10 December 1999 Irish Republican Socialist Movement Turns Twenty-Five The Irish Republican Socialist Movement (IRSM) is today a quarter of a century old. The IRSM is the combined revolutionary activists of the Irish Republican Socialist Party, Irish National Liberation Army, Republican Socialist Prisoners of War, and its support organisations abroad, such as the Irish Republican Socialist Committees of North America. Founded on 10 December 1974, it is the best embodiment in Ireland today of the political tendency of which William Thompson, Fintan Lalor, James Stephens, J.P. McDonnell, James Connolly, Jim Larkin, Peadar O Donnell, Frank Ryan, Mick Price, Nora Connolly-O Brien were apart. It has produced a number of visionary thinkers and people of action whose names are appropriately added to those just cited, many now sadly torn from us through what has been called the greatest level of repression ever directed against any party in Irish history; people like Seamus Costello, Miriam Daly, Ta Power, and Gino Gallagher. The movement has seen bitter times and dark days, darkness of such oppressing weight none could be faulted had they simply given up and called an end to the movement and its struggle. These days have now passed, however. The IRSP has been in continuous growth for the past half decade. The movement struggling just to survive at the beginning of this decade is continuously rebuilding the ranks of its membership and of the resources at their disposal. Dublin and Strabane are both opening new offices, the movement has erected a new monument to its martyrs in the Republican Socialist plot in Belfast and is doing so in Derry as well. The IRSP again commemorated our brilliant founding chairperson and chief of staff, Seamus Costello's life and death in the service of the Irish working class. When we recently buried INLA Volunteer Campbell, there was neither a shortage of mourners attending in solidarity, nor a timidity, which would have precluded his burial with full military honors. The RSPOWs, now gaining early release and rejoining the political struggle of the party, were forced during this decade to undertake (successfully) a hunger strike in Portlaoise to gain parity of esteem with Republican Prisoners. The RSPOWs successfully joined in blanket protests in jails in Britain with such clear determination they won their demands of repatriation almost immediately. They were sufficiently Prepared to renew protests in Maghaberry several years ago, that our prisoners there swiftly gained relocation to Long Kesh, to the RSPOWs own Republican Socialist wing, still prepared to sacrifice for. Principles as did their counterparts in the 1970s and '80s, including the three martyrs who died during the 1981 hunger strike, Patsy O Hara, Kevin Lynch, and Mickey Devine. Finally, just as their predecessors never ceased the struggle, even behind bars-as was shown my RSPOW escapes from Long Kesh and Portlaoise-three INLA volunteers carried out orders to assassinate Loyalist death squad leader Billy Wright while he was himself imprisoned in Long Kesh. The INLA rebuilt itself slowly and was the only republican paramilitary there at the barricades in 1996 and 1997 to challenge the Loyalist mobs backed by the RUC during the summer marching season. While continuing to oppose the "peace process," the INLA recognized the workers of Ireland's yearning for peace, and on 22 August 1998, declared themselves on cease-fire. To date, no other paramilitary organisation on cease-fire has maintained the silence of their weapons as completely as have the INLA. Yet while discussion begins regarding the decommissioning the Provisional Irish Republican Army, both the INLA and IRSP have taken strong positions in opposition to the INLA ever surrendering its weapons, and we anticipate that they will continue to keep their promise to maintain themselves in arms until a 32-County Socialist Republic has been won. The IRSP has renewed the publication of its newspaper the Starry Plough. It has opened new premises in several locations. Two members of its Ard Comhairle are in the executives of their trade unions. The party held a successful Ard Fheis in 1997 and again in 1998, and will hold another in the year 2000. The IRSP has shown its continued superiority in putting forward bold and novel perspectives on intractable political issues, such as its document on community policing and its recent Non-Aggression Pact proposal. It has held firm to its view of electoral politics in a capitalist nation should be for revolutionary socialists purely a question of tactics, with each contest waged being evaluated separately. The IRSP has also renewed its International contacts, forming an International Department Secretariat embracing activists from Ireland as well as its members in Britain and North America. The party sent representatives to international conferences this past year in Italy and Puerto Rico, as well as meeting with other revolutionaries on a trip to Vienna, Austria and sending a representative to the Kurdish National Parliament in Exile at its meeting in Amsterdam earlier this year.  The party is preparing for high level talks to be renewed with the Welsh socialists Cymru Goch and will be working with activists from a number of struggles in a shared propaganda effort called peoplestruggle.com in the near future. Gino Gallagher once said of the movement: "We trace our tradition, Republican Socialism, back through Irish history to the likes of radicals, Marxists, and republicans as diverse as Thompson, Lalor, Davitt, Connolly, Larkin, Mellowes, O'Donnell, and Seamus Costello. Not withstanding our past problems and difficulties, we come from a proud radical vein of revolutionary politics. We see the other parties (Sinn Fein and the SDLP) as mainstream nationalists, representing all classes therein. We stand with the whole of the Irish working class, regardless of religious background. We are unashamedly a working class, Marxist, and republican movement." The IRSM has little interest in the sterile confines of the sectarian Left or the ultimately failing perspective of mainstream nationalists and republicans. It well understands that the only national liberation worth fighting for in Ireland is that which brings with it the class liberation of Ireland's workers. It has no interest in accepting, preserving, and certainly not in administering either of the two partitionist statelets on the island of Ireland today. It has no interest in being invited to the White House by the leader of Western Imperialism around the globe nor in being wined and dined by the capitalist leaders of America and invited to ring the well launching the trading in that temple of capitalist greed, the Wall Street stock exchange. It did not organise itself as a movement so that its leaders could have large homes in Donegal, or so that it could direct the educational policy of the British occupied and still partitioned six county statelet. The IRSM was organised by Irish workers, and continues to be lead by Irish workers, for the purpose of defending the interests of Irish working people and overthrowing imperialism and capitalism in Ireland to enable the vast majority of the population, who are Ireland's working class, to control both the political and economic resources of the nation in their own interests, and in the interests of working class people around the world. Accordingly, it stands like James Connolly, mocking those who claim that we must be "practical," and seek mere reform within the context of the existing status quo, when we understand that only by remaining "extreme" do we have the slightest chance of gaining something that is worth the sacrifice the workers of Ireland have already paid in the fight for Irish national liberation. As an unabashedly revolutionary socialist and republican movement, the IRSM deserves-even demands, simply by its existence-the solidarity and support of other revolutionaries internationally, just as it is compelled to lend its solidarity to others fighting for the same aims as ourselves. We cannot but question the political integrity of those who call themselves Marxists and revolutionary socialists in Britain, the United States, Canada, or elsewhere, who have made a long-standing practice of studied silence about the IRSM, while rushing to embrace the multi-class, ultimately bourgeois republicans in other movements, often serving as craven apologists for the political shortcomings of those movements, while zealously reiterating the black propaganda of the capitalist media about the IRSM. The revolutionary workers of Ireland will well remember who were the opportunists and who rendered genuine revolutionary solidarity to the proletarian struggle in Ireland, as will we. The comrades and supporters of the IRSCNA are justifiably proud of the history of the IRSM and the dedication and political vision of our comrades in the IRSP, INLA, and RSPOWs, and our own role in helping to build awareness of, and support for, the IRSM in Canada and the United States. On this, the 25th Anniversary of the founding of the IRSP and INLA, we take this opportunity to reiterate our unswerving dedication to, and support for, the movement. In doing so, we know we stand on the side of the Irish working class, and we ask of those holding back from joining our movement and being counted, which side are you on? For the answer to that question must dictate whether you remain outside or join with us in helping the IRSM as it embarks on the way towards its first half century . . . on the Way Forward and the Road to Revolution. Happy silver anniversary to all our comrades in the Ard Comhairle and general membership of the IRSP in Ireland and Britain; the RSPOWs in Portlaoise, Long Kesh, and Maghaberry; and the volunteers of INLA. We hope you will share the pride we have in you. Peter Urban North American Coordinator Irish Republican Socialist Committees Pairtí Poblachtach Sóisialach na h-Éireann Page last updated 18 Aug 2008 Ireland's OWN Logo by Eamann Website Design and Starry Plough Background by Míchealín Daugherty Copyright © 2008 Ireland's OWN All Rights Reserved.