JAMES CONNOLLY FESTIVAL 2025

This year’s festival runs from Tuesday, May 6th to the 11th with almost all events taking place at Connolly House and The New Theatre. 

It will include a week-long James Connolly Art Exhibition. Seven artists have been invited to prepare prints and paintings that will be available to view and purchase throughout the week. 

Similarly, ‘Grand Canal Demolition Derby’ is a Playstation style video game set in Dublin where players learn of the Irish economy’s over-reliance upon US capital. The game’s ‘missions’ include thrashing Teslas and maiming the mainframes of American tech companies. It serves as a metaphor for the shift from US tech dominance to a socialist economy and will be available to play all week.

The festival kicks off on Tuesday 6th with a panel discussion on ‘Neutrality, Partition and the Fight Against Imperialism in Ireland’ We welcome Niamh Ní Bhriain (Transnational Institute) Colm Laighneach (Communist Party Ireland) and Roisin McAleer (Social Rights Ireland).

On Wednesday the 7th we’ll hear a lecture on ‘Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century’. It will be given by Carlos Martinez. Author of ‘The East Is Still Red’ and ‘People’s Republic of China at 75: The Flag Stays Red’, Carlos is the co-editor of Friends of Socialist China. 

Thursday sees a conversation with Dr Kirsten Ghodsee, author of ‘Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism’, Red Valkyries’ and ‘Everyday Utopia’. Dr Ghodsee is Professor and Chair of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

On Friday, a film screening of ‘Isrealism’ will take place in the New Theatre. The film examines how a new generation of American Jews, raised to "unconditionally love" Israel, are confronting the reality of Israel's treatment of Palestinians, leading to a reevaluation of their relationship with both Israel and their Jewish identity. 

The opening event of what will be an action packed Saturday May 10th sees Dr Conor McCabe host a ‘James Connolly Walking Tour’. The 2.5km stroll will take in some of the lesser-known or ‘hidden’ places associated with Connolly’s life. Meeting at the Connolly statue, Liberty Hall at 11am. 

Back at Connolly House, we will open our courtyard for the first time. We’ll be joined by some of Dublin’s brightest poets - Anna D, Mikey Cullen and Clíodhna Bhreathnach. It kicks off at 1pm (entrance via Connolly Books)

The annual James Connolly Memorial Lecture returns to the New Theatre at 4pm. ‘No Green without the Red: on Sovereignty, Environment, and Class’ will be delivered by Dr Harun Siljak.

In another first for the festival, we will host a night time gig in Connolly Books from 9.30pm with Fools Sorrow, Rarewitch and Yoke Folk.

On Sunday May 11th the festival will close with the James Connolly Commemoration in Arbour Hill from 3pm, followed by a drinks reception at The Cobblestone, Smithfield from 4pm.

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WHAT IS JAMES CONNOLLY FESTIVAL?

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.

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 #JCF2025

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