As my thoughts turn increasingly to the May elections, I remembered that James Connolly tried to get himself elected onto Belfast council in 1913 and thought it might be helpful to see if he offered any insights on how to approach the business. Family history has it that my maternal grandfather, a docker, was a member of Connolly’s Irish Socialist Republican Party.

The first lesson is a negative one. I have decided against trying to seize the local post office to use it as a base for an armed insurrection. It looks like a flimsy construction which would offer no protection from shellfire.

The 1913 election was Connolly’s second. In  1902 he stood in Dublin and issued a leaflet in Yiddish which is translated here. It is very good and was written by Boris Kahan, Secretary of the East London Jewish branch of the Social Democratic Federation.

Connolly’s manifesto for Belfast’s Dock Ward was surprisingly moderate in comparison.  He wanted the trams which workers used in mornings and evenings to be enclosed to offer protection from the city’s weather. He called for children to be fed in schools and that local authorities “should be empowered to make provision for the supply of at least one good meal per day to each child” in cases of poverty or neglect. He pointed out that “the children of the working class have as much right to be maintained thus as have the children of royalty”. 

He was in favour of directly employed council staff being used, a minimum wage and compulsory union membership for all council employees.

So far, so reformist. The ward he stood in was religiously mixed and Samuel Levenson’s unfortunately named biography James Connolly: socialist, patriot and martyr says that during the campaign reactionary Catholic hoodlums, we can assume encouraged by the clergy prevented the socialists from meeting in an area they controlled. The threat of similar violence from loyalist reactionaries kept them out of Protestant areas. I intend to avoid this risk by not having any meetings.

Although he was supported by his union and some members of the Independent Labour Party, Connolly stood as an independent and understood the necessity of putting forward a fuller programme. He did not pull his punches. In addition to telling voters that he believed “Ireland should be ruled, governed, and owned by the people of Ireland” he added that “I desire to see capitalism abolished, and a democratic system of common or public ownership erected in its stead” explaining that “Only by this means can we secure the abolition of destitution, and all the misery, crime, and immorality which flow from that unnecessary evil.”

More than a century later and there is nothing to disagree with there.

Connolly got 905 and lost to a unionist who got 1523. Not a bad result for an independent candidate putting forward a programme of abolishing capitalism.