Hybrids :
Larkin and Connolly
High in interest among modern historians of the Irish saga is that phenomenal species, the hybrid - those ‘Irish’ born, bred or spawned abroad anywhere between the reaches of America and India - anywhere, that is, but in the ‘holy land’ itself. Significantly, it is virtually a well-worn axiom that from these rose the notables, the leaders, ‘that delirium of the brave’: from Swift through Tone to de Valera.
Above and below this reach and mesh of the organised there were, of course, others. There were those enviable few who had no need; those whose vantage position provided a happy and oblivious detachment. Then there were those who were all need, abject and absolute, whose lack of position simply dictated abandonment: these were the perpetual poor, the unskilled, the labourers - and it was for these, James Connolly and James Larkin, two of that saving strain of hybrid, ‘did that they did’. Organising them, bringing them, within the Pale of minimal chance, these two immigrants from Edinburgh and Liverpool, respectively, provided the Irish poor with notions of hope, values and worth.
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