Part 013 - PAMPHLET 039 013

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n 8 an S S e Irish and international anti-colonialist tradition, through its profound respect for the leading ideas of its great leaders and their achievements in inspiring unity of their people. The European democratic revolutions of 1848 once again saw Ireland deeply affected by the advance of the most progressive forces, and the whole country seethed with expectation of rebellion under the banner of Tone and Emmet. Once again crisis, martyrdom, imprisonment and deportation were the context in which Irish Republicanism sought to consolidate a revolutionary leadership. The insurrectionary preparations and drilling of 1847-8 found the focus of their cohesion in the leadership of John Mitchel. His deportation was followed by the regrouping of the movement around the great revolutionary patr- iot James Fintan Lalor, but the leadership crisis was not solved in time for Ireland to ride the revolutionary high tide sweeping Europe that year. Nevertheless it was Lalor who faced and solved the major problems of the Irish national revolution. Above all he solved the question of successors to the revolution in the difficult circumstances of illegal- ity, and the majority of the leaders of the Fenian movement of the later nineteenth century traced their origins back to the brief but brilliantly constructive period of Lalor's revolutionary activities. Lalor bequeathed to the world the priceless revolutionary legacy of his thought on peasant movements and revo- lutionary patriotism and is to be numbered, like Connolly later, among the most strikingly and prophetically modern of the early scientific socialist and progressive thinkers. His vision of an interna- tionalist mission for a free Ireland, its independence shining out like a beacon, has been implemented by the Juche Idea which has made of the heroic struggles 7