The Workers Party of Ireland commemorates the Easter Rising of 1916

Street barricades in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Uprising -- public domain image

Easter Oration: Workers Party of Ireland, 5^th April 2026

Comrades and friends,

The ideals of Easter 1916

Every year our Party, the Workers Party, commemorates the Easter Rising of 1916. This is far more than simply tradition. Today, we gather not only to remember the past. It is also about looking forward. The Easter Rising of 1916 occupies a unique place in our history: a moment whose political, cultural, and social reverberations far exceeded its military scale.

We recognise the struggles of those who fought for freedom, independence and equality, before 1916, in 1916, and afterwards, including all those comrades who dedicated their lives to building the Workers Party.

We highlight the relevance of historical struggles to contemporary challenges which inspire our continuing struggle for a new and better society. The Easter Rising was defeated militarily, but its ideals live on.

A century has passed since the 1916 Rising and provides us with an opportunity to reflect. The Easter Rising of 1916 was many things at once: a national revolt, a cultural awakening, and, most importantly, a declaration that the working people of Ireland deserved a future shaped by their own hands.

Today others will remember Easter 1916 but for different reasons and motives. For them the Rising will be portrayed as a purely nationalist rebellion stripped of the social vision that animated so many of its leaders. But we remember that James Connolly marched into the GPO not only with the dream of an independent Ireland, but with the conviction that independence without equality, that freedom which did not liberate the working class, would be a hollow victory.

Connolly’s vision

Connolly and the Citizen Army understood that political freedom is incomplete without economic freedom; that a flag alone cannot feed a family; that a republic worthy of the name must be built on solidarity and workers’ unity, not exploitation. Their vision was not simply to remove the British Empire from Ireland, but to remove an economic system, capitalism, which afflicted the lives of workers everywhere, those who toiled in factories, docks, fields, and lived in the poverty of tenements and rural hovels.

The Rising was a revolt against the social order of the time, an order marked by poverty, exploitation, and profound inequality. Dublin in 1916 was a city of over-crowded and dangerous tenements, where infant mortality rivalled that of the poorest cities in Europe, and where the working class, suffering chronic unemployment, acute deprivation and appalling social conditions, bore the brunt of oppression and exploitation.

V.I. Lenin was appalled by socialists who described the Easter Rising as a “putsch” carried out by “petty-bourgeois” nationalist dreamers and failed to understand its significance. Lenin, on the contrary, embraced the Rising as a decisive “blow against the power of English imperialism”. Lenin understood that Connolly’s aims in joining the Rising included striking a blow against the imperialist war that was costing the lives of millions of workers and that he wanted to remind socialists of the internationalist duty that most of them had abandoned on the outbreak of war, thereby incorrectly substituting workers’ unity for nationalism.

James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army brought an explicitly class‑conscious dimension to the Rising. Connolly understood that political independence alone could not remedy the conditions experienced by the working class. His vision of a republic was not merely a change of flag or administration; it was a total transformation of society itself. Of course, many of the participants in the Rising held diverse views, however, the Proclamation of the Republic, read outside the GPO, contains the unmistakable imprint of Connolly’s influence: its commitment to “equal rights and equal opportunities,” its pledge to cherish “all the children of the nation equally”, and its demand for "the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland".

Yet the social programme envisioned by the Citizen Army did not become the dominant force in subsequent political developments. Instead, the emergent state prioritised the national bourgeoise over radical social and economic transformation. The cherished ideals remained, and remain, unfulfilled.

A world of imperialist war

Today, as in 1916 the world faced the plague of imperialist wars. Today, as then, the world was marked by open military conflict, geopolitical brinkmanship and intense competition among the world’s imperialist powers. From Eastern Europe to the Middle East, from the South China Sea to the Sahel, war has reasserted itself as a central mechanism through which states pursue economic and strategic interests. For us, imperialist wars are not accidents, they are not aberrations, but structural features of a global system driven by competition and profit.

Imperialism is not simply an aggressive foreign policy. It is the global expression of capitalism in its advanced stage. When capital accumulates beyond what can be profitably invested at home, it seeks new markets, resources, and spheres of influence abroad. States act as the political and military guarantors of these interests.

The proliferation of wars is the direct and inevitable product of imperialism, the highest and final stage of capitalism. Lenin defined imperialism not as a policy but as a global system characterized by the domination of monopolies, the fusion of banking and industrial capital into finance capital, the export of capital as the central economic activity, the formation of international capitalist cartels and the territorial division and redivision of the world by great powers. This framework remains today the most accurate description of the modern world. The planet is carved into zones of influence controlled by rival imperialist blocs, each backed by its own monopolies, banks, and military alliances. In such a system, competing blocs repeatedly clash, compelling expansion, competition, and the carving up of the world into zones of control.

Economic stagnation in advanced capitalist economies pushes states to seek external sources of growth and influence. Resource scarcity, especially in energy and rare minerals, fuels geopolitical competition. The militarization of foreign policy, including Ireland, with record global military spending, is an attempt to normalise imperialist war. The rise of nationalism and racism provides ideological cover for expansionist and aggressive policies.

Current imperialist conflicts

The current conflict in Ukraine is located within a broader struggle between NATO’s decades‑long eastward expansion representing Western capital and capitalist Russia’s attempt to defend and expand its sphere of influence. Both sides are driven by strategic imperatives tied to markets, pipelines, military positioning, and regional dominance. The result is a devastating proxy war in which the Ukrainian and Russian working class is being sacrificed on the altar of competing bourgeois interests.

In Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Palestine, the Middle East and beyond remains a crucible of imperialist violence over control of energy resources, shipping lanes, and regional alliances. The result is a cycle of militarization, occupation, and humanitarian catastrophe that persists because it serves the interests of powerful states and corporations. This remains a region where U.S. domination, Zionist Israeli militarism, reactionary, authoritarian and repressive monarchies and regimes, and regional capitalist powers all operate within a framework shaped by oil, trade routes, and arms profits. Every war in the region serves the interests of capital and the military‑industrial complex.

The sharpening rivalry between the United States and China is also rooted in competition over technology, trade routes, raw materials, and global governance. The South China Sea, Taiwan and Africa’s mineral wealth are all arenas where economic interests and military strategy intersect and are battlegrounds for competing monopolies and state‑capitalist blocs.

The Workers Party has played an important role in exposing imperialism’s attacks in the Middle East and elsewhere through a series of regular protests and solidarity actions. Our Party opposed the brutal U.S. aggression against Venezuela and continues its long-standing support for socialist Cuba and its Revolution. In the past week alone, the Workers Party has been involved in sending much needed supplies to Cuba to break the U.S. inhumane blockade.

Turning imperialist war into class war

Lenin insisted that workers must not support “their own” bourgeoisie in imperialist war. The task is not to choose the “lesser evil” among imperialist blocs but to transform imperialist war into a struggle against the ruling capitalist class.

The Workers Party rejects the idea that working people have any interest in supporting imperialist competition, aggression and war. Across borders, ordinary people share more in common with each other than with the ruling class which profits from conflict. The Workers Party demands solidarity with the workers and oppressed peoples of the world, opposition to all imperialist blocs and alliances, including NATO and its fronts and the EU war machine, the redirection of resources from military budgets to social needs including healthcare, education, housing and social expenditure and an end to the global and unaccountable arms industry which perpetuates suffering, destroys all life and the environment and places profit above the value of anything else, reinforcing a world order where imperialist violence is a lucrative business. Our task, as a Workers Party, is to continue to build a revolutionary party of a united working class.

The capitalist world epitomises the crisis of overaccumulation, the intensification of monopoly competition, the militarization of the global economy, and the inability of capitalism to resolve its contradictions. A world beyond imperialist war requires a world beyond capitalism. The choice is between imperialist barbarism, or the socialist transformation of society.

We make no apology for concentrating today on the real dangers of imperialist war. It is always the working class, now as in 1916, which pays the price. Ending the plague of imperialist wars demands a transformation of the social order that produces them. That is our challenge with our comrades across the world and the compelling duty of socialist internationalism today. Remembering the sacrifices of the men and women of Easter 1916, the Workers Party will not shirk its responsibilities in that task.

Central Executive Committee

Workers Party of Ireland

5th April 2026