From May 9th-12th, Connolly Books presents James Connolly Festival at The New Theatre.
The James Connolly Festival is an annual, week-long series of events in radical arts, culture and politics. It is a community-centred celebration of music, film, discussion and debate that brings together the ideas and thoughts of progressive and radical thinkers and organisations from across Ireland and beyond.
Learn more about the five day programme here.
Since the festival’s inception we have sought to promote progressive arts, culture and politics, providing a platform of discussion and debate for those seeking alternatives in a world where the lives of the many are dominated by the few. We challenge societal inequality and the class barriers fraught within the arts, encouraging an inclusive and collective approach to artistic expression. Our annual festival serves as a celebration of the rich working class culture that exists in Ireland and provides a space for the people of our ever-evolving island to express the wealth of their culture and articulate their experience of life.
James Connolly remains Ireland’s foremost working class hero and founder of the Irish trade union movement. In his humble introduction to the 1907 songbook ‘Songs Of Freedom’ he famously remarked that “no revolutionary movement is complete without its poetical expression”. He noted that if a movement caught hold of the imagination of the masses that they would “seek a vent in song for the aspirations, fears and the hopes, the loves and the hatreds engendered by struggle” and that until the movement was “marked by the joyous, defiant, singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement, it is the dogma of a few, and not the faith of the multitude.” It is in this revolutionary spirit, and recognition of the importance of culture to transcend society, that the festival centres its ethos.
For more information on the festival you can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter using /ConnollyFest or the hashtag #JCF2024
