I asked a friend in Belfast to write frankly about the Irish far left for the guest posting below. We’ll call him “River Dale” until he comes up with a better alias. The Irish far left makes the British far left look pretty good. That’s how bad it is. There are elections next week to rubberstamp Sinn Fein’s utter surrender and the triumphs of British imperialism and Ian Paisley. Most of them don’t see this historic defeat as worth commenting on.
It’s best not to read it if you are easily offended and I refer you instead to my piece below on Germany which tries to explore some of the same issues.
The ISN, a small leftwing group in Dublin, recently produced a critique of Trotskyism published on the Irish Indymedia site. One wonders why they bothered. To describe the Irish left as Trotskyist is to ascribe to them powers of rational thought well beyond their capacity.
To enter the world of Irish socialism is to enter the world of the grotesque, the bizarre, the unbelievable. The major components (to use the word major loosely) are the SWP and SP, clones of their British counterparts and applying the same policies in a very different environment. The result is people who carry out the same sorts of activities as the mother party but without the thin rationales that apply in Britain. When asked to explain what they are doing they frequently speak in tongues. Pressed to be coherent, thin sheets of St Elmo’s fire are emitted from their bodies. The observer can choose to laugh uncontrollably or to sink into despair.
The star of the show is the SWP. In their pursuit of the zeitgeist they have built ‘people before profit’ – Respect without the Muslims. Don’t ask what it’s for – it’s for everything. One recent SWP campaign was on partnership – demanding that the Trade Unions negotiate better partnership with capitalism! In the North they run two indistinguishable fronts, proclaim that imperialism and sectarianism have been ‘sorted’ and tell voters that they can vote for any other party (by implication for Ian Paisley) as long as they get the first preference. Their election literature is beyond parody. On one of the major themes of the election – the Sinn Fein decision to support the police – they declare ‘Police aren’t the answer to poverty’.
The SP have the advantages of greater coherence. Their members are better trained and they have the advantage of always having seen the questions of partition and imperialism as nothing to do with them. Their TD, Joe Higgins, can generate tidal waves of apathy. Their central issue was bins in Dublin. They have now moved North where their slogan is ‘It’s the water stupid!” Even here they prefer to dribble on about charges rather than the issue of privatisation. Their finest hour was the proposal for a mass labour party with the Loyalists!
Both groups hate the tiny Socialist Democracy group, mainly because it actually is Trotskyist. Sensible but grumpy is the verdict, but then who could blame them?
The rest of the left, concentrated in Dublin have drifted in the direction of anarchism. Some quite decent individuals are active, and the WSM has some sensible positions, but direct action rules the roost.
To go further is to enter the twilight zone. Here, despite having sold out on the national question, joined the RUC, struggled to get into coalition with Ian Paisley and Bertie Ahern and developed an economic programme far to the right of Tony Blair, Sinn Fein are part of the left! ‘Socialist’ debate is split between an electoral alliance with a reformist programme, the same plus Sinn Fein or the same again plus the Labour Party.
Labour Party – a party that makes Blair look like a trotskyist!
This is such bollocks that I start to glaze over. O.K. Irish leftwatch is for nerds. But as nerdy as this? I think I’ll go trainspotting.
Liam redux 
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