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The party has been involved in various populist campaigns including the Anti-Bin Tax Campaign and the Campaign Against Home and Water Taxes. Members of the party were jailed for their part in the former, while members have been arrested for their role in the latter. It had a seat in the European Parliament from 2009 to 2014. In 2015, the party received state funding of €132,000.[7]
From 2014, the party's election candidates in the Republic did not stand for election directly on the Socialist Party platform, but have instead run as candidates of the Anti-Austerity Alliance (AAA), now Solidarity, which was a registered party in its own right between 2014 and 2015 and which continues to contest elections as part of People Before Profit–Solidarity (PBP–S). Socialist Party members Ruth Coppinger, Mick Barry and former member Paul Murphy, were elected in this way as TDs in the 32nd Dáil. Similarly, in 2016 the Socialist Party in Northern Ireland instead fielded candidates in the Cross Community Labour Alternative. In 2022, however, the party ran once again in the North as the Socialist Party.
History
The party was formed by former members of the Labour Party, collectively known as the Militant Tendency, who were expelled in 1989 having been accused of Trotskyist entryism.
The Irish Militant Tendency was aligned with Militant tendency in Britain, with both groups having been founding members of the Committee for a Workers International in 1974.
After its expulsion from Labour, they formed Militant Labour, which became the Socialist Party in 1996.[8][9][10]
Foundation and Split from the Labour Party
Militant Tendency in Ireland began in 1969 when Paul Jones, an Irish student who had joined Militant in Britain while he was a student in London, returned to Derry and began organising there, and also held meetings in Dublin. Peter Hadden, had similarly joined Militant when attending Sussex University in England and upon returning to Northern Ireland in 1971, began organising Militant there. The group grew on both sides of the border and practiced entrism in both the Northern Ireland Labour Party and the Labour Party in the Irish Republic.[11] In 1977, they were expelled from the NILP and formed the Labour and Trade Union Group to contest elections in the north.[12][13]
The party was formally founded in the south in 1972 as a tendency within the Irish Labour Party, grouped around the newsletter Militant Irish Monthly.[14] The tendency organised within the Labour Party throughout the 1970s and 1980s, attempting to win the party towards socialism, and briefly controlled Labour Youth from 1983 to 1986. People associated with it include Dermot Connolly, Clare Daly, Finn Geaney, Joe Higgins and John Throne. In the late 1980s, a number of known members were expelled from Labour. In 1989 they established an independent party, adopting the title Militant Labour—also used by other sections of the Committee for a Workers' International at the time. In 1996 the party merged fully with the Labour and Trade Union Group of Northern Ireland and changed its name to the Socialist Party. The Socialist Party has built some electoral support in the Republic of Ireland. It found it harder to gain an electoral foothold in Northern Ireland, but it has maintained a minor presence in the trade union movement there, as well as a youth wing.
Socialist Party TDs Clare Daly (left) and Joe Higgins (centre), pictured here during the Boycott the Household Tax campaign in January 2012, were jailed for their part in the Anti-Bin Tax Campaign.
At the 2002 general election, Joe Higgins retained his Dublin West seat in Dáil Éireann.[17]Clare Daly narrowly missed out on gaining a second seat for the party in the Dublin North constituency.[18]
Councillor Mick Murphy was responsible for bringing the GAMA construction scandal to light in October 2004.[28] This involved a group of Turkish workers being brought to Ireland by GAMA, a Turkish construction company. They were illegally underpaid and forced to work hours in breach of the EU Working Time Directive. Murphy discovered the workers living on the building site where they were employed. After contacting the local council, GAMA and trade union officials and remaining unenlightened, Murphy wrote a leaflet in English, had it translated into Turkish "mainly to say that we had no problem with them being here, and saying what GAMA had said", then threw it over the hoarding surrounding the site.[28] Murphy brought it to the attention of his party colleague Joe Higgins, who was then a TD for Dublin West, and Higgins raised the matter in Dáil Éireann on 8 February 2005, bringing public awareness to the workers' plight.[29] The exploitation included migrant Turkish construction workers bring employed on state projects, being paid as little as €2.20 an hour[30] (the minimum wage in Ireland was €7.00) while being forced to work up to 80 hours per week. This led to a strike by immigrant workers in Ireland.[31][32][33] The exploited workers each won tens of thousand of euro worth of unpaid wages and overtime.[34]
2007–2011 (30th Dáil)
At the 2007 general election, Joe Higgins lost his Dublin West seat and the Socialist Party was left without a TD for the first time since 1997.[35] The Party campaigned for a "no" vote the 2008 and 2009 referendums on the Treaty of Lisbon.[4][36]
At the 2011 general election the Socialist Party returned two TDs to Dáil Éireann: Clare Daly was elected for the Dublin North constituency, while Joe Higgins regained his seat in Dublin West. The Socialist Party contested this election as part of the United Left Alliance (ULA), an alliance of far-left parties[43] which included both People Before Profit (PBP) and Workers and Unemployed Action Group (WUAG), as well as independent activists. The Alliance won five seats in the national parliament.[44] Higgins resigned his European Parliament seat, and Paul Murphy was selected by the party to replace him.[45] Following the death of Brian Lenihan Jnr, the Socialist Party contested the 2011 Dublin West by-election, with its candidate Ruth Coppinger coming in third.[46] The Socialist Party also called for a referendum on the December 2011 EU deal, which it opposed.[47]
In 2012, legal advice was sought when it emerged that the expenses given to Higgins and Daly as TDs may have been used for travel outside their constituencies and journeys to the Dáil.[48]Public expenditure ministerBrendan Howlin subsequently confirmed that TDs were, in fact, entitled to claim expenses for travel outside their constituencies and that Daly and Higgins were guilty of no wrongdoing.[49] The Socialist Party and ULA said the story was a "manufactured controversy", part of a "vindictive smear campaign by Independent Newspapers", which were owned by billionaire Denis O'Brien.[50][51][52]
Clare Daly resigned from the Socialist Party in August 2012, following a dispute over her support of Independent TD Mick Wallace, whom the party had called on to resign after the revelation of tax irregularities.[53][54] The Socialist Party left the ULA in January 2013.[55]
The party altered its registered name in 2014 to Stop the Water Tax – Socialist Party.[60] In 2015, water charge protestors, including party elected representatives Paul Murphy, Kieran Mahon and Mick Murphy, were arrested.[61][62][63] The arrests led to accusations of "political policing" and sparked minor solidarity protests across Europe, including in London, Berlin, Vienna and Stockholm.[64][65]
2016–2020 (32nd Dáil)
Logo of the party during the 2010s
In the 2016 general election Murphy and Coppinger were re-elected in Dublin South-West and Dublin West, respectively, and Barry was elected in Cork North-Central, all of them running as Anti-Austerity Alliance–People Before Profit members.[66] For the 2016 Assembly Election, the Socialist Party in Northern Ireland supported Cross-Community Labour Alternative and critically called for a vote for the People Before Profit as the two parties did not stand candidates in the same constituencies.[67]
According to its website, the Socialist Party "stands for the socialist alternative to the dictatorship of the markets – namely real democracy whereby ordinary people take centre stage in running society, with democratic public ownership of banks, of key sectors of the economy and industry, and a democratic plan of the economy to provide for the needs of people". It opposes the so-called "Social Partnership" deals and those in the trade union movement who advocate them, considering the agreements detrimental to the well-being of workers.[69] It also holds influence in the Northern Irish branch of the FBU, where its members played a key role in encouraging the FBU's split from the British Labour Party in 2004,[70] as well as influence in NIPSA with members in the NIPSA Broad Left faction.[71]
The Socialist Party is Eurosceptic and supported Brexit, considering the EU to be a "club of bosses and bankers" and rejecting reform attempts due to there being "almost no mechanisms of democratic accountability" in the EU.[72][3]
The Socialist Party opposes sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland between Protestants and Catholics and seeks to bring working class unity to both sides of the border. They argue that capitalism is incapable of overcoming sectarianism. The Socialist Party take a critical view of the Good Friday Agreement and other subsequent initiatives, claiming it further entrenches and institutionalises sectarianism and doesn't work towards solving the fundamental causes of the conflict.[73] They therefore oppose a border poll and believe calling one would further polarise Catholic and Protestant communities. Instead, the Socialist Party believes that Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales should merge and form a socialist federation, which should aspire to be part of a Socialist Federation of Europe.[74]The Phoenix has opined that the Socialist Party's position is a "bizarre fusion of Trotskyism and British Unionism" that "articulates a unionist outlook dressed in socialist rhetoric".[75]
The Socialist Party is pro-choice. Their members staged an 'abortion pill bus'[76] during the campaign to repeal the 8th, where they travelled across Ireland distributing abortion pills.
List of newspapers and publications
The Socialist (formerly Socialist Voice, The Voice, and Militant) – Monthly newspaper
Socialist Alternative (formerly Socialism 2000 and later "Socialist View") – Quarterly Theoretical Journal
^Routledge Handbook of European Elections. Edited by Donatella M.Viola. Published by Routledge. First published in 2016, in Oxon, United Kingdom. Accessed via Google Books.
^Coulter, Oisín Vince (6 February 2020). "The PBP/Solidarity explainer: from Campaigns to Revolution". Village Magazine. The Militant Tendency in Ireland, like its British counterpart, existed within the Labour Party here until the late 1980s when numerous expulsions of their members drove them out. They were known as Militant Labour until 1996 when they adopted their current name of the Socialist Party. They used to run in elections as the Anti-Austerity Alliance, but recently rebranded to Solidarity.
^McCabe, Conor (2015). "The Radical Left in Ireland". Socialism and Democracy. 29 (3): 158–165. doi:10.1080/08854300.2015.1084697. S2CID146396087. 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.
^"Socialist Party". The Socialist Party is a Trotskyist party active in Ireland. It arose from the Irish Militant Tendency, which became Militant Labour after ending the policy of entryism in the Labour party, and later merged with the Labour and Trade Union Group in Northern Ireland to form the Socialist Party. It is a member of the Comittee [sic] for a Workers' International [Majority] (CWI). Joe Higgins was elected for the party in 1997, and held his seat until 2007.
^Campus, "The far-left, Ireland’s socialist TDs, may be easily found if one moves the eyes to the back benches of opposition. Here sits three Socialist Party deputies, a Socialist Workers Party TD and United Left socialists, Joan Collins and Clare Daly." Archived 12 November 2017 at the Wayback Machine
^O'Regan, Michael (12 October 2014). "Paul Murphy trumps Sinn Féin's Cathal King in Dublin South West". The Irish Times. Archived from the original on 15 February 2015. Retrieved 12 October 2014. Anti-Austerity Alliance candidate Paul Murphy has won a sensational victory in the Dublin South West byelection. He defeated the hot favourite, Sinn Fein's Cathal King on the eight count, having trailed him earlier.