Friday, Mar 12th 2010
Pdf of SPI 1973 Report of the 1st national congress here: SPI73REPORT
As a means of opening the discussion on the SPI the accompanying document was donated by Mark P (for which many thanks and many thanks also to the SP for allowing us access to some documents from their archive) and seems entirely suitable for [...]
The following clip is from an interview with Joe Deasy, who was born in 1922 and who met and worked with Jim Larkin Snr in the 1940s. Both were Labour councillors on Dublin Corporation. Joe would later leave the Labour party and join the Irish Workers League, which was a communist organisation, the antecedent to [...]
In September 2009 I interviewed John Throne about his own history, as well as the Irish left and working class. We talked for about two hours and after I had stopped recording, I asked John would it be ok to ask him about his expulsion from the Committee for a Workers’ International. He said yes, [...]
[League for a Workers' Republic, After the Election 1977, available here. (1.92MB)]
According to D.R. O’Connor Lysaght in his Early History of Irish Trotskyism, the League for a Workers Republic was formed in March 1968. Those involved in its foundation included Sean Matgamna, Peter Graham, Paddy Healy, and Liam Daltun. It arose out of a split [...]
John Throne was heavily involved with the establishment of Militant Irish Monthly, the newspaper of the Militant Tendency in Ireland. It began publication in June 1973, and a copy of the first issue, as well as some information on the Militant Tendency, is available on cedarlounge here.
The interview below is part of an Irish [...]
[Not to be confused with the 1960s Irish Workers Group.]
[19 November 2009. Jim Larragy, formerly of the Irish Workers' Group, has made some important clarifications/corrections to this article. Please see the comments below.]
The Irish Workers Group (IWG) was formed sometime around the end of 1975 following a series of expulsions that year from the Socialist [...]
[This is an edited version of an article which first appeared in Football Studies 11, 1 (2008). The article itself is based on a paper which was presented at the 2005 Irish Sport History Conference.]
In 1955 the Irish political, cultural, and religious establishment found itself challenged by an unusual and reluctant opponent: The Football [...]
40 years on, and the legacy of 1968 remains contested. This is probably inevitable. While it’s one of those few years like 1789, 1848 or 1989 that are synonymous with uprising and revolution, 1968 is unique in that there’s little or no consensus on what it meant then or what it means now.
Sean [...]
Long endowed with a potent resonance for French people, the year 1968 has, at this point, 40 years on, morphed into a brand. In spite of the tumultuous occurrences elsewhere in the world that year, it has become synonymous with France, and more particularly Paris. Only for the Czechs and Slovaks does it have anything [...]
It’s hardly a radical proposition that the Irish Left is a curious beast. It is small, gaining perhaps at best twenty five per cent of the national vote at elections. It is scattered, with leftist elements within the Irish Labour Party, Sinn Féin, the Green Party and beyond amongst a number of much smaller [...]