The speeches, as I remember, were not enthralling. Perhaps that was just me. A 12-year-old’s patience for solemn perorations is finite and Edinburgh’s Cowgate, that smear of high blackened walls and greasy cobbles, was never a byword for momentous occasions. My memories of a Saturday in June 1968 are of boredom, a badge, and nagging bemusement.

We were in the Cowgate for the sake of someone famous to whom, it turned out, some of us were related. His name and dates were on the plaque they had unveiled. His profile was on the neat bronze and green enamel lapel badge the trades council handed out for a souvenir. That was one part of the puzzle: since when did we know famous people?

Memory’s footnote says we didn’t really know this James Connolly. Or rather, we had come to know something of him, as a family, just a handful of years before the gentleman from the embassy and the colleague from the Irish Congress of Trades Unions – I couldn’t have said which was which – appeared in the Cowgate’s dank canyon to commemorate the centenary of the birth.

What did we know? That Connolly was famous, chiefly, for getting himself killed. His reasons were as obscure as the rhetoric on a summer Saturday was prolix. It would not have eased a 12-year-old’s puzzlement much to hear that most people in the city of Edinburgh, and in Scotland, shared his ignorance.

The great man had suffered the usual fate: he was famous elsewhere.

Beyond a handful, no one in his birth country knew much about him.

One part of what they did know was held to be distasteful. In Edinburgh, in Scotland, it was customary – is still customary – to remember the famous figure, if at all, for his less flamboyant deeds. The archaeologists of the labour movement’s pre-history would give him his due. Scholars would grant him an honoured place within the Marxist tradition. All well and good.

If you grew up where I grew up, meanwhile, Connolly’s life was a folk tale.

Just a couple of generations before my birth, for him and others we could name, for old people I knew, existence had been beyond imagining. Livestock had been better treated. The fact that Connolly had achieved literacy was a victory. That kind of story, reliably ‘inspirational’, was worth telling. Th other one, the one with guns, green uniforms, proclamation and executions, was beyond bounds.

It had taken a 15-year campaign to win the plaque by the Cowgate arch.

Edinburgh’s council had declined the opportunity to send a representative to its unveiling. For the city of his birth and mine, the man who waged war against an empire was best ignored, the better to be forgotten. He was, for Scotland, ‘difficult’. Born at 107 Cowgate he might have been, but Connolly was someone else’s hero. The Irish – and some were never reticent about saying it – could have him.

None of this counts as revelation. A figure of international significance has been neglected by the country of his birth. Native sectarianism (as we call it) and republican violence; caricatures of nationalism and a labour movement’s supposed internationalism; finally the Marxism, rebuking all who followed: contradictions enough to be going on with. Connolly has been too damned difficult. Odd bedfellows have conspired to agree that, what with one thing and another – and with one thing above all – he has been impossible to accommodate.

This is more than neglect. For Scotland, it amounts to willed amnesia. It allows bizarre disjunctions. Fine books and credible figures pile up praise for a thinker, a national hero, the ‘hero of the working man’. Mention his name in Edinburgh and ugly noises won’t stay beyond the woodwork for long.

So history, that property held in common, is erased. The people, to whom properly history belongs, are dispossessed.

The first version of the Connolly plaque was levered from its grimy wall almost as soon as it was unveiled. Loyalists made a wee symbolic gesture of their own. It was, to be fair, a gesture well understood by anyone who took an interest in the matter. Years later, when I was working as a night porter in an Edinburgh hospital, a colleague boasted that he had been in on the (slightly pissed) nocturnal jape. Honour had been satisfied, so he reckoned.

He was a staunch trade unionist.

By the middle of the 1960s something of the truth had been prised out of granny, finally. She had kept most of it to herself for most of half a century.

There was no mystery in that, not for her. In her book, there were things of which you did not speak. In working class Edinburgh, for long years, an uncle who had taken up arms against the British state was certainly one of those things.

As a child in 1916 she had been chased home from school by street Arabs when news of the execution came. Her own father had been victimised by the council and sacked for his socialistic shenanigans. Yet that father, his brother’s mentor in socialism and organised labour, had been granted a British Army veteran’s funeral after he died in that same May. Emotions were liable to be confused. Understanding, if sought, was not expressed.

In time, Katie Connolly had married a Protestant. She knew enough about love-in-poverty, but she also knew how Knox’s city looked on these unions, and on the Irish. More reticence. A Fenian uncle – Fenian for shorthand – who had died for his treason was reason enough for utter silence. By the ’60s, nevertheless, that discretion, that suppression, was becoming hard to maintain.

My father had come across the C Desmond Greaves biography of Connolly in a public library not long after it was published in 1961. Dad had begun, as granny might have thought, to pry a little. As 1966 and the 50th anniversary of the Rising approached, meanwhile, people with questions were turning up at Craigmillar Castle Avenue. By the time Ireland began to prepare its state events to mark the half-century, granny was on the invitation lists and in the reviewing stands. She was rediscovering family and memories. She brought us back a set of commemorative stamps.

There is a photograph from ’66. It shows granny in her best hat giving a tall, distinguished looking man what was once known as an old-fashioned look. Perhaps it was something Eamon de Valera, octogenarian president of the republic, had said. Elsewhere in the line there is a fierce looking whitehaired little woman who looks as though the photographer has caught her – it would be no surprise – in mid-denunciation. Our supply of famous unknowns had doubled.

Nora was granny’s cousin, second child to James. She was also Senator Nora Connolly O’Brien, author, Sorbonne graduate, former correspondent with Trotsky, unbending republican and inveterate activist. She was, further, the garrulous, chain-smoking, sometimes comical and always hard-bitten Nora. After 1966, she became an annual visitor. Her cousin, my grandmother, had kept her knowledge of James Connolly to herself for half a century. Nora lived for her father’s memory. You could make something of those facts.

You could explain it away as a tale of two countries and two long-parted cousins. Ireland’s history, you could further say, was Ireland’s business, not ours. When Nora was visiting Scotland in the 1970s, in any case, the Troubles had made a lot of people (though not her) a little circumspect. The emblematic fact remains that granny had spent her life saying nothing about James Connolly; Nora talked of little else.

Yet one issue could induce reticence in the senator, too. Memory mattered more to her than anyone I have ever met, but the uses to which memory are put mattered too. Sitting by Scottish firesides, joking with grandad (whom she adored), scattering ash as she stabbed the air, Nora hated to admit that her father had been born in Edinburgh.

Given half a chance, she preferred the old myth of a birthplace on a Monaghan farm. She would not even concede – never in my hearing, at any rate – that she herself had been born in Edinburgh, in a Lothian Street tenement. It was of profound importance to Nora that her father, Ireland’s hero, had been born on Irish soil.

No doubt she remembered some of the jibes he had once endured because of his Edinburgh accent. No doubt there were old bruises. But in this her socialism succumbed to ancient fictions. Some notion of authenticity and nationality lingered to the last. For her, where Connolly’s venerated memory was concerned, neither the well-established, irritating facts nor the internationalist rhetoric mattered.

Another little metaphor. In this piece of history, they accumulate. So Scotland chooses to forget James Connolly while Ireland holds him in the vice of approved memory. So a niece stays silent while a daughter prefers to misremember. So two women are born in Scotland to an Irishness, refused or embraced, that sets confused echoes sounding down the years. Then there’s the Scot, Connolly himself, who approaches his death knowing that no comrade in Scotland, Britain, America, or Europe will remember what is fundamental to him: he’s Irish.

I don’t remember his name being mentioned during the long argument that preceded Scotland’s independence referendum in September 2014. You could call that odd, given all he wrote, said and did, but only if you know nothing about the Scots, their complications, and their complicated attitudes towards an independent Ireland. The fact remains that when it mattered most his birthplace excluded Connolly yet again. And Edinburgh, city of ‘snobs, flunkeys, mashers, lawyers, students, middle-class pensioners and dividend hunters’, voted No overwhelmingly.

Was Ireland’s republic ever an example to those who voted Yes? Sometimes, in general terms, in the agreed, bland, consensual terms of modern European nationhood. Anything else, like Connolly himself, was too damned difficult, liable to start a fight, and better avoided. Stalwarts of the Labour Party in Scotland, otherwise capable of admiring the man to bits, certainly found nothing to say about him when they were damning atavistic nationalism and advertising their credentials as socialists and internationalists.

Equally, the Yes campaign made nothing of his name. Many of the younger activists had never heard of him, of course. The Scottish National Party is meanwhile leery, for tangled historical reasons of its own, of Irish examples in general and James Connolly in particular. The willed amnesia inflicted where he is concerned is part of a wider forgetting, in any case, in these family matters. Scotland and Ireland resemble a pair of cousins with a habit of misremembering old truths.

When we had our vote a misrepresented nationalism collided with a Labour Party defending (so it said) an internationalist ideal. I do not maintain that Connolly reconciled socialism and nationalism just by getting himself killed. By the end, there were plenty of contradictions he left unresolved.

Nevertheless, the neglect of his memory is also the neglect of certain other memories. In September 2014, Scotland was the poorer for forgetting.

Once upon a time in Europe, a pair of ideals, socialism and nationalism, were not everywhere inimical, or regarded as such. Once upon a time, James Connolly seemed to assert that internationalism without an acknowledgement of national identity is a forlorn, empty gesture. In the 21st century, in any case, class politics has ceased to be a simple (or simplistic) refutation of nationalism. Connolly’s argument, unfinished as it may be, can no longer be dismissed as an atavistic spasm.

Back in 1968, even the idea that Scotland would ever contemplate independence would have sounded like one of the dafter jokes. Few spoke seriously of such a thing. James Connolly was just another shunned idealist, another of those lost leaders who had wasted his time and his life on foolish causes. Silence at home was his reward. But silence, as my grandmother knew, falls away in time. Then you must speak for yourself.

Ian Bell’s essay appears in Scotland and the Easter Rising, edited Kirsty Lusk and Willy Maley, published later this month by Luath, priced £12.99. Read Tom Devine’s review next Saturday.