Japanese scholar’s listing of Connolly’s works /  Dr Conor McCabe   

[Editor’s Note: In 1980 Japanese scholar Professor Tomo Horikoshi published a listing of over 500  political articles and editorials by James Connolly.  Although nearly half a century has passed since Tomo Horikoshi’s document was published, it still seems to be the fullest listing of Connolly’s writings to date. That is why it is being  republished on this website in 2025.

As happens with newspaper editors, James Connolly wrote many unsigned items, in particular  editorials, and he may also have used pseudonyms, as Desmond Greaves himself did sometimes when editing the “Irish Democrat”.  Professor Tomo Horikoshi was conscious that his listing was incomplete, as shown by the following letter which he wrote to Desmond Greaves when sending him a copy of his publication. The diction of his letter has not been changed: 

“Dept. of General Education,

  Gifu University, 

  Nagara, Gifu City, 

 Japan.

 [To]

 Mr C.D. Greaves,

Connolly Association,

283 Grays Inn Road, London WC1,

England.

Aug.7, 1980

Dear Sir,

In 1971 I visited you in London and heard your talk on James Connolly. Since then I have studied on the Easter Rising, particularly on James Connolly. In 1978 I researched the works of him in National Library in Dublin. And first of all I made the list of his political writings.

Though this is incomplete, I published this for the purpose of making a full list. Please point out the mistake and lack in this. I have an intention of completing this by your advice. 

Sincerely yours,

Tomo Horikoshi  ”

There is no record in the Desmond Greaves archive of a reply to this, but it would be unlike Greaves not to have replied. He was well aware that only one-third or so of Connolly’s political writings had been published in the various compilations that he examined for purposes of the “Appraisal” of Connolly’s republished works that he compiled for the ITGWU Executive around that time – see the earlier item in this subsection of this website.

This Japanese scholar died in 2013. He is mentioned in  a review article by Professor Louis Cullen of Trinity College Dublin on “Writing in Japanese on Irish history”,  in Irish Historical Studies, Vol.48, Issue 173, May 2024.

Irish economist Dr Conor McCabe states in the Introduction to his book, “Lost and Early Writings off James Connolly”, published in 2024, that he had been unable to source a copy of the original Tomo Horikoshi listing, although trade union leader Donal Nevin referred to it in his work on Connolly and it had been reviewed in the Irish Labour History Society publication, Saothar No.7, in 1981.

In the year prior to Conor McCabe’s book appearing, the Editor of this website became aware of a series of  podcasts interviews and broadcasts in which McCabe made wholly unjust and defamatory attacks on Desmond Greaves’s reputation as an historian. For instance he stated in one of these  broadcasts that in writing his well-known biography, “The Life and Times of James  Connolly”, Greaves “made it up he went along”– in particular regarding his references to Connolly having served in the British army under an assumed name as a teenager. He stated that Greaves was “a journalist, not an historian”  and made several other sneering or patronising comments about Greaves.

As the Editor of this website, who is Desmond Greaves’s literary executor,  thought that Conor McCabe was doing a progressive job in editing previously unpublished writings of Connolly, he wrote to him in a friendly fashion on three occasions during the year before his book was published, urging him to desist from what seemed to be an obsessive campaign of denigration of someone who was a meticulous historical researcher, who had made a major contribution to Connolly scholarship and who, being dead, could no longer defend himself.

 Conor McCabe made no response, however, and when his book came out it contained further quite unjust and inaccurate comments on Greaves’s work. 

That led the Editor to put on this website the evidence which led Greaves to the conclusion that  Connolly had served in the British army in his teens, so that interested readers can judge for themselves – see the earlier item in this subsection of the website. If readers consult this they will recognise Conor McCabe’s imputations re Desmond Greaves to be the unworthy and unprofessional absurdities they are.

For Professor Tomo Horikoshi’s listing of James Connolly’s writings, published in 1980, see the following: