Speech by Lynda Walker, national chairperson, Communist Party of Ireland,
at the reopening of Connolly House, Dublin23 February 2007
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am proud to be here in Dublin to open Connolly House, and I want to thank you, comrades, my brothers and sisters, for giving me this job tonight.
I have three things to say. The first is that it is so appropriate that the building is named after James Connolly, a man of the working-class people, as much at home in Ireland and any part of the world where he was involved in class struggles. His writings are a heritage of the Irish working class and indeed in some instances of the British working class. And it is great to see Connolly’s writings in pamphlet form in the bookshop, making them more accessible to people.
Secondly, we stand here today at the dawn of a new century. Looking back at the beginnings of the past two centuries, we can observe a certain amount of progress, but progress that goes in a circle, repeating past transgressions of war, rape, and plunder. At the beginning of the last century James Connolly and Keir Hardie, Aleksandra Kollontai, Sylvia Pankhurst and others were warning of the war that became known as the First World War, a war that took millions of lives.
Just about four years ago people all over the world demonstrated against the impending war in Iraq, but to no avail. These masters have to listen and to end the bloody conflicts; and it is the responsibility of us all, the old and the young, to put an end to war. At this point in time we have the technology and the human power to build a world that is to the benefit of us all, not just the selfish few.
We must all realise that if we do not take this civilised and revolutionary road then not only will individual nations be ruined but our environment will also be destroyed. Connolly used the words of John Boyle O’Reilly to say, “Take heed of your progress, its feet are shod with the souls it slew, with its own pollutions, | Submission is good, but the order of God may flame the torch of the revolutions.”
Finally I want to say thanks to the workers who rebuilt Connolly House, those men and women who refurbished the place, those men who carried the hod and laid the bricks and mortar, like my own brother, who was a labourer on the building sites and who worked as a navvy on the road with Scottish, Welsh and Irish men. They are the salt of the earth—the asphalt of the earth.
I will finish with a verse of a poem by Joseph Brennan on “Divine Right.” (Connolly said that “the excellence of the sentiment must be held to atone for the poverty of the poetry.”)
The only right acknowledged
By the people living now,
Is the right to obtain honour
By the sweat of brain and brow.
The Right Divine of Labour
To be first of earthly things,
That the Thinker and the Worker
Are manhood’s only kings.
In the name of the common people of Ireland, of Johnny Nolan, Kathleen Morrissey, Sammy Warden, Bobby Fleck, Lily Anderson, Andy Barr, Lily and Seán O’Rourke, Betty Sinclair, Madge Davidson, Peter O’Connor, Hughie Moore, Johnny Mooney, Peadar O’Donnell, Frank and Bobbie Edwards, Micheal O’Riordan, and all those too numerous to mention who have gone before, I declare Connolly House open.
www.communistpartyofireland.ie/oscailt.html
