Irish Republican Socialist Party - Milestones in The IRSP's History

Milestones in The IRSP's History

• 1975: At the IRSP's inaugural convention, it becomes the first political party in Ireland to support the legalisation of abortion and equal rights for gays and lesbians
• 1981: The IRSP wins two seats on the Belfast City Council, and comes close to winning a third. The IRSP runs two candidates, Kevin Lynch and Tony O'Hara, in the Irish parliamentary election as Independent Anti H-Block candidates. Neither candidate wins, but Lynch comes within 300 votes of winning a seat, while O'Hara garnered a respectable number of votes.
• 1982: Party member Brigid Makowski wins a seat on the Shannon Town Commission.
• 1984: At the IRSP's convention, two motions are put forward:

1. That the IRSP stands in the tradition of Marx, Engels, and James Connolly. (Drafted by party member John Gilligan and put forward by the party's Limerick branch).
2. That the IRSP stands in the tradition of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. (Drafted by the party's chairperson, Jim Lane, and put forward by the party's Cork city branch.)
   Both motions are passed and combined into a single statement: that the IRSP stands in the tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Connolly.

• 2000: The IRSP passes a new ideological motion at its convention, which affirms:
  • That the IRSP is a revolutionary Marxist organisation, and that by this we mean that the IRSP believes:
    • Class conflict is the motive force in human history;
    • The IRSP stands unreservedly and exclusively for the interests of the working class against all others;
    • Only the creation of a 32-county Irish socialist republic can provide the means by which Irish national liberation can be realised;
    • That there can be no socialism without national liberation in Ireland, nor can there be national liberation without socialism;
    • That there is no parliamentary road to socialism, because socialism cannot be forged by seizing the bourgeois state apparatus; nor is there a guerilla road to socialism, because a social revolution requires the active participation of the masses; and therefore a socialist republic can only be established through the mass revolutionary action of the working class in the political, economic, and social spheres;
    • That socialism means the ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange collectively by the entire working class, with an end to wage labour, an end to production for profit and its replacement by a system of production based on human need; and
    • That socialism must be administered democratically by the working class itself, recognising the class dictatorship of the workers, because the vast majority of society is formed by that class. This does not suggest the need for a political dictatorship of a single party. Rather it calls out for a class dictatorship, administered through new working class institutions created to permit the greatest degree of political freedom for all working people.
• 2011: The IRSP puts forward five candidates in the North's local elections, its first foray into electoral politics in almost 30 years. The candidates all poll well but fail to secure a seat. Candidate Paul Gallagher of Strabane missed out on a seat by just a single vote.