Dublin Opinion

Below is a reproduction of the entry on Irish Trotskyism in Robert Jackson Alexander’s book, International Trotskyism, 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). An edited version of the book, including an edited version of the entry on Ireland, is available on Google Books, here.

The article below is simply a typed copy of the edited entry on Ireland that’s available on Google Books. As such, it is incomplete. Unfortunately, not all of the footnotes to the article are available on Google Books. From those which are available, it appears that Alexander was helped in this overview of Irish Trotskyism by D.R. O’Connor Lysaght. The notes cite letters between the two historians. This does not mean, of course, that the conclusions reached by Alexander are those of Lysaght. It means what it says on the tin, that Alexander corresponded with Lysaght while writing the article.

D.R. O’Connor Lysaght wrote an early history of Irish Trotskyism, published by People´s Democracy. Ciarán Crossey and Jim Monaghan wrote the excellent “The Origins of Trotskyism in Ireland” in Revolutionary history, 6:2-3 (1996), 4-57.

Splintered Sunrise has a post on the origins of Irish Trotskyism here. Workers’ Republic, has a comprehensive list of articles and material relating to Irish Trotskyism here. Finally, the comments on cedarlounge’s Irish Left Archive are a good source of information as well.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s the edited version of Alexander’s article, from Google books preview.

TROTSKYISM IN IRELAND

Ireland has never figured as a major centre of strength for international Trotskyism. The movement really did not get a foothold at all there until World War II and even then there were false starts. Its various factions and tendencies have been more than usually plagued with the problem of relations with other political currents on the Left. The partition of Ireland has meant that the Trotskyists have not only had to find a “political space” for themselves with regard to relations with the Social Democrats and Stalinists, but also with regard to the nationalists of various hues and policies.

THE ORIGINS OF IRISH TROTSKYISM

The first exposition of Trotskyist ideas in Ireland took place in 1935, when C.L.R. James, the West Indian who was then a leader of British Trotskyism, visited the island. D.R. O’Connor Lysaght has noted that “he lectured on the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and angered the Communist Party by exposing the Third International’s failure to oppose Italian imperialism. All that came of this was that he persuaded Nora Connolly O’Brien to write to Trotsky, who was then interned in Norway.”

The first real converts to Trotskyism were to be among those Irishmen who went to Spain to fight on the Loyalist side in the Civil War. Two of those people were of particular importance: Robert Armstrong, who had joined the Stalinist-controlled International Brigade, and Patrick Trench, who had fought with the militia of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM). A third Irish participant in the Spanish Civil War, Geoffrey Coulter, entered into contact with the Socialist Workers Party of the United States but subsequently dropped out of political activity.

Immediately upon returning to Ireland, Armstrong went to England, where he stayed for a couple years. Patrick Trench joined the Irish Labour Party (ILP), where in November 1939 he became secretary of the ILP’s Pearse St. branch. Also, with the encouragement of Michael Price, leader of the party’s left-wing but by no means a Trotskyist or even a Marxist, Trench began publishing articles in the Torch, the organ of the Labour Party’s constituency Council, of which Price was secretary.

In 1939 the emergence of Trotskyism in Ireland got a stimulus from the outbreak of world War II and the impact of that event on British Trotskyism. Some time before, in December 1938, the Revolutionary Socialist League, which had just been recognized as the British section of the recently established Fourth International, suffered a split. A group opposed to the line of entry into the British Labour Party broke away to establish Workers Fight. That group, together with some Irishmen resident in Britain, soon joined forces with the Workers International League (WIL).

In September 1939 a number of the leaders of WIL, fearful of persecution because of the outbreak of war, established an “exile” headquarters in the Irish Free State. They had contact with Patrick Trench and other Trotskyist sympathizers, and one WIL leader, Thomas Gerard (Gerry) Healy, contributed at least two articles to Torch.

When the repression that they had expected in Great Britain did not materialize most of the WIL people returned to that country. Robert Armstrong, who had come back to Ireland with them, went to Belfast where he set about building a left wing in the Republican Socialist Party in Northern Ireland. Thomas Reilly, John Byrne, and other former Irish republicans who had also come with the WIL group from Britain stayed in Dublin to work with Trench.

Then in June 1940 there was a change in the editorship of Torch, which gave the Trotskyists even more access to that periodical than had previously been the case. Among the articles which Trench contributed to it was an obituary of Leon Trotsky.

Thus, by 1941 there were two small Trotskyist groups, without any affiliation with the Fourth International in Ireland. One was in Belfast, where it worked particularly within the Republican Socialist Party, the other was in Dublin, where its members were active in the Irish Labour Party. The Belfast group tended to be considerably more sympathetic than that in Dublin to the cause of the struggle for a united Ireland.

Lysaght has noted that “in the Labour Party, Trench’s political struggles included demands for a sliding scale of wages, for more measures of nationalization and against the removal, under clerical pressure, of the Workers’ Republic as the party’s constitutional aim.” He added that “in practice, the Dublin Trotskyists were activists. They played a big role within the opposition to the Fianna Fáil government’s trade union bill in its aim to licence trade unions and limit their rights of recruitment. A Council of Action established in this eventually unsuccessful fight was maintained by the Trotskyists for housing and other agitations.”

The Dublin Trotskyists also became involved in the controversy over Irish neutrality in World War II. Within the Left there were those who wanted the Irish to be “neutral in favour of Britain” to those who sought help in arms and money from the Nazis in the struggle for a united Irish republic.

Lysaght has noted that “against all these arguments, Trench (and Price) presented a conception of Irish neutrality as a positive war against the war. They urged that Irish Labourites should use the twenty-six county state’s position as a base from which to contact anti-Axis resistance movements and the ant-icolonial movements in the lands of the democratic imperialists. In 1941, Trench persuaded the Labour Party Conference to pass a general motion on positive neutrality… The next year, however, a more detailed motion was defeated overwhelmingly.”

By 1943 the situation of the Dublin Trotskyists had been seriously undermined in the Irish Labour Party. For one thing, the control of Torch was taken over by the Labour Party’s Administrative Council, and after October 1941 the Trotskyists no longer had access to its columns. For another, the Labour Party decided early in 1943 to limit membership of branches of the party to those people who lived in the branches’ neighbourhoods. The only unit to which this rule seems to have been applied was the Pearse Street Branch, where the strength of the Trotskyists was concentrated.

THE REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST PARTY

Rather than trying to resist the manoeuvres of the Labour Party leadership against them, the Dublin Trotskyists decided to withdraw from the party. Together with the Trotskyists of Northern Ireland, they established the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), which as Lysaght noted was “Ireland´s first open Trotskyist party.” It was recognised as the Irish section of the Fourth International at the International Conference of 1946. [Note: the Workers’ Republic website says that the party was recognised by the Fourth International on 20 July 1944.]

The RSP started its existence with about eighty members, fifty in the Belfast area and thirty in the Dublin region. Early in 1944 it published a document entitled “theses on the National Question,” which Lysaght claimed “remains a major landmark in Irish Marxist theory… Most relevant of all, today, is its insistence that the demand for national unity could act as dynamic rather than as brake on social struggles. It prophesied accurately, too, that a civil liberties agitation might perform a revolutionary role.”

Lysaght added that “from the point of view of the Revolutionary Socialist Party, the “Theses” most ominous failure was its underestimation of the effectiveness of the opportunism of Stalinism.”

The Revolutionary Socialist Party had branches in three cities: Belfast, Dublin, and Cork. The last of these developed quite independently of the other two, by people who had been won over to Trotskyist ideas by literature of the Socialist Workers Party of the United States, which had been distributed by an SWP seaman named Carroll who worked on the ship City of Vancouver. The Cork affiliated with the RSP in 1943.

During the period of the RSP there were two periodicals expressing Trotskyist ideas. One of these was Northern Star, published by the Republican Socialist Party there, and the other was Workers’ Republic, issued by the Revolutionary Socialist Party itself.

The Revolutionary Socialist Party survived only until 1947-48. It was finally torn apart by the controversy then going on in the Fourth International concerning the nature of the Soviet Union. One element, particularly among RSP members in Belfast, supported those in the International who were arguing that the Soviet Union had become “state capitalist.” When the Second Congress of the International went on record declaring the Soviet Union and other Stalin-dominated countries to be “degenerated” or “deformed” workers’ states, most of those people abandoned the RSP. The further disintegration of the party was hastened by the fact that its two most important figures had disappeared from the scene. Patrick Trench died early in 1948 and Robert Armstrong left Ireland, seeking work in Great Britain. By August 1948 there were only two members of the RSP left and they decided to try to work within the Irish Labour Party and the Stalinist-controlled Socialist Youth.

FROM INTERNATIONAL WORKERS GROUP TO MOVEMENT FOR A SOCIALIST REPUBLIC

It was nearly two decades after the demise of the Revolutionary Socialist Party before Trotskyism was re-established in Ireland. The only exception to this was the existence in Belfast of a branch of the British-based Socialist Labour League headed by Gerry Healy.

The person who re-founded Irish Trotskyism was Gery Lawless. He had first become acquainted with Trotskyist ideas while interned in the Curragh prison camp, where he read the documents of the Fifth World Congress of the Pabloite faction of the Fourth International. After being released Lawless went to Great Britain, where he became a member of the Socialist Labour League (SLL). There, in 1963, he opposed the refusal of the SLL to participate in the “Unity Congress” which established the United Secretariat of the Fourth International.

According to Lysaght, Lawless then “sought to build an Irish Trotskyist group that would not take sides in the international… Trotskyist controversies. In this course he made strange bedfellows among London’s Irish immigrants. First he formed an Irish Workers Union. Then he combined with the Maoists who would constitute the so-called Irish Communist Organization… in an Irish Communist Group. When this last split into Trotskyist and Stalinist parts in late 1965, the former founded the Irish Workers Group (IWG), which brought Trotskyism back to Ireland, at last.”

The IWG established its first branch in Dublin in 1967. Soon afterwards a branch was also organized in Belfast under the leadership of Michael Farrell. A third branch was set up in Dundalk. In both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland the IWG worked principally within the labour parties of the two regions.

The Irish Workers GRoup was soon split into warring factions. One was led by Sean Matgamna, who had come back from Britain with Lawless. He was soon leading a faction seeking Lawless’ ouster from the organization. When the Matgamna group was defeated they withdrew on St. Patrick’s Day 1968 to establish the League for a Workers Republic…

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…The PD [People’s Democracy] was at first a loosely organized group patterned on student-worker assemblies which had arisen in the uprising in Paris earlier that year. However, [Mike] Farrell writes, “The YSA [Young Socialist Alliance] hard-core… gave it a leaven of tough determination and the political influence of the YSA in the looser body grew rapidly.”

The PD refused to call off civil rights demonstrations when Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill proposed a series of moderate reforms favouring the Catholics. Early in 1969, when O’Neill called a general election in which he sought Catholic support for a number of moderate candidates of the Unionist Party (the predominantly Protestant group favouring continued association with Great Britain), People’s Democracy ran eight candidates against the O’Neill coalition, who together received 23,000 votes.

Meanwhile, the Young Socialist Alliance had “dissolved itself into [the] PD.” As the civil rights movement intensified PD organized a march to and across the border of the Irish Republic. Then in August 1969, when physical attacks were mounted by Protestant elements on Catholic areas in Belfast and Derry, PD forces joined the barricades which were raised in the Catholic areas and for a while ran Radio Free Belfast and a newspaper issued by the Catholic resistance people. However, they soon closed the radio and withdrew from the paper because of political disagreements with IRA elements in general charge of the resistance efforts.

As a revolutionary organization, People’s Democracy not infrequently got into trouble with the authorities of Northern Ireland. On July 5, 1977, John McAnulty, General Secretary of the PD, was arrested and charged with possessing documents “likely to be of assistance to terrorists.” The PD organized a petition campaign, the petition saying in part, “John McAnulty’s case is clearly a case of political harassment and we call upon the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Irish Government to press for his immediate release. He was subsequently released without being brought to trial.

On August 2, 1978, the British Army raided the PD’s Connolly Bookshop in Belfast, arresting McAnulty and John McGeown of the MSR. After four hours the two men were released, but the entire contents of the bookshop were kept by the army authorities.

Another PD leader, Dennis Murphy, was sentenced late in 1978 for possession of arms and ammunition. In his trial, he admitted possessing these but argued that he had them in order to defend himself and those around him in case of attack by Protestant elements.

During the 1970s People’s Democracy went through a process of political evolution. According to John McAnulty,

In the early organization we defined ourselves as socialists without any clear idea of what that meant.. we didn’t have the benefit of a developed program and a strong foundation in political theory. We had to learn from experience and that has been both our strength and our weakness… We rediscovered for ourselves the main principle of Connolly’s socialism - that to be a socialist in Ireland you must be an anti-imperialist and that most consistent anti-imperialist fighters were always willing to unite in action with other sections of the anti-imperialism movement and with a rounded understanding of the political, social, and economic aspects of imperialist domination.

As a consequence of their ideological evolution, People’s Democracy clearly differentiated themselves from IRA elements and the Communist Party. “We rejected their ’stages theory’ that reform in the North would be followed at long intervals first by a United Ireland and then by Socialism. We developed our own understanding of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution - seeing that any movement strong enough to defeat imperialism and establish a United States would move on to win a Workers Republic.”

During the middle 1970s People’s Democracy suffered a major split. McAnulty has noted that after a general strike of Protestant workers brought about the downfall of a Northern Ireland government of moderate Protestants and Catholics, People’s Democracy “saw a danger of a Fascist takeover and began to stress more and more the need for military defence. The Loyalist takeover never came, and when we began to adjust our political strategy to take account of the reality, there was a serious division in our organization and almost half the membership split away.”

However, McAnulty added that “the long-term results of the split were healthy. We were able to go back to political first principles and restate our program differences with Republicanism - our belief that the major force for revolution came from the activity of the masses and that the driving force within this mass struggle could only be the organized power of the working class.”

THE UNITED PEOPLE’S DEMOCRACY

The exit of the devotees of physical force from People’s Democracy also facilitated the unification of the organization with the United Secretariat’s supporters in the Republic of Ireland. According to Lysaght, “Gradually, PD and RMG/MSR found themselves working together with political agreement on most issues. As early as 1974-75, they initiated unity talks which collapsed over disagreements on the International and on the question of physical force… In 1975 and 1976, the main advocates of physical force left the PD. In 1977, negotiations began again with the MSR and ended in December 1978, in the fusion of the two organizations. In November 1981, the new People’s Democracy affiliated to the Fourth International [USEC].

The united People’s Democracy continued to centre much of its attention on the struggle for a united Ireland. It was particularly active in the campaign centring on the hunger strikes of several IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland in 1981 over the issue of their bring treated as common prisoners instead of political prisoners. People’s Democracy published and widely distributed several pamphlets on the issue, including Prisoners of Partition: B-Block/Armagh and Internment ‘71, H-Block ‘81: The Same Struggle.

They were also active in campaigns around other issues. For instance, they put out a pamphlet in the form of a special supplement to their newspaper Socialist Republic in July 1984 entitled Nicaragua: Revolution on the March! The Lessons for Ireland. They also featured the Nicaraguan situation in their periodical from time to time. Their newspaper also gave publicity to various labour conflicts in Ireland and in other countries. It likewise gave strong support to the campaign for legalizing divorce in the Irish Republic and against a constitutional amendment in the Republic to outlaw abortion.

People’s Democracy was interested in placing their movement in the historical framework of early revolutionary groups and events in Ireland. To this end, they published, for example, a pamphlet which went through at least two editions, D.R. O’Connor Lysaght’s The Story of the Limerick Soviet: The 1919 General Strike Against British Militarism.

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OTHER TROTSKYIST GROUPS

Aside from the United Secretariat, two other tendencies in International Trotskyism have had affiliates in Ireland. There are the International committee of Gerry Healy and the Lambertist Organization Committee for the Reconstruction of the Fourth International [CORQI].

As already noted, the Socialist Labour League (SLL) of Great Britain maintained a branch in Northern Ireland during the 1950s and 1960s. It was not until 1970 that Gerry Healy and the SLL became interested in recruiting followers in the Irish republic. For that purpose, they sought to gain influence in the Young Socialists, the youth group of the League for a Workers Republic. According to the periodical of the SLL’s U.S. counterpart, the Workers’ League, “Led by YS National Secretary John Simmance, a special recruiting team visited Dublin from Britain to join the Young Socialists in the building of their revolutionary movement.”

By the time of the split in the International Committee between Gerry Healy and the SLL on one side and Lambert and CORQI on the other, Healy had an allied group in Ireland, the League for a Workers’ Vanguard. It had been accepted as a section of the International Committee at the IC’s 1970 preconference, and it was a signer of one of the major documents in the polemics between the Healyites and the Lambertists, the “Statement of the International Committee [Majority],” issued on October 24, 1971.” Apparently the SLL branches in Northern Ireland became part of the League for a Workers Vanguard [LWV].

In the mid-1970s the LWV became the Workers League. According to Lysaght, admittedly an unfriendly source, “It seemed to disappear almost overnight, in 1978, though there is still some sort of organization in Belfast and, perhaps, Derry. They were, and the Belfast one still are, very much into the ’security’ rubbish,” that is, the claims of Gerry Healy and his followers that Joseph Hansen and George Novack were agents of the GPU and the FBI and implicated in the murder of Trotsky.

It was the League for a Workers Republic which became the Irish section of the CORQI tendency of International Trotskyism. As we have already noted, this group was established under the leadership of Patrick Healy on St. Patrick’s Day 1963, and for a few years was the only avowedly Trotskyist group in Ireland. According to Lysaght,

… the LWR developed its theory on the lines of what might be called copybook Marxism. It applied the basic aphorisms of Marxism literally and consistently without considering the context of the move… Above all the essence of ‘working class unity’ was interpreted not only as neccessitating an orientation to the Orange workers… but also to those sections of the said class in the twenty-six counties who were indifferent or, even, hostile to the demand for national unification… so it was that when, in August 1969, the northern struggle escalated into warfare, the LWR responded by presenting proposals for repartitioning Northern Ireland. subsequently, this was justified by a claim that there were two Irish ‘nationalities.’

The LWR joined the CORQI sometime after CORQI’s split with Gerry Healy and the British SLL. Until the late 1970s it appears to have been confined only to the Republic of Ireland. however, at the time of its seventh conference in April 1979 it was announced that for the first time the group had been able to establish a branch in Belfast, which was represented at the conference. That meeting was said to have paid attention particularly to work in the unions, establishment of units in enterprises, work among students, and strengthening of the group’s penetration in Northern Ireland.

In the Irish Republic parliamentary elections held in 1981, at the time of the hunger strikes of the IRA prisoners, the LWR ran Patrick Healy as a “pro-hunger strike” candidate for the Dublin North-East constituency. Although he was defeated, Healy’s campaign was called a Lysaght “a nice try.”

Continued activity of pro-LWR elements is indicated by the fact that Patrick Healy’s brother Seamus was elected to the Clonmel city council in the June 1985 elections. Lysaght has written about this that “I do not think he is actually a member of the LWR. [He certainly was not in 1981.] He is however, sympathetic to Trotskyist politics.”

Two other Trotskyist groups which have been associated with fractions of British Trotskyism have also existed in Ireland. One is the socialist Workers Movement, which has shared the “state capitalist” interpretation of the Soviet Union and other Communist Party-controlled regimes with the Independent Socialists/Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain, and was represented at a meeting of the worldwide International Socialist Tendency in London in September 1984. The other group is the one around Militant Irish Monthly, more or less aligned with the British Militant Tendency. Of there, Lysaght has said that “they are bigger… than ourselves or the Irish Healyites and/or Irish Lambertists.” Unfortunately, we have obtained little further information about these two groups.

CONCLUSION

Trotskyism was late in getting established in Ireland. Even after it got its first foothold it disappeared largely as a result of the conflicts within the Fourth International in the 1940s. When it was revived almost two decades later it was still split among five of the tendencies in International Trotskyism, that is, the United Secretariat, Gerry Healy’s International Committee, the CORQI led by Pierre Lambert, the International Socialist Tendency, and the British Militant Tendency.

All Irish Trotskyist factions have been largely peripheral to the organized labour movement, not being able to establish any significant base in it. Finally, all branches of Irish Trotskyism have found their relationship with the Irish nationalist movement to be a particularly difficult issue to handle, although by the early 1980s all segments of the movement werecommitted to the struggle for the unification of the island.

[Robert Jackson Alexander, ‘Ireland’, International Trotskyism, 1929-1985: a documented analysis of the movement, Durham, Duke University Press, 1991, 568-576]