Legends as for the software to manage Dryads we provide two tools first one to be able to put operating system images or flush over the air to the devices and also to the other one to control power supply to the target device to put the device into known state and be able to control it and with all those over all those Dryads we've got Boruta which takes care of the whole farm of multiple Dryads it can schedule access requests to the devices and it provides a convenient way of accessing selected Dryads one it is given single Boruta server takes care of multiple Dryads and a single Dryad hooked up into the Boruta server starts in maintenance mode which is then moved to the idle or allocated by the testing laboratory maintainer if such Dryad matches requirements for the access requests then Boruta prepares environment for that set ups tunnel or SSH tunnel or other way of connecting to the device under test if it is necessary and then actions can be performed on the target devices directly once they are finished devices go back into the unallocated state and can be reused after that but I believe no one wants to do that on their own all the time that's why we also provided a VLS which is a lightweight testing framework inspired by Lava and it provides similar to Lava interface based on YAML job definitions which we try to stay as close as possible to the Lava syntax so we also allow the same stages of device under tests which are deployment both tests and of course collection of the results single VLS server should be connected to the Boruta and then Boruta who controls Dryads can execute all those tests and with such setup we've got it's pretty similar to the one that Lava provides because from VLS YAML job definitions goes in then they're all executed right down to the target devices and the gathered results are brought back by the VLS web interface and that's actually its main purpose to automate the actions that are being performed on the device under tests and actually that's all that VLS provides it only parses the YAML job definition collects all the assets that are necessary for the job to be completed requests access to the device under tests from Boruta and then perform the actual actions but I also mentioned that there should be a layer which actually has to know what should be done and that's the work for Perun which is our layer for or maybe a dashboard would be a better word for actually testing the operating system images which schedules the verification on the basis of what is being pre-published for Tizen Perun is the layer that actually automates the quality assurance step of what we do at Tizen every day so the release engineering duties Perun also has to be connected directly to the VLS server and that's how Perun provides us with results it crawls a single URL with operating system images reports any change that could be detected submits VLS jobs on those detected changes collect artifacts from the test execution interprets them so that we won't have to and that's how we know whether a new release can be published or not and with this layered setup we think that it's kept pretty simple but also decoupled so you only need software and hardware of course to unify access to your various target devices then go ahead just take maxpice, connect them to your devices and with two interfaces power supply and network connection you'll have access to them remotely if you already have such hardware and you don't want our then replace it with your own but maybe you'd like to be able to schedule your tasks or schedule remote access requests and for that you might find our Boruta useful or maybe you already have your own testing framework you do not want VLS but Boruta with maxpice would be pretty useful or maybe you think that our Golang implementation should be reworked and you have already your javascript dashboard your Python based testing framework and you schedule access to the devices under tests with Java Jenkins but maybe the maxpy would be the hardware you would like to use for the unification of your environment that is also possible as long as the communication of our HTTB APIs is set with the specification we provided so that's what we've been working so far and what about the future we will focus on the audio I.O. and testing the audio functions of the single board computers and other embedded devices as well we will investigate the possibility of having USB type C as more and more devices are equipped with it and it could be pretty useful and for the better control over the dryads we also think about having serial console with embedded converter on the board itself as for the software side we will provide convenient web interfaces for current layers since what we currently have are only CLI tools we also want to provide service state management in case there are some failures on the server side and also provide a new layer or even more of them to automate the whole setup further and if you'd like to know more about those devices go ahead to our wiki pages or where you might also find our lessons learned from the SDMAX board if you have some questions go ahead and drop us a line at our mailing list or podcast at IRC channel so to sum it all up we currently have got a setup which can be quickly made and is pretty easy to maintain we finally divided all the responsibilities that are in testing laboratory and no developer has to do them all by himself we've got parallel execution of all those tests on target devices and sharing devices for better utilization and unified environment which we've been pretty happy with so far if you have any questions about this board or software or the laboratory setup I would be now more than happy to answer them the question is how many devices do we have in our testing laboratory and currently I believe it's around 50 the next batch and around 100 but we never went with more so far the question is about Lava Dispatcher and running it on the Max Pi board we haven't tried it but it would be possible if you ran Debian on the Nanopi board and got this directly from Lava Maintainers because it's already prepackaged in the repository if I'm not mistaken so yeah that would be possible we just haven't tried it yet we focused on the Boruta Veles Perunstak as far as I know the question was about the maximum power that can be provided to the target device and as far as I know there is no limit but I believe that it would be much safer to ask that on the mailing list directly to the board designer alright so the question was about making a bigger batch of Max Pi boards and about gathering all interested on the Tizen mailing list Tizen is an open source project so everyone is invited to discuss and to post new information there so I see nothing that could prevent from it so the question was about the HDMI on the board and getting image from the HDMI currently only the PCC line is connected for the idea of the information and it's having the image over the HDMI is a complex topic and for now it's out of our current scope sorry


James Connolyd yn ond, mae'n gwneud 155 yr ysgol ar y bydd yma ar 1868, a mae'n ddim yn oed yn dda i'r ymdano i'r hunan yn ystod. Mae'n 16 oed yn yr ymdano i'r ymdano i'r ymdano i Brithwyr yn cymryd. A'r Lennon yn ystod, rydyn ni'n fath o gweithio'n gweithio'n gwrthodd ymddangos ar y llyw o'r fath, .. a, ond, yma, yw'n cant i ddweud yr hyn yn ei ddeithas. Ac mae'n ceisio i James Connolly yma. Mae'n dweud yn gweld llawer o ddeithas... .. o bwrth gwrs, o ddod, sympath. O bwrth sympath, yma. Mae'n dweud yn ymwybod a'u dweud o'r lleol... .. mae'n gwybod hyn yn y bwyd... .. mae'n dweud o'r wybod bwyd. Mae'n grwmp othen yma yma a'r weech... .. eiswyd agurio, oedd, oedd, oedd... ac yn ymwneud y bydd y sgol. Felly, mae'n gofyn i gyd yn ymwyntio'r wath. Felly, mae'n gweithio ym 1868, oherwydd, yn Calgate, yn Edinburgh, yn ysgol i fynd i'r awrthau virus, yn ysgol i'r ardal, yn ysgol i'r ardal yn ysgol i'r ardal, mae'r frysgau'r ardal yn ymwyno i'r carter, ac mae'n gweithio'r ardal i'r amser o'r edrych, oherwydd o'r edrych ffordd. Mae'n gweithio'r sgol o'r 10 o 11, a dwi'n mynd i'r ei wneud i'r hoffa o dod o'r 11 yr adrodd 14. Fy hoffa i'r hyfforddiad yng Nghymru. Ond, y cwlau yn gyffredinol yn ysgrifiannol i'r hyfforddiad, yn Marksys, a'n mynd i'r hoffa o'r hoffa o'r hoffa, yn ffwrdd, mae hwn yn dweud o'r cynhyrchu a'r arddangoddegol o'r ddod o'r hyfforddiad ac yn llyfr. Rhywodd, mae'r hoffa o'r hoffa o'r hoffad o'r hoffa, S Deshalb, mae'n dweud o'r hwysio'r complex, a'r age of 14, ond dyna'i'n mynd i ymddai os yng Ngomroed dweud ac sefydlu'r Parae Brifes, dweud gweld i'r pwysig o'r hyffordi ar y dynod o yma, gweld i ddweud o'r awrfer y taith gyntaf o'r iawn, os yw o'r awrfer, i gyrmwys i ddweud o'r awrfer o'r awrfer o'r Cynyddu agofiant, i hynny sefydlu'r yma, Even of his years at the age of 14 would have been a revolutionary Irish nationalist because of these events which were radicalising the Irish population. But actually it's not a contradiction really. A lot of young Irishmen at that time would have joined the British Army precisely to learn how to use a gun with the intention of one day turning it on the British Empire itself. It was a fact that the Liverpool regiment that he joined they actually kept the guns and ammunition under lock and key because they didn't actually trust the majority of Irishmen who were in that regiment. And it was as part of the British army that he went to Ireland for the first time. He went to various parts of Ireland he ended up in Dublin and he would have met the Irish workers for the first time, gone to socialist meetings and that's also where he met his future wife Lillie Reynolds. yw'r cyfnodau oedd yma sy'n raddicolol wedi bod yn ystod yn cyfnodd ac yn ystod yn ystod yng nghymru yng Nghymru, a'r clywed y clywedau a'r clywedau i'w gynnyddio, rydym wedi bod yn gwneud o'n amlwgau yn y tŷ o Cynulliad Cynulliad Cynulliad Cynulliad, a'r ysgawdd ym ni'n gyngor, yn gwybod y cysylltiadol. Cynulliad Cynulliad Cynulliad Cynulliad yn ystod, os wrth hyn yn ei gwaith, mae'r byw yn bwyr mewn i'r gweithio bryd yn bwyr, mae'r byw yn bwyr o'r economiaf, lle yn ddiolch yn llafodol yn y lle. Mae'r byw yn bwyr yn bwyr, mae'n bwyr o'r byw yn bwyr o'r byw. Mae'n golygu o'n sesio ar y byw y Rhyw Llywodraeth, ac mae'n partad hon yn gweithio'r gweithio yma yn y fawr iawn. Mae gweithio'r byw yn gweithio'r gweithio ar y byw yn bwyr, island which started from the Norman conquest and this was not simply a national imposition it was not simply the imposition of political rule over island but you had the imposition of a new set of property relations of feudal and capitalist property relations upon island which previously existed in a you had forms of primitive communism existing in islands until very late in the historical record but yeah so you had this the imposition of these absentee landlords and the majority of the population were dispossessed and one thing to always understand the persistence of the Irish question the national question in island comes down to the fact that the connection with England was always a source of backwardness for islands this is one of the most important things particularly since 1801 with the union you had Irish industry in Cyprian Irish industry was crushed by competition from British imports except for a little bit in in the north around Belfast you had a bit of linen industry shipbuilding and so forth for them up for the most part island was held in a condition of agricultural backwardness supplying the new manufacturing towns in in England and therefore the majority of people simply to survive had to hold on to the land and you had this subdivision of the land into tiny little parcels and this absentee landlord class that developed a system of rack renting where they took huge amounts of the produce but gave nothing back to island keeping it in this condition of backwardness and by the 60s and 70s by Connelly's youth nothing had fundamentally changed really you still have this absentee landlord class but the world market was making itself more and more felt upon Irish agriculture competition from Argentina the United States was pushing down food prices but these rents were still being extracted and the the tenant farmers were unable to pay the rent so you had the explosion of class war in the 1870s on the countryside in Ireland the organisation of the land league under people like Michael David and Charles Stuart Parnell who yeah and you had this real intense period of class war where the the tenant farmers and the labourers were involved in withholding rent refusing to hand over agricultural produce and boycotting the most vile landlords and so forth in fact the word boycott actually comes from this period and yeah and yet the leadership of course was under middle class leadership basically people like Parnell and the Irish party were basically demanding they were demanding land acts and they were demanding some form of home rule some sort of Irish parliament and the liberal government at the time were completely unable to crush this movement and therefore they were forced to use they used all sorts of oppression Parnell was thrown in prison but Gladstone's government had to go negotiate him whilst with him whilst he was being held in Kilmaine and prison and he agreed he made a massive mistake he agreed to call off the land war and diverted the struggle into parliamentary means he was given all sorts of promises about a land act and a home rule bill but it was completely of course betrayed by the by the liberals and in fact the liberals went even further and using a really hypocritical pretext they demanded of the Irish party because of some scandal involving Parnell that they get rid of their leader they get rid of Parnell basically and they obliged the parliamentarians obliged they got rid of Parnell at the beckon call of the of the ruling class in Britain basically they betrayed their own leader if you like so this was these are the sort of events which would have been forming Connolly's consciousness intense class war coming under a middle class leadership and the middle class leadership itself betraying the movement and yeah so um yeah i have to be a little bit telegraphic here but in 1889 Connolly goes AWOL actually he leaves the the British army and he returns to to Scotland eventually making his way to Edinburgh and bringing his family over and he meets a guy called John Leslie and John Leslie for the first time induces him into the Marxist movement he wrote a wonderful little pamphlet actually on the Irish question and you can see the influence of this man on Connolly's ideas um and yeah Connolly really absorbed Marxist ideas into his into into his flesh really um now i don't have much time to really go into his his this period of his life but he uh he quickly became the centre of the Marxist movement the Scottish Socialist Federation in Edinburgh and also the independent Labour Party he stood in elections and he found himself victimised um and struggling to support his family he basically decided to go full time for the movement at this point and an advert was put out in justice the the Marxist paper in Britain and he was delighted to get a response uh from the Dublin Socialist Society actually got back in touch with him it was mostly an organisation a small organisation based in Dublin asked him to come over and turn their little group into a serious revolutionary organisation uh something he was delighted obviously to do so he he went over to Dublin with his family and he founded through a process of discussion um he he won over these young people to his own outlook if you like on the the the relationship between the national question and the class question and founded out of these discussions a new party called the Irish Socialist Republican Party and this party represents an absolute it's an absolutely unique party in Irish history up until this point um because all previous parties have basically seen the national struggle the struggle for self-determination in Ireland and the the class struggle the struggle for socialism um as basically two fundamentally separate and different struggles if you like uh all previous parties have essentially done this and Connolly not only um if you like fuse these two things he actually analysed the reasons if you like that these things had become radically separated and he showed it was the it was the role the historical role of the the middle class basically in Ireland the role that it had played uh caused this situation to develop and uh i'll quote from a number of articles here this is from erin's hope which was a collection of articles written in the 1890s where he explains this situation he says that the the Irish middle class uh by virtue of their social position and education stepped to the front as Irish patriot leaders they owed their wealth to the manner in which they had contrived to wedge themselves into a place in the commercial life of the Saxon enemy assimilating his ideas and adopting his methods so he showed how the Irish capitalist class really uh simply always really just formed a cog in the in the greater machine of British capitalism it was extremely dependent upon British capitalism um and then he goes on that uh their political influence they derived from their readiness at all times to do lip service to the cause of Irish nationality which in their phraseology meant simply the transfer of the seat of government from London to Dublin and the consequent transfer to their own or their relatives pockets of some portion of the legislative fees and lawyers pickings so he shows that really the basis of the nationalism if you like of the middle class in Ireland was a really just to sort of gain for themselves certain of the privileges which which or were currently with the British capitalist class that it was for that reason alone that they were uh um or for sentimental purely sentimental reasons that they sort of adopted nationalism and took up the leadership of the national struggle and he concludes with such men at the helm it is no wonder that the patriot parties of Ireland have always ended their journey upon the rocks of disaster the rock of disaster so you can see that what is being described here is uh a weakened dependent bourgeoisie dependence upon British capitalism uh which is unable to really carry out the basic bourgeois democratic tasks such as land reform such as protective barriers to protect Irish industry which would have been the consequence of a serious struggle for national self-determination and in in this what he what what he's doing Connelly is he's foreshadowing actually conclusions which were much broader really but the same fundamental conclusions that were made by Trotsky 10 years later in his writings on the the theory of the permanent revolution in the context of Russian capitalism talking about how that took there too you had a week and dependent bourgeoisie dependence upon international finance capital again particularly French finance capital and who were prepared to sort of come to a compromise with the old ruling class with the aristocracy with the landlords and so forth and were not capable of carrying on a consistent struggle for the rights of the nations to self-determination for democracy for the real basic the capitalist development of the country which the capitalist class in other countries had had achieved in in the the great bourgeois revolutions in previous periods but he makes this even more explicit in some of his later writings so this is from the introduction of uh to uh labor in Irish history Connelly says that the development of the system of capitalist society leads inevitably to the increase in conservatism of the non-working class element and so the revolutionary vigor and power of the working class so he also points out another element here this is in 1910 you'll see the context of this later on which is that the as as the as capitalism develops and it develops a revolutionary working class the capitalist class has another reason to step back from a serious struggle uh for you know away from its sort of um from revolution if you like and become increasingly conservative and he goes on that the middle class growing up in the midst of the national struggle and at one time as in 1798 he's referring to the united irishman uprising led by wolf tone uh through the stress of the economic rivalry of england almost forced into the position of revolutionary leaders against the political despotism of their industrial competitors have now also bowed the knee to Baal and have a thousand economic strings in the shape of investments binding them to english capitalism as against every sentimental or historic attachment drawing them towards a irish patriotism and he concludes importantly only the irish working class remain as the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for freedom in ireland so he sees that if the as the bourgeoisie have been completely reactionary um it is left to the working class to carry on the struggle not just for social demands not just for economic betterment of the working class but against every form of national humiliation for every democratic right that has yet to be won that the bourgeoisie of having abdicated that struggle but he goes he explains uh and and similarly uh with uh trotski if you like that the working class isn't simply going to stop at the creation of a of a capitalist republic if you like it's going to go on to complete uh the socialist revolution and therefore he raises the slogan of a socialist republic of a workers republic and again this is a once more from the 1890s uh in in a famous article called socialism and nationalism he makes this explicit he says that if you remove the english army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over doubling castle unless you set about the organisation of the socialist republic your efforts will would be in vain england would still rule you she would rule you through her capitalists through her landlords through her financiers through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs so yeah um the problem was at this time however the majority of socialist parties up until this point had not connected the need for a revolutionary party of the working class to fight for both the socialist tasks and these democratic tasks and to take up the question the mantle of the fight for national self-determination which was a key task um and uh in fact they for the most part saw this as a concession to nationalism if you like and most parties at this time uh that were present in island socialist parties were connected to their british counterparts like the independent labour party in the social democratic federation and um yeah this was in this was in spite of the fact that uh uh marks and engels in fact had taken up the question of the need for irish uh independence and they had done so not from the point of view obviously of irish nationalism but from the point of view of the interests of the world revolution and from the interests of the socialist revolution and they laid out a number of reasons why it was necessary for socialists particularly in britain to defend the right of self-determination for the irish people on the one hand they would they saw that a strike for self-determination in ireland would mean uh an agricultural revolution and the death of landlordism in ireland which would inevitably mean the death of landlordism in britain and death and and would start would be the beginning really of a socialist the socialist revolution in england um but they also saw uh that it would clear the decks if you like of all of the national prejudice and hatred which had been stirred up as a result of the enforced possession of ireland by uh by britain um because as you had seen with with the one of the only places to go for the impoverished irish people was to emigrate and you had a large amount of emigration particularly to britain and in every city you had a little island you had a an irish working class alongside the english workers and this this continued connection with ireland was a deep source obviously of tremendous animosities and the bourgeoisie knew how to use this to divide the english and the irish working class and therefore marx and engels uh raised uh the the necessity of uh separation uh possibly uh followed by federation down the line but um yeah and in this lenin argued along very similar lines in connection to to russia um and he pointed out that and in a lot of polemics such as for example his polemics with rosa luxenberg who was an honest revolutionary and was struggling against polish nationalism in particular but in that struggle she went too far in the struggle against polish nationalism she denied the needs for the particularly the russian party to take up the question of the right of nations to self-determination and uh lenin explains that as as well as the the nationalism of the small oppressed nation there is also another nationalism if you like which almost is hidden um is or is under the sort of false flag of internationalism it is possible to slip into the position of defending a far more reactionary nationalism that is the nationalism of the oppressor nation the big nation of russia over poland in the case where lenin was polemicising with rosa luxenberg but in the case of a lot of british socialists in arguing against connelly's position they were really defending the forced um connection between england and island and really were defending the position of british imperialism essentially um and uh yeah so however i mean from the point of view of the irish socialist republican party the proof of the pudding was in the eating uh this was uh this party had a massive impact despite the fact it was almost entirely a youth organisation it never had more than 100 members but it had a high political level under connelly's leadership and it had a tremendous impact within the island in the jubilee protests against the jubilee queen victoria's jubilee it shot actually to international fame by organizing protests of thousands of people through dublin it participated in the bore war protests and even as a byproduct you had after parnel the irish party had fallen apart the bourgeois nationalist seeing the rise of the irish socialist republican party were forced to sort of fuse their ranks again and formed under the leadership of john redmond the the irish parliamentary party almost in fear and there's this constant thing this is a recurring theme of the of the bourgeois nationalist the constitutional nationalist losing the leadership of the national struggle to more radical elements to the working class elements if you like this was something that spurred them on now connelly of course was an internationalist and he was tremendously proud of the fact that in 1900 the irish working class for the first time was represented at an international congress by the delegates of the isrp but what he saw there was a split down the middle of the world working class movement at the paris conference and a split between reform and revolution between the genuine marxist elements and those moving in the direction of opportunism and connelly and the irish party were always on the left of the international and in fact it was in part to take up the struggle against opportunism that connelly first went on a speaking tour in britain and later in america and eventually he moved to america for seven years between 1903 and 1910 obviously i'm not going to be able to go into everything that happened in the course of those seven years sadly um rather i'll speak about what was going on in ireland whilst he was away this time in ireland um the period whilst connelly was away was a period of intense class struggle um the beginning of which was heralded by the the arrival of jim larkin in belfast uh who went over there sent over by the national union of dock labourers to organise the the unorganised workers there and larkin very quickly organised hundreds of dockers and brought them out on strike and unlike a lot of the more conservative british trade union leaders he took every spark of discontent and deliberately whipped it up into a huge firestorm through the means of the sympathetic strike bringing one section of workers after another out in solidarity with each other taking any grievance to sort of really intensify the class struggle and he terrified larkinism as it was called terrified the the irish ruling class who began to use the the sectarian cards that was there that was what they used to basically try and divide the working class along religious lines but they failed at this time in belfast in 1907 when you had this great strike in fact it was it was themselves who found themselves split the ruling class and their their organizations in connelly sorry not connelly larkin even managed to get the police to come out on strike and mutiny so it really struck terror into the hearts of the of the ruling class and obviously connelly was in america looking at these events going on and was desperate to really return to the scene of the fight essentially now the the the struggling belfast at the end of the day was sold out by the british trade union leaders basically this they went over the heads of larkin and the other workers in belfast and signed a deal with the bosses independently which infuriated larkin really embitted him and he founded the irish transport and general workers union as a result and this really starts a new chapter in the in the history of the irish working class and opens up a period really of intense class struggle in irelands and not just in irelands this is also a period of intense class struggle rising in britain the great unrest you have you have miners being shot in south wales you have strikes across britain and in ireland itself you have a huge explosive growth of the transport workers union in the in the in this period in 1911 it has 4 000 members by 1913 it has 300 000 members it's grown almost by 100 times over that's the that's the the the the degree to which everything is sort of been whipped up and the bosses are terrified and they begin organising they begin organising to to meet larkinism head on and to smash the transport workers union and so connelly returns in this context in 1910 and he goes he starts with a speaking tour for the socialist party of ireland which was founded by former members of the irish socialist republican party but yeah it's a very different it's a very different country in a lot of respects in in many of the places that he goes he finds himself being attacked by mobs that have been whipped up by local politicians local businessmen and groups like the ancient order of hebernians in other words a sort of catholic sectarianism you know they're attacking him as an atheist he's a he's a free thinker whenever he's in belfast he's a he's a catholic and so forth so he's obviously got nothing to do with religion it's a class question at the end of the day but the bosses you know the so-called nationalist progressive bourgeoisie here you show their real faces you know whipping up catholic sectarianism as the answer to sort of the protestant sectarianism that's been whipped up by the bosses in belfast and yeah he's met by these these sort of mobs in a number of places but yeah before the bourgeoisie really has time to have a showdown and with the transport workers union with the with the working class which increasingly Dublin's becoming the centre of the transport workers union the workers are organising to a greater and greater extent then a new crisis breaks out and a crisis which isn't altogether unconnected actually to the the growing class struggle in Ireland in this period because as I mentioned the towards the end of the 19th century with the declining importance of the if you like the the landlord class and the growing importance of finance capital the british ruling class decides to pass a number of land acts that basically pensioned off the old landlord class in in in islands and as a result they start moving in the direction of reform of granting reforms like home rule like the idea of an irish parliament and you have a home rule bill is passing through the parliament in 1912 but of course the context has now changed they're no longer able to grant reforms it becomes completely intolerable the idea of granting home rule to island in the context of a tremendous class struggle in islands and britain they could they see this as only I mean the possibility basically of a socialist revolution in islands and facing a socialist islands right next to their shores and therefore the ruling class begin preparing a rebellion against this home rule bill which looks like it's going to pass through parliament and the Tory parties at the vanguard of this rebellion against home rule they you have edward carson lord carson goes over to Ulster in the north and begins arming the Ulster volunteers basically a reactionary organisation much like the black hundreds in russia it's a lumpen organisation with aristocrats actually in the leadership and tens of thousands of the of the most backward layers in belfast are organised into this this Ulster volunteers and guns are imported in their tens of thousands to arm the to arm these groups meanwhile in reaction to this you have nationalist groups start to arm themselves then the liberal you know then the government comes down and stops arms imports into into islands but yeah you have a rebellion is being is being organised and at the cura you have a mutiny led by the tops of the army refusing to to obey the government basically and the liberal government at this time is softly is taking a very softly softly approach with this sort of mutiny by the by the the capitalist class basically so you see that the capitalist class always preach that the working class must follow constitutional norms must go through parliamentary means and so on but of course when it's a crisis which really affects their vital interests they showed as in 1912 1913 that they will they will use any unconstitutional non-constitutional extra parliamentary measures necessary but what was the response of this you know the nationalist bourgeoisie in in ireland what was the the nationalist middle class well john redmond actually started to go into negotiations directly with lord carston about the question of what they called home rule within home rule which basically meant a deal where uh carston and and you know the the the the bourgeoisie the unionist bourgeoisie in the north could could lord it over create a sectarian stateler if they want in the north and they can lord it over the the workers the workers there as long as the nationalist bourgeoisie in the south could lord it over the workers there basically in other words partitioning ireland this is what they began negotiating for and connelly said that this would this was a complete betrayal and the working class had to resist this even if it at the cost of their own lives because uh to partition ireland would mean a carnival of reaction in fact that has been the whole history of ireland since partition has been particularly in the north well two sectarian states were formed after the partition of ireland um but further more than this the the the nationalist bourgeoisie was starting to take advantage of the fact that you had pogroms in the north you had catholics being kicked out of their jobs and not just catholic trade unionists socialists were being kicked out of their jobs you had this general reaction in in belfast and the bosses in dublin began preparing to use the fact that the working class was on the defensive to strike their own blow and in august 1913 led by a the biggest capitalist really and a former nationalist mp william martin murphy 400 bosses in dublin locked out their workers um larkin was imprisoned and they they demanded of the workers that they resigned their membership of the transport workers union and 100 000 workers in their family were families were basically starved this was the methods of the bosses to starve the workers into submission to stop them from yet to break their organization and this really at this point connelly came down to dublin with larkin imprisoned to lead this struggle but this showed the real division uh within the you know the so-called nationalist camp because on the one hand you had you had the bosses uh you had armed scabs which were being brought over from britain to fight against the strikers and the pickets uh the the the upper echelons of the catholic church and many of the bourgeois the right-wing bourgeois nationalists like the likes of shin fein um leader arthegriffith and others like this uh and then of course the british state all in one camp and on the other side you had the transport workers union the working class of dublin and all of the the most revolutionary elements within the intelligentsia and the petty bourgeoisie um uh revolutionary the most revolutionary republicans began coming over to the side of connelly and the transport workers union and the side of the working class um and in in self-defence against these armed scabs you had for the first time the organization of the irish citizens army uh under the leadership of captain jack white i think it was and uh and james connelly um this was really a monumental step in in european working class history because it was the first time that you had the organization of a red guard uh anywhere as far as i can as far as i'm aware um workers arming themselves in self-defence against the the police against the uh the scabs that were being used by the bosses but ultimately the the thing went down to defeat um well i say a defeat uh the tuc in britain completely sabotaged the movement the only thing that could have made for a success of the on the side of the workers would have been if you'd have had sympathetic action in britain and indeed you had had spontaneous action uh in some among some of the dock workers in in birmingham i think some trans some railway workers refused to move irish goods and you had mass meetings i think there was something like 25 000 people came out to to a meeting in manchester um so the working class in britain showed tremendous instinctive class solidarity hundreds of thousands of pounds were raised to feed the starving uh people of working class of dublin and families even offered to take children into their homes to uh to look after these starving children um and the thing went down really to a stalemate though because the tuc refused to call coordinated action and the result was that uh whilst the bosses didn't get what they want um the working class uh began returning to you had a return to work by the start of 1914 um the transport workers union was uh bloody but unbowled um and so you'd had a stalemate essentially but at a tremendous cost for the working class uh incredible suffering that winter for the workers of dublin um but before long before you even have time to before the people even had time to draw breath a new crisis is starting to develop in europe of course um at the and in august 1914 you have the outbreak of the first world war um and uh a shocking situation because previously all of the leaders of the social democracy all the workers leaders across europe had promised to resist this war by any means necessary they'd all signed declarations and and so on and so forth and now you had the majority of the workers leaders were supporting this war uh in in germany uh the official social demo uh well we had a discussion on friday nights about that uh in france in one country after another only in a number of a small number of countries in in russia in syrbia and in islands did you have the leadership of the workers movement refusing to support their bourgeoisie uh in this bloody slaughter and connelly immediately understood the significance of this and was extremely embitted about this betrayal he said uh these are his words he says what then becomes of all our resolutions all our protests of fraternisation all our threats of general strikes all our carefully built machinery of internationalism all our hopes for the future were they all a sound and fury signifying nothing um but it wasn't just the leadership of the of the workers leaders if you like the betrayed you also had the the bourgeois nationalists uh the so-called uh the constitutional so-called nationalists people like john redmond and the home rule uh bourgeoisie uh also supporting britain in this war uh this this war for the self-determination of small nations like belgian with all their colonial possessions uh under the promise that if they did if they loyally supported the british empire during the war after the war they would get their independence and they would be rewarded for their uh civility not only that but redmond who'd managed to wangle his way into the leadership of the irish volunteers this nationalist force that had organised in to defend home rule against the austra volunteers um he even offered the service of the irish volunteers to go and fight in belgium actually and this resulted in a split in that organisation and the irish republican brotherhoods which was a revolutionary secretive organisation occupied the offices of the volunteers and the the organisation split about 15 000 went with the irish republican brotherhoods um but connolly as soon as he heard the news of the outbreak of the war it's incredible if you read his articles in august 1914 the conclusions he has already drawn he's already on the path to an insurrection against the british rule and against british capitalism um he already had drawn this conclusion within days of hearing about the outbreak of the war which placed connolly in a tiny in a camp of a tiny minority within the international workers movement a tiny minority who understood who were not just opposed to the war from pacifist reasons but knew that the only way to end the war was to turn it into a civil war was to basically turn it into a a class war uh and this was the same conclusion drawn by trotsky in vienna uh lenin in zeurich and a handful of other revolutionary genuine revolutionary internationalists and these are these are connolly's words he says this is in august 1914 i believe he says should the working class of euro rather than slaughter each other for the benefit of kings and financiers tomorrow proceed uh proceed tomorrow to erect barricades all over europe to break up bridges and destroy the transport service that war might be abolished we should be just perfectly justified in following such a glorious example and contributing our aid to the final dethroment of the vulture classes that rule and rob the world um but for him it wasn't just words he wasn't just uh i mean everyone was in in theory in favour of a revolution that brought an end to the war now even probably the official leaders of the social democracy in germany were probably in favour of it as long as you know as long as the uh the british workers started it or the russian workers started it if you like connolly wasn't simply a fatalist uh he he understood that it was the revolutionary duty of the irish working class and of the leadership of the irish working class to to act and act alone if necessary is words where the time for island's battle is now the place for island's battle is here and by such means he goes on island may yet set the torch to a european conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture will be shriveled on the funeral pyre of the last warlord um so you can see he has a he has a concept of a revolution in ireland uh that will bring an end to the war that will start the european wide revolution which is quite clearly a socialist revolution that's the content of it and connolly was uh extremely uh had a real sense of urgency about the need for this this uprising and uh you can see that where this stemmed from um connolly was very much aware of the possibility of striking too soon if if an interaction came too soon that it could fail but he'd also um he'd also studied irish history and he'd seen that in 1848 uh in 1882 uh in a number of occasions particularly under the middle class leadership you'd had situations where the the middle class leaders had talked and talked and talked and talked and then they had let slip a possibility to deliver a blow to british imperialism and that window would remain closed for another generation um and he saw that now that you had the war uh british imperialism was extremely exposed because its army was stretched all across the western front and there was an there was a limited window of opportunity to strike a blow and each day that passed uh saw um in uh saw uh if you like uh a real threat a real sword of damocles uh standing over the the working class particularly the threat of conscription um in ireland which was to come up again later but all all sorts of threats you have democratic rights that have been acquired over decades of struggle were being got rid of overnight um every day tens of thousands of socialist workers were slaughtering each other and then of course very ominously in ireland you have creeping prices going upwards and with the with the landlords having been pensioned off as i mentioned it wasn't going to be the tenant farmers now who would starve from a new famine it would be the irish working class that would starve the working class being the the class which has the future of humanity in its hands he saw that the future was one of socialism or barbarism basically and he could see the elements of barbarism in the situation so there was real there was a i mean what i'm trying to explain what i'm trying to get across is the reasons for this sense of urgency if you like gripping uh uh connelly um the only question was would the working class be ready for an insurrection would the working class be ready for a new uprising um now i want to address finally before coming on to the easter uprising itself one uh very uh pernicious uh distortion i think of connelly's ideas and this is something that the the the author of the best biography of of connelly that i'm aware of um c desmond grieves perpetuates the idea that he made um like an 11th hour conversion to a basically a conception of the uprising which was an uprising for a bourgeois republic basically and that he either converted to simple fhenian style republicanism or that he had become an unconscious Stalinist and was basically in favour of a a struggle for national self-determination first and then somewhere down the line uh you know the delay eventually you'd have a struggle for socialism when the conditions have matured the stages approach which is put across by uh uh Stalinists um well this is completely contradicted by any of uh if the the concept his conception of the of the revolution of the insurrection is it's contradicted by his writings all the way up until really you have the outbreak of the easter uprising um this is from january 1916 this is what he says uh in a in an article entitled what is our program which was aimed at the rank and file of the the uh the volunteers he said we realised that the power of the enemy to hurl his forces upon the forces of islands would lie at the mercy of the men who control the transport system of islands we saw that the hopes of island as a nation rested upon the due recognition of the identity of interest between that ideal and the rising hopes of labour um and uh yeah further further uh we have an explanation here of what had frustrated this possibility of such an insurrection and he blames he places the blame upon the so-called patriotic capitalist class uh the uh um you know the progressive bourgeoisie that the Stalinist would have exists he said that uh how do we not been attacked and betrayed by by many of our ffervent advanced patriots had they not been so anxious to destroy us so willing to applaud even the british government when it attacked us had they stood by us and pushed our organisation all over island it would now be in our it would now be in our power at a word to crumple and demoralise every offensive move of the enemy against the champions of irish freedom had we been able to carry out all of our plans as such an irish organisation of labour alone could carry them out we could at a word have created all the conditions necessary of striking a successful blow whenever the military arm of island wished to move now what is being described there in my opinion is an insurrection which is connected to a revolutionary general strike that is what connelly is basically talking about that that was his conception of of how an insurrection in ireland could take place um the problem was uh there are two factors which were not present at that time which are necessary for such an insurrection to be possible on that basis and they were on the one hand uh and this is something that is explained by trotsky and his history of the russian revolution there's a chapter on the art of insurrection and he says that you need to um on the one hand have an organisation which involves the mass of the workers basically brings them into the the mass element of the insurrection um such an organisation can't be brought into existence willy nilly uh it is the product of a revolutionary period itself uh soviets workers councils or or what have you um but it also what is also necessary is a party of the working class a revolutionary marxist organisation with educated marxist cadars at all level of the labour movement in the in in soviets or organizations like that within the unions within groups like the citizens army the transport workers union you would have needed a party like that to to coordinate basically the mass side of the insurrection and the conspiratorial military technical side of the insurrection if the two are to be harmonized and brought together as they were in the october insurrection in 1917 in russia there was only one problem with that and that was the fact that conley had no experience of the russian revolution because it didn't happen until a year and a bit later um it's very easy with with hindsight to explain how a successful insurrection can take place but what has to be understood is that the october revolution in russia was only possible on the basis of the failed 1905 revolution it was only but uh possible on the basis actually of innumerable attempts of uprisings insurrections i mean lenin talks about in left-wing communism how the bolshevism was the product of an unprecedented period of vast different experiences in in russia from 1903 to 1917 um the rapid alteration alternation between legal and illegal forms of work um and so on in other words this experience was absent for for conley he didn't have access to it and furthermore and this i think really increases his stature it doesn't diminish it all of the conclusions he drew on the national question the need for an insurrection uh the character of that insurrection were the product of his own independent creative thinking he had no contact with lenin with trotsky with rozerluxberg with the other great revolutionaries of europe of uh of the european marxist movement at that time and as a result uh he was he was forced therefore to uh to to compromise on on this uh this conception of an insurrection and to come to an agreement with the irish republican brotherhoods which had basically infiltrated the irish volunteers uh because they had far bigger forces he simply didn't have the forces to carry out this insurrection there were 300 members in the irish citizens army the the volunteers had um about 15 000 did i say 300 in the eyes yeah so they had about 15 000 members uh the problem was that this organisation did not have the same conception as conley of a of a politically prepared uh insurrection of a revolution they had a purely conspiratorial technique that it was a petty bourgeois organisation led by um you know very brave men uh people like patrick pierce josef blunkett and so forth um but they didn't have a clear class outlook a lot of their membership was working class but the the the class nature of the leadership was petty bourgeois uh and uh as such they had relied upon um uh yeah purely conspiratorial methods in fact after they had taken over the irish republican brotherhood took over the irish volunteers headquarters they deliberately left in place key moderates like oen mcneil at the leadership of this organisation to try and disguise the fact that they were preparing an insurrection by leaving these moderates in place but the the problem was not only might you disguise this from the british uh government you might disguise this from your own your own members uh from your potential allies people like conley who was actually preparing to go independently of the volunteers because he thought he thought that the irish republican brotherhoods were going to bottle it or make a botch of it um and therefore um yeah they left people like mcneil in the leadership of the irish volunteers which was a massive mistake um now the date of the uprising was set for east of sunday on nine in 1916 conley came to this agreement with the irish republican brotherhood but the problem was oen mcneil and other moderates were were eventually rumbled them but this that this conspiracy was in preparation and a countermanding order was sent which completely uh turned the thing into a disaster um it had a massive impact only a tenth of the irish volunteers came out one and a half thousand members came out uh they had to delay the uprising for a day monday the day after and there were other there were other unfortunate incidents there was a capture of arms that were being imported but nevertheless it was too late the thing had to go ahead because the arrests would have taken place and the thing would have been it would have been too late had they had they failed to strike and they did on on monday of east of week the the gpo uh became on o'connell street became the centre of the uh of the forces in dublin conley became the commandant of the forces in dublin and for six days they held out against the british forces i won't go into the technical details of the stir uprising uh the british were very were paralyzed at first uh but they eventually regrouped and uh they crushed the uprising a tremendous cost not just to the the the fighters but to dublin as a city was was turned was was set on fire um half of o'connell street was was was flattened the first building they they smashed was liberty hall the transport workers union headquarters and eventually after six days as I said the the revolutionaries had to surrender conley by this time had been mortally wounded he'd been hit in the uh in the ankle I believe and um um then uh at that time after the defeat of the these of the revolutionaries the the the the nationalist bourgeoisie were wholeheartedly on the side of the british cheering them on redmond the church all of the home rule press uh celebrated the british victory but very quickly they had to change their tune because the british were in for revenge at this point and they started a execution not just one or two of the leaders but uh one after another executing them executing them and then finally connelly himself was taken out already mortally wounded uh he was taken into a courtyard in kilmanum jail and he was strapped to a chair because he wasn't able to stand and uh he was shot dead and this this turned the mood of revulsion against against the british um but um yeah and uh and uh yeah that was uh as I say um now these events were misunderstood by a large number of people uh even so-called marxists people like plekinoff and raddeck uh in russia denounced these events as a putsch um and lenin had an answer for these people he it was at that point that he explains that uh you know unfortunately sorry to say but um when a crisis of capitalism emerges all of the different sources of rebellion aren't quite nice and harmonious enough to all go and flow into one stream all at once uh inevitably a period of revolution is uh is initiated by premature uprisings um and defeats setbacks um and he said that it's unfortunately revolutions don't happen where you have one army lines up over this side in favour of socialism another army lines up over that side in favour of imperialism and the two have it out and that's what a social revolution looks like he says such people pay lip service to socialist revolution um and when they don't even uh when they wouldn't know what it looked like if it bumped them on the nose that's not exactly what he said that's a paraphrase obviously um but as lenin explains the the real uh mis this is his this is what he said of the irish uprising he says it is the misfortune of the irish that they rose prematurely before the european revolt of the proletariat had come had had time to mature capitalism is not so harmoniously built that the various thought sources of rebellion can immediately merge of their own accord without reverses and defeats and that's precisely the the real um thing that was missing the working class or having had the stuffing knocked out of it in the Dublin uh lockout in 1913 it hadn't had time to recover its forces within a couple of years it had had time to recover its forces and there was a revolutionary movement exploded within islands you had in 1918 a massive general strike against the attempt to introduce conscription and a general election at which the irish parliamentary party was completely smashed um and shin fein rose uh on that basis why did shin fein uh managed to uh take the leadership if you like of the revolution in ireland it was because the labour leaders completely boycotted the election the leadership the second line uh and the third line of leadership within the labour movement in ireland was completely incapable of the task many of them were personally loyal to connelly but this was the biggest mistake i think of connelly's life was to to fail to build a bolshevik style party um of revolutionary cadres who could have led the working class in the socialist in a socialist revolution for which there was a huge potential in the period from 1919 through to 1922 instead the leadership fell to the petty bourgeois nationalist basically who diverted the whole thing into a guerrilla struggle and eventually it led with the betrayal and the partition of ireland into two sectarian states as i mentioned um so that uh that takes me over 50 minutes so i'm going to have to draw a line under that there uh there's plenty more that can be said but we can open it for a discussion now i think