James Connolly and Ulysses: a Joycean Stroll Through the Workers’ Republic

From 1898 to 1903 James Connolly was editor of Workers’ Republic, a Dublin newspaper that covered class politics and nationalist ambitions with a keen eye and caustic tone.

Its articles and editorials contain more than occasional crossovers with Ulysses, with some of the same people in politics, literature, and journalism strolling through the pages of each.

There are also familiar themes and events: the fall of Parnell and the campaign for Home Rule; the Boer War and Chamberlain; working class poverty and middle class inertia – a veritable riot of socialism, capitalism, bullocks and bards.

This walk will explore these links by taking a stroll through the class politics of Dublin in the early 1900s – a misshapen, goldbricking metropolis, tottering on the edge of empire.

It will also look at the lives of both men, two wandering rocks in the city they shared at the turn of the twentieth century.

Tour given by Conor McCabe, editor, The Lost and Early Writings of James Connolly, 1889-1898.

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Host or Publisher School of Thought Collective (Augustine O'Donoghue and Conor McCabe)