The Execution That Turned Dublin Against Britain

The execution of James Connolly is one of the most haunting and consequential deaths in all of Irish history — the moment a dying, wounded man was strapped to a chair and shot by a firing squad, an act of such cold brutality that it helped turn a divided nation decisively against British rule and set Ireland on the road to independence. It is a story of a remarkable life, a doomed rebellion, and a death so cruel that even the men who carried it out were said to be shaken by it.

To understand it, you have to meet the man. James Connolly was not, as you might expect, born in Ireland at all — he was born in 1868 in the Cowgate, a desperately poor Irish immigrant slum in Edinburgh, Scotland. He grew up in grinding poverty, left school as a child, and as a young man even served for a time in the British Army. But he became one of the most brilliant and important socialist thinkers and labour organisers of his age — a self-educated writer, a founder of the modern Irish labour movement, and a tireless champion of the working poor on both sides of the Atlantic. For Connolly, the cause of Irish freedom and the cause of the working class were one and the same: he dreamed not just of an Ireland free from British rule, but of a socialist Irish republic that would belong to its ordinary people. And in Dublin, he built the Irish Citizen Army — originally formed to protect striking workers from police violence — into a disciplined revolutionary force.

By 1916, Connolly had joined with the nationalist leaders of the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood — men like the poet Patrick Pearse — in a daring and desperate plan: an armed rising against British rule, timed for Easter, while Britain was consumed by the First World War. Connolly was made a Commandant-General and one of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. And on Easter Monday, the 24th of April 1916, the rebels seized key buildings across Dublin, with their headquarters in the General Post Office, the GPO, on Sackville Street, and proclaimed an independent Irish Republic. Connolly was the military commander at the heart of it.

The Horror

The Rising was doomed almost from the start. The rebels were vastly outnumbered, and the British responded with overwhelming force, bringing artillery and even a gunboat up the Liffey to pound the rebel positions and reduce the centre of Dublin to rubble. Connolly was in the thick of the fighting, fearless, repeatedly venturing out into the bullet-swept streets to direct his men. And on one of these sorties, he was seriously wounded — shot in the leg, his ankle shattered by a bullet. He dragged himself back to the GPO and continued to command from a stretcher, even as the situation became hopeless. After nearly a week, with the city burning around them and no hope of victory, the leaders surrendered to save the lives of their followers and the civilians of Dublin.

And then came the reckoning. The British authorities, determined to crush Irish rebellion for good, moved swiftly and mercilessly. The leaders of the Rising were tried in secret courts-martial and sentenced to death. Over ten days in May 1916, at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, they were shot, one after another, by firing squad — the sound of the volleys, and the raising of the black flag over the prison, carrying to the shocked people of the city. Fourteen men were executed in Dublin. And the very last of the signatories to die were the two most difficult cases: Seán Mac Diarmada, and James Connolly.

Because Connolly was dying already. His shattered ankle had turned gangrenous; infection — septicaemia — had poisoned his blood. The doctor treating him in the emergency hospital set up at Dublin Castle assessed that the wounded man had, at most, only a day or two left to live. He was in agony, barely conscious, a man already at death’s door. By any measure of mercy, there was no need to execute him at all — nature would have taken him within hours. But the British commander, General Sir John Maxwell, was in a hurry. He knew that the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, was on his way to Dublin to put a stop to the executions, which were already causing disquiet. So Maxwell ordered that the sentences on the last signatories be carried out at once, before he could be stopped. And so, at dawn on the 12th of May 1916, the dying James Connolly was taken from his hospital bed, loaded into an ambulance, and driven to Kilmainham Gaol to be shot.

What happened next horrified everyone who heard of it. Connolly was so gravely wounded that he could not walk, could not stand, could barely sit up. He was carried from the ambulance into the Stonebreakers’ Yard of the prison on a stretcher. Before the end, a priest, Father Aloysius, attended him, and asked Connolly if he would pray for the men who were about to shoot him. Connolly’s reply became legendary — the words of a man without hatred even for his own executioners: “I will say a prayer for all brave men who do their duty.” And then came the final, terrible detail. Because Connolly could not stand to face the firing squad as the others had, the soldiers brought a chair. They sat the dying man in it — and when it was found that he was too weak even to sit upright unaided, they tied him to the chair, strapping his broken body upright against it so the firing squad would have their target. A white cloth was pinned over his heart to give them their mark. And there, bound to a chair in the corner of the prison yard, unable even to stand to meet his death, James Connolly was shot dead by a British firing squad. He was forty-seven years old. It is said that even hardened officials present were unsettled by what they had been made to do.

The Modern Relic

And it changed everything. When the Easter Rising began, the people of Dublin had been, in large part, against it — furious at the rebels for the death and destruction they had brought to the city. But the executions, drawn out over ten grim days, began to shift that feeling. And Connolly’s execution, above all — the image of a dying, wounded man carried out on a stretcher and tied to a chair to be shot — was, for many, the final straw. Sympathy hardened into anger, and anger into resolve. The dead leaders were transformed, almost overnight, from reckless troublemakers into martyrs, and the cause they had died for swept the nation. Within a few years, Ireland was engulfed in a War of Independence that would end British rule over most of the island and give birth to the Irish state. It has often been said that it was the executions of 1916 — and Connolly’s most of all — that truly won Irish independence. Maxwell had meant to crush the rebellion. Instead, by his cruelty, he had guaranteed its victory.

The relic still stands, and it is one of the most powerful and visited historic sites in all of Ireland. Kilmainham Gaol, where Connolly and his comrades were held and shot, is now a museum, preserved as a monument to the men and women who suffered and died there for Irish freedom. Visitors from around the world come to walk its grim corridors and cells, and to stand in the Stonebreakers’ Yard — the very execution yard — where two simple crosses now mark the spots where the leaders of the Rising were shot. One cross stands at the far end, where most of the men faced the firing squad standing. And the other cross stands alone in a corner, apart from the rest — marking the exact place where James Connolly, too weak to walk the final twenty yards to join the others, was tied to a chair and killed. You can stand before it today. James Connolly is buried at nearby Arbour Hill, remembered in Ireland not as the troublemaker the British hoped to erase, but as a founding martyr of the nation and one of the great heroes of the Irish working class — the wounded, dying man who forgave his killers, and whose execution in a chair so shocked the conscience of a country that it helped free it.

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