James Connolly (Song - A Great Crowd Had Gathered)

James Connolly is to this day loved, admired and revered by many us from all over the world and is one of my personal heroes from that period of time during the struggle for Irish Freedom and the rights of the working men and women in Ireland. James Connolly was co-founder of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA), founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, joint signatory of the 1916 Proclamation and Commandant-General, Dublin Division of the Army of the Irish Republic during the Easter Rising of 1916. James Connolly was 47 years of age when he was courts-martialed on 9th May 1916 by General Maxwell and his team, gathered around James Connolly's bedside at Dublin Castle on a charge of Armed Rebellion. On 12th May 1916, the same day as his fellow signatory to the Proclamation Seán Mac Diarmada, James Connolly was executed in Stonebreakers Yard at Kilmainham Gaol. Being unable to stand in front of the firing squad due to his wounds and medication, James Connolly was strapped to a chair and shot. James Connolly will always be remembered for his courage and his unfailing efforts to improve the rights of working men and women in Ireland together with his steadfast and unwavering belief that...to quote the great man... "The British Government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland, the presence, in any one generation of Irishmen, of even a respectable minority, ready to die to affirm that truth, makes that Government for ever a usurpation and a crime against human progress".