Roddy Connolly was born in Dublin in 1901, the sixth child (and first son) of James Connolly, the great Irish Marxist writer and activist. His was a long and eventful life. Some of the highlights include fighting in the 1916 rising, the war of independence, and the civil war in Ireland; being imprisoned on several occasions; meeting Lenin; helping to found two communist parties (he was also active in several others); and being elected to the Irish parliament three times (twice to the lower house and once to the upper house). In his personal life, he married twice and had seven children. He was active at a vital juncture in Irish history, and like many who were involved in the revolutionary period, he eventually reconciled himself to the new state and to constitutional politics. While he was certainly committed to his political beliefs (even if these changed over time), his achievements are difficult to distinguish by the end of Charlie McGuire's lengthy political biography.

Like his older sisters', Roddy Connolly's political education began early, as James Connolly engaged the children in discussions on politics. In 1913, the year of the Dublin lockout, which ravaged the lives of thousands of working-class families in the capital, Roddy joined the republican scout movement, the Fianna Éireann. When his father and members of the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers staged an uprising on Easter Monday, 1916, the fifteen-year-old Roddy Connolly was part of the contingent that established the rebels’ headquarters in the center of Dublin, in the General Post Office (GPO). The young Connolly was sent away from the GPO by his father on Wednesday afternoon to remove him from immediate harm's way. Three days later the rebels surrendered, and James Connolly, along with the other leaders of the rising, was sentenced to death. Visited by his wife, Lillie, on the eve of his execution, Connolly was relieved to hear that although Roddy had been arrested, he had been released without coming to any harm. “He was in the fight and has been imprisoned for his country and is not yet sixteen,” noted the proud father; “He has had a great start in life, hasn’t he?” (16).

Certainly, if their upbringing made it likely that the Connolly children would follow in their father's political footsteps, James Connolly's execution in 1916 added another compelling imperative. In young Roddy's case, he abandoned his schooling after his “great start” in favor of becoming a full-time revolutionary. He was coming of age when the Western world was in tumult; quite apart from the independence struggle in Ireland, there was the Bolshevik Revolution and the final throes of World War I, which in turn saw the growth of revolutionary socialism in postwar Europe. Initially active in the Irish Volunteers, his focus became more leftist after time spent with Marxists on Glasgow's “Red Clydeside.” From that point on, Connolly worked to build a communist movement in Ireland through a succession of organizations, factions, and fronts and endeavored to foster strong ties with the republican movement and create a revolutionary alliance of red and green. Eventually, Connolly joined the Labour Party with a view to pushing it in a republican socialist direction, but over time his commitment to revolution diminished. He became a fully fledged democrat even though his experience of democracy was often negative, since Connolly had a knack for losing elections.

Despite his eventful life, Connolly rarely is featured with any prominence in histories of the Irish Left, a situation that the author of this book sets out to redress. More ambitiously, however, McGuire uses Connolly as a window through which the rather depressing fate of the Left in twentieth-century Ireland can be viewed. Starting out as a revolutionary Marxist republican, he had in later years become a constitutional social democrat within the Irish Labour Party with a record of taking a firm line against left-wing elements in that party. Connolly had become the very model of a poacher turned gamekeeper.

The book is stronger in its first half, where it deals with Roddy Connolly's involvement in revolutionary socialist movements. This is in part because during that time in his life Connolly was a big fish in the tiniest of ponds but also because the author is more knowledgeable about and empathetic toward the politics of the republican Far Left. When Connolly ventures into constitutional politics, the book finds itself on less firm footing. The book's Marxist analysis is undermined considerably by the bald and inaccurate assertions that pepper the text (e.g., the idea that the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed by the British government and the IRA).

Having traced Roddy Connolly's political career, the author examines it to see if Connolly succeeded in “uphold[ing] the thoroughgoing socialism, republicanism and anti-imperialism that constituted the political legacy of James Connolly” (8), a legacy that is, in this case, narrowly read and indelibly fixed. The idea of upholding anyone's political legacy is problematic in itself: it turns Connolly senior from a thinker to a prophet, and while in life Connolly adapted his thinking to changing circumstances, the logic here suggests his successors should not be allowed a similar luxury. Then there is the question of interpretation. Described by W. K. Anderson as a “vessel into which each man could pour his dream” (Helga Woggon, “Interpreting James Connolly, 1916–1923,” in Politics and the Irish Working Class, 1830–1945, ed. Fintan Lane and Donal Ó Drisceoil [Basingstoke and New York, 2005], 175), James Connolly has been used and abused across the left-wing spectrum, for while he was a Marxist revolutionary, he was also one of the founders of the Irish Labour Party (a fact not mentioned in this book). The diverse ways in which it was possible to follow in Connolly's footsteps is well illustrated by Helga Woggon in her essay “Interpreting James Connolly, 1916–1923,” in which she outlines the various political paths followed by the Connolly children (besides Roddy, Nora was in the republican Left; Ina, in the Irish Labour Party; and Fiona, in the British communist movement). All upheld their father's legacy in their own way. Whether it is fair or even valid to measure them against their father is another question altogether.

Based on a PhD thesis, the study is very well researched, although it would have benefited from further distillation. As an account of Roddy Connolly's activities on the Irish Left, it is a useful addition to the growing literature on this subject. If Connolly's character remains somewhat elusive at the end of this book, the same cannot be said of his politics, which are thoroughly traced even if, despite much struggle, there is little socialism to show by the end.