article 2015

The Radical Left in Ireland
Conor McCabe
The Irish radical left is an uneasy and somewhat contradictory
assemblage of Marxist-republican, Trotskyist, and anarchist thought.
This is not purely by choice, of course, but rather a reflection of the
history of the island itself.
The ideas that infuse the Irish left are framed by a truncated
national independence, a shared language, geographical closeness to
Great Britain, and a neo-corporatist labour movement swaddled in
the blanket of Catholic social teaching. In more recent times, a
growing number of local working-class groups have developed that
were never asked to become democratic partners in a radical left move-
ment and, not surprisingly, show no burning desire to do so now. The
radical left finds itself with a new problem as it tries to corral the
austerity-radicalized grass roots into one or other of the proposed
national political movements for change: that is, the Socialist Party,
People before Profit, Right2Water, and Sinn Feín.
The problem is one that is common to all radical left movements in
times of social and economic flux: how to build upon the past while at
the same time escaping it. The tactics and overall strategy cannot help
but carry the weight of what has gone before, yet must also speak to the
unfolding situation in a way that is both relevant and new.
The beauty of Gramsci’s famous dictum of the time of monsters is
that it can be used equally as an analysis and an excuse.1
It may be the
case that we live in a world where the old is dying but the new cannot
be born; it may also be the case that the new has materialized but unfor-
tunately we do not have the talent, skills, and vision to use it to our
advantage.
Whatever the pros and cons of the objective conditions we find
ourselves in – and only time and direct action can answer that conun-
drum – the issues which envelop the Irish radical left are immediate
1. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be
born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” A. Gramsci,
Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971), 276.
Socialism and Democracy, 2015
Vol. 29, No. 3, 158–165, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2015.1084697
# 2015 The Research Group on Socialism and Democracy
Downloadedby[ConorMcCabe]at20:4808December2015

and historical in equal measure, subject to a tense relationality. One of
the objectives here is to try to tease out those tensions in an effort to
bring at least some clarity to the situation. It is not meant to be a 10-
point plan or call to action, the type of which litter the activist
ground like yesterday’s lottery tickets. Instead, what is presented in
this article is a moment of reflection on objectives which are common
to us all but which have to be built in a temporal, spatial, and intellec-
tual reality that is unique to each movement. History, location, and
ideas are the tectonic plates which shift beneath our feet. And here is
where our reflection begins.
In 1989, the Irish Workers Party found itself on the edge of a par-
liamentary breakthrough. It had seven members of parliament (TDs),
one member of the European parliament (MPE), and 24 local council-
lors, all of whom had stood on a Marxist-republican platform. The
fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union gave
energy to the social democratic bloc within the party, leading to a
split in 1992. All but one of the party’s TDs left to form a new party,
the Democratic Left, which entered a centre-right rainbow coalition
government in 1994 along with the Labour Party and led by Fine
Gael, a right-wing Christian party aligned with the European
People’s Party. In 1999, Democratic Left continued its rightward shift
and merged with the Labour Party.
In contrast, the Trotskyist formation, Militant Tendency, which
was expelled from Labour in 1989, formed the Socialist Party in 1996,
winning its first seat in 1997 when Joe Higgins was elected as TD for
Dublin West. The party currently has three TDs, although two other
independent TDs – Clare Daly and Joan Collins – are former
members of the Socialist Party. The smaller (though no less active)
Trotskyist group, Socialist Workers Party (SWP), currently has one
TD, Richard Boyd-Barrett, and 14 councillors.2
It operates under the
banner of “People before Profit”, which was founded in October 2005.
For years, the SWP was active mainly in colleges and universities,
although this has changed in recent years and it has become more com-
munity-based. This is similar to the Workers Solidarity Movement
(WSM), a small anarchist group, which has held a steady presence in
Irish left circles since its formation in 1984. It also has a number of
members in community organizations, trade unions, and universities
and, not surprisingly, favours direct action and education over rep-
resentational politics. The Marxist-republican group, Eírı´gı´, has
2. People before Profit also has one councillor in Belfast.
Conor McCabe 159

worked with the WSM in the past, and is active mainly in Dublin and
Newry.
The Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) is active in Dublin and
Belfast. It does not have any elected representatives, and is focused pri-
marily on trade union activism. The CPI runs the only radical book-
shop in Dublin, Connolly Books, and in recent years has put a lot of
emphasis on education and analysis from a Marxist perspective. It is
also active in the various anti-austerity campaigns that have arisen
since 2009.
The largest political grouping in the Irish republic with an avow-
edly leftist perspective is Sinn Feín. It has 14 TDs, four MEPs, and
159 councillors. It is also part of the power-sharing agreement in North-
ern Ireland, where it is the second-largest party. It considers itself a
radical left party, with a strong emphasis on equality and social
justice, and is affiliated to the European United Left/Nordic Green
Left European Parliamentary Group (GUE/NGL). Sinn Feín is not,
however, an explicitly anti-capitalist party, and is treated with derision
by the Socialist Party and “People before Profit”.
From 1987 to 2010, the dominant theme in Irish trade unionism was
social partnership. This was a series of pay and tax agreements
initiated by the then largest political party, Fianna Faíl (a Peronist-
type party of big business and workers), the Irish Congress of Trade
Unions (ICTU), and the Irish Business Employers Confederation
(IBEC). The main purpose was to impose wage restraint on the Irish
workforce, with cuts in income tax as a substitute for pay increases –
a quasi-Thatcherite campaign against the social wage but without the
class conflict.3
The ultimate nature of the policy was masked somewhat
by the effects of the so-called “Celtic Tiger” – a 10-year credit-fuelled
construction and consumption boom which came to a shuddering
halt with the financial crisis of 2008.4
The social partnership model,
despite being highly controversial, remains the dominant strategy
among the leadership of the ICTU. This is due, in no small part, to
the influence of the largest union in the state, Services Industrial
Professional and Technical Union (SIPTU), as well as the bulk of the
public sector unions, which cling to social partnership with a belief
that borders on messianic.
3. For more on this, see T. McDonough and T. Dundon, “Thatcherism Delayed? The
Irish Crisis and the Paradox of Social Partnership,” Industrial Relations Journal, 41,
no. 6 (2010), 544–562.
4. For more on this, see C. McCabe, Sins of the Father: The Decisions that Shaped the Irish
Economy, 2nd
ed. (Dublin: History Press Ireland, 2013), 96–218.
160 Socialism and Democracy

No less controversial and equally divisive is the 499 km border
which separates Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland.
The 30-year conflict known as “The Troubles” involved Loyalist,
Republican, British and Northern Ireland state forces, and had a pro-
found effect on Irish radical left thinking, with UK and Irish Marxist
writers and activists facing significant difficulties in trying to recon-
cile and overcome the very real divisions within the working class
over issues of culture, identity, and political expression.5
The
violent conflict served as a bulwark against Sinn Feín support in
the Republic, and it is no coincidence that the party has slowly
gained in size and stature since the signing of the Good Friday
Agreement in 1998.6
The ending of the republican military campaign
has not led to any reconciliation between the Irish radical left and
Sinn Feín and there is little chance at the moment for a SYRIZA-
type coalition.
The 20-year period from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to the
crash of the financial markets in 2008 was marked in Ireland, therefore,
by neo-corporatist social partnership agreements,7
a credit and con-
struction boom (bank lending to households and non-financial firms
was over 200 percent of GDP from 1997 to 2008),8
and a hollowing
out of the social wage.9
It was a time of profound change in societal atti-
tudes, marked by declining influence of the Catholic Church in public
5. J. White, “Interpretations of the Northern Ireland Problem: An Appraisal,” Economic
and Social Review, 9, no. 4 (1978), 257–282 ; B. Walker, “Ireland’s Historical Position:
‘Colonial’ or ‘European’,” The Irish Review, 9 (Autumn, 1990), 36–40; M. McAteer,
“Critical Contexts for the Irish Left’,” The Irish Review, 32 (Winter 2004), 53–68;
M. Muck, “The New Marxist Revisionism in Ireland,” Capital and Class, 46 (spring
1992), 95–110.
6. “The Good Friday Agreement brought to an end the 30 years of sectarian conflict in
Northern Ireland known as ‘The Troubles’. It was ratified in a referendum in May
1998. The agreement set up a power-sharing assembly to govern Northern Ireland
by cross-community consent.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/events/good_
friday_agreement.
7. The agreements were: Programme for National Recovery (1987); Programme for Economic
and Social Progress (1991); Programme for Competitiveness and Work (1994); Partnership
2000, for Inclusion, Employment and Competitiveness (1997); Programme for Prosperity
and Fairness (2000); Sustaining Progress (2003); Towards 2016 (2006).
8. M. Kelly, “The Irish Credit Bubble,” UCD Working Paper Series, WP09/32 (December
2009), 2. https://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/wp09.32.pdf
9. Tasc, “Submission on the National Minimum Wage” (April 2015). http://www.tasc.
ie/download/pdf/tasc_submission_to_low_pay_commission.pdf; R. O’Farrell,
“The Irish Labour Market since the Recession: Lifting the Veil on Long Term
Trends,” NERI Working Paper Series (December 2013). http://www.nerinstitute.
net/download/pdf/the_irish_labour_market_since_the_recession_rory_ofarrell.pdf
Conor McCabe 161

discourse,10
and one that saw the radical left struggle to make itself rel-
evant when the long-term ills of unemployment and emigration were
seemingly banished forever by the Great Moderation paradigm.11
The credit crunch, financial crisis, and the Irish bank guarantee12
soon put paid to those assumptions.
On 30 September 2008, the citizens of the Irish republic woke up to
find that the government had volunteered the state as collateral for the
crushing liabilities of six private banks. The country was now liable for
approximately E400 billion in leveraged loans, and was in a recession,
while sitting on top of a deflating property bubble.
The real break in terms of political formations came in November
2010 when Ireland was forced into a Troika program.13
The problem
was not so much that the austerity package was for the most part a
Fianna Faíl/Green government economic program, as it was the fear
that Ireland was losing its economic sovereignty. Support for Fianna
Faíl went into meltdown. The February 2011 election saw the party
lose over 70 percent of its seats, dropping from 71 to 20. It gave Fine
Gael the highest return in terms of seats (76 in total), but this was not
enough for the party to form an overall majority. It went into govern-
ment with the Labour Party, which itself had received a high return of
37 seats. The government majority – 113 out of 166 – was the largest in
the history of the state. The relatively high Labour Party vote (19.7
percent) reflected its promise to protect citizens from the excesses of
austerity. It has failed to do so, but nonetheless it shows where the
10. R. Lyng, “Is Nothing Sacred Anymore?” The Furrow 54, no. 9 (September 2003), 469–
477.
11. This refers to the thesis put forward in the early 2000s by US Federal Reserve chair-
man Ben Bernanke that US capitalism that solved the problem of severe fluctuations
in the business cycle, and had done so through low interest rates and independent
monetary policy. See B. Bernanke, “Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke At the
meetings of the Eastern Economic Association, Washington, DC, February 20,
2004: The Great Moderation,” http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/
speechES/2004/20040220/default.htm; J.B. Foster, “Bernanke and ‘The Great Mod-
eration’ Four Years Later,” MRZine (3 December 2008), http://mrzine.
monthlyreview.org/2008/foster031208.html
12. On 30 September 2008, the Irish state put in place a two-year guarantee to safeguard
all deposits (retail, commercial, institutional and interbank), covering bonds, senior
debt, and dated subordinated debt (lower tier II) with six Irish banks. The overall
cost of the guarantee is somewhere around E64 billion, and was one of the causes
of Ireland’s sovereign debt crisis in 2010. For more on this see McCabe, Sins of the
Father, 195–218.
13. The Troika were a committee made up of the European Central Bank, International
Monetary Fund and European Commission that oversaw the bailout programmes of
Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus.

Irish people were in their thinking at the time. It is only after 2011,
when the faith they placed in the Labour Party showed itself to be mis-
guided, that alternative forms of protest and organization began to take
off.
The 2011 national election also returned a number of Marxist TDs
to the Daíl (the Irish parliament). There are seven at the moment, all of
whom come from the Trotskyist tradition, and all of whom have been
active in the various anti-austerity campaigns such as the 2010 marches
against austerity, the anti-household charge, and the anti-Irish Water
campaigns.
The first stirrings of public dissent outside the electoral arena came
with the Occupy phenomenon, which started in New York and quickly
spread across the Atlantic. The summer of 2011 saw a number of
Occupy camps in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick, and Belfast, with
the WSM and its bookshop, Solidarity Books (subsequently closed),
providing ballast to the protest in Cork. At the same time, in Ballyhea,
a small village in Cork, a weekly march against the bank bailout was
being undertaken by the ‘Ballyhea Says No’ group. The people
involved had no history of activism or radical politics; it was the first
clear sign that something extraordinary was taking place at a commu-
nity level in Ireland. Concurrent with this was a rise in the number of
workplace occupations, the most high-profile being those at Calcast
(Derry), Visteon (Belfast), Waterford Crystal (Waterford), Thomas
Cook (Dublin), and 4 Homes (Cork) in 2009, Vita Cortez (Cork) in
2011, and Game shop (Cork), and La Zenza (Dublin) in 2012.14
The Occupy camps petered out over the summer, and in March
2012 the last one – on Dame Street in Dublin – was forcibly shut
down by the authorities. By this time, there was a growing disaffection
with the new government’s continuation of the previous government’s
austerity measures, and a proposed property tax was used as a rallying
point against austerity by the radical left. The protests grew strong on
the back of a somewhat fragile, but nonetheless genuine, national grass
roots network, culminating in a national rally in Dublin in March 2012
with around 4000 delegates. The campaign was one of non-payment of
the household property tax; while initially successful, the tactic itself
was circumvented by the government once they gave the tax office
additional powers to take the charge from wages and/or social
welfare payments. Nonetheless, there were lessons learned and net-
works established. A nascent radicalism was taking hold, one that
14. “Explaining Work-Place Sit-ins,” Socialist Voice, February 2012, http://www.
communistpartyofireland.ie/sv2012-02/04-sit-ins.html
Conor McCabe 163

was fed by the continuing austerity programme and a growing, if
somewhat inarticulate, class consciousness.
All these elements fed into the protest against the Irish Water
Company. Irish Water was established in July 2013 as a standalone
utility service. The water system in Ireland was funded through a com-
bination of commercial rates and general taxation. The purpose of Irish
Water was to introduce domestic water charges on a national basis.
This has been fiercely resisted through a combination of mass
protest, non-payment, and a campaign of actively blocking the installa-
tion of water meters in various working-class estates across the
country. Those at the forefront of the campaign, for the most part, do
not come from an activist background. Indeed, there is an ongoing
tension within the campaign between those rooted in the communities
and the more established radical left groupings.
Non-payment currently stands at around 57 percent of households
(roughly 56 percent of the population), whereas political support for
the Socialist Party and People before Profit stands at around 3
percent.15
The vast majority of households engaged with the non-
payment campaign do not appear to subscribe to a radical left perspec-
tive, nor is there any indication that they will do so in the future. The
idea that the mass non-payment of bills which underpins the anti-
Irish Water campaign will automatically lead to a mass radical left
movement is rather naı¨ve.
If we look back at the 20-year period preceding the 2008 crisis,
arguably the single largest element missing from the creation of a
dynamic in Ireland for societal change was a genuine class-based
social, political, and trade union movement. It could also be argued
that what we are witnessing since 2008 is the first tentative steps
towards such an organized movement. The campaign against Irish
Water has given rise to the umbrella group Right2Water, which con-
sists of local community organizations, five of the country’s 50 or so
trade unions,16
Sinn Feín, and participants from radical left groups
such the Socialist Party, ‘People before Profit’, the WSM, Eírı´gı´, the
Workers Party, and the CPI.
15. “Water charge Farce to Cost State Millions,” Irish Examiner, 16 July 2015; Sunday
Independent/MillwardBrown Opinion Poll: July 2015, slide 9. http://www.
millwardbrown.com/docs/default-source/ireland-downloads/opinion-polls/
wind-taken-out-of-fine-gael-39-s-sails-sunday-independent-2nd-august.pdf?
sfvrsn=2
16. The five unions are: Mandate Trade Union, Unite the Union (ROI), The CPSU,
Opatsi, and the CWU Ireland.

Events held under the banner of Right2Water have seen over
100,000 people from across the country on the streets of Dublin
engaged in active and celebratory protest.17
There is a new mood in
progressive and radical circles that is positive not just reactive, and
Right2Water has tried to tap into this with a plan to launch an
agreed political platform for radicals and progressives who intend to
stand in the next general election. This move to create a coalition has
not been without its tensions. The trade union movement suffers
from the legacy of social partnership, and is still not quite trusted.
The participation of Sinn Fe´in is anathema to the radical left, while
the newly formed community groups tend to view the radical left
parties with suspicion, as entryist cuckoos in the anti-austerity nest.18
It is hard to know whether Right2Water will lead to anything, but
even if it results in false starts and stumbles, it is nonetheless pointing
in the right direction. The Irish people, quite simply, need a progress-
ive movement. The Irish radical left, despite its current limitations, has
an opportunity to help shape its scope and direction. Will it show the
ﬂexibility and humility needed in order to play a positive role? The
answer to that is in our hands, and I live in hope that we can, and
can help build the country we deserve.
17. “Furious protesters scream ‘No More’ as 100,000 march against the hated charge,”
Daily Mirror (10 December 2014). http://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/
politics/irish-water-furious-protesters-scream-4786062
18. This comment is based on conversations I had with members of these groups in
Dublin, Cork, Cavan, Monaghan, Limerick and Kildare. The main form of com-
munication used by these groups is social media (in particular, Facebook), which
tends to be immediate and ephemeral. The following newspaper article illustrates
the tensions: “AAA accused of trying to sabotage water charges campaign in Lim-
erick,” Limerick Post (27 March 2015), http://www.limerickpost.ie/2015/03/27/
aaa-accused-of-trying-to-sabotage-water-charges-campaign-in-limerick/
Conor McCabe 165

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