read part I here
A period of slow steady gains
When the Militant Tendency was expelled by the Labour Party in 1989 it first organised as Militant Labour in order to emphasise its previous orientation to the Labour Party and its continuing orientation to the wider workers movement. In 1996 it changed its name to the Socialist Party (SP). Its electoral progress was steady, but by the standards of the Workers Party in the 1980s, slow. The first council seat was won in 1991, but it was 1997 before the first Dail seat was gained: in both cases the victor was Joe Higgins. A 1996 Dail by-election had provided a springboard for success when Joe Higgins polled just 252 votes behind the victor Brian Lenihan Junior of Fianna Fail. This was the first of several by-elections which allowed the SP to come to national prominence through a skilled tactical approach, challenging both the establishment parties and later Sinn Fein as the latter gained electoral momentum.
At the 2002 general election the SP gained votes but failed to win any extra seats: Joe Higgins retained his Dublin West seat, but airport worker Clare Daly narrowly missed out on gaining a second seat in the Dublin North constituency. Soon after the SP played the leading role in the Anti-Bin Tax movement, a genuine mass campaign of working-class people. In September 2003, Higgins and Daly and a dozen other activists were jailed for a month after refusing to abide by a High Court injunction relating to the blockading of bin lorries.
At the 2004 local elections, the Socialist Party gained two council seats, with Mick Murphy elected to South Dublin County Council and Mick Barry elected to Cork City Council. The party also retained their two previous seats (held by Clare Daly and Ruth Coppinger) on Fingal County Council. At the European election held on the same day, Joe Higgins received a credible 23,218 (5.5%) votes in the Dublin constituency, but did not win a seat.
Councillor Mick Murphy became a national figure when he exposed the GAMA construction scandal in October 2004. This involved a group of Turkish workers being brought to Ireland by GAMA, a Turkish construction company, where they were illegally underpaid and forced to work long hours in breach of the EU Working Time Directive. Joe Higgins skilfully used his seat in parliament to expose GAMA, and SP members assisted the workers in organising into a trade union and launching strike action.
From Defeat to Triumph
At the 2007 general election the SP suffered a major setback when Joe Higgins lost his Dail seat. The Party’s electoral base was reduced to four councillors only. Soon after the “Celtic Tiger” (the nickname for Irelands long boom which began in the early 1990s) was derailed by the 2008 worldwide financial crisis. The ruling class bailed out the bankers and imposed savage cuts in wages and pensions on working people. Austerity was met with only weak opposition from the union leaders who made no real attempt to channel class anger into a movement of opposition. The Socialist Party was propelled to the forefront of the consciousness of many of the best workers and young people in Ireland as it emerged as the leading force in the anti-water charges movement, the most important mass movement against austerity.
In a stunning victory at the 2009 European election Joe Higgins won a seat in the Dublin constituency with 50,510 (12.4%) first preference votes. In local elections held on the same day he won a seat on Fingal County Council and the party held its seats on Fingal County and Cork City Council (Ruth Coppinger and Mick Barry respectively), while gaining one seat each on Balbriggan Town Council and Drogheda Borough Council. However, the party lost the seat of Mick Murphy, its only councillor on South Dublin County Council.
By 2011 its support base was such that it was able to win two Dail seats: Joe Higgins in Dublin West and Clare Daly in Dublin North. It also achieved credible votes in several other areas, including Dublin South-West and Cork North Central which pointed to future possible victories. Now back in the Dail Joe Higgins resigned his European Parliament seat, and Paul Murphy was selected by the Socialist Party to replace him. Joan Collins who had left the Socialist Party after a short dispute in the early 2000s (also involving the previous General Secretary of the Socialist Party, Dermot Connolly) was also elected in 2011 and she was to hold a seat in Dublin until the 2024 election.
Socialist Workers Party launch People Before Profit
Initially, the Irish Socialist Workers Party (SWP-affiliated to the International Socialist Tendency) stood aside when the Socialist Party began to contest elections and continued to hold to its long-standing hostility to electoral politics. It soon learned lessons from observing the Socialist Party however and began to stand candidates. Initially its votes were low but when it established the People Before Profit Alliance in 2005 it began to build local bases and to attract votes. The SWP had a prominent position in the anti-war movement after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and this gave its leading figure Richard Boyd Barrett a profile which in many ways he has maintained to today.
The Community & Workers Action Group (CWAG) in south Dublin joined PBP in 2007 and gave it its first elected representative- Joan Collins had already been elected to the local council. PBP contested several constituencies in the 2007 general election and came closest to winning in the Dún Laoghaire constituency. In the 2009 local elections PPB won five seats in three of Dublin’s four councils.
PBP and the Socialist Party contested the 2011 election as part of the United Left Alliance (ULA), a coalition which also included the Workers and Unemployed Action Group (WUAG), as well as independent activists. The Alliance won five seats in the Dail in total: Seamus Healy from WUAG, Richard Boyd Barrett and Joan Collins under a joint People Before Profit and United Left Alliance banner, and Joe Higgins and Clare Daly under a joint SP-ULA banner.
Later in 2011 Dublin West TD Brian Lenihan Junior died and the Socialist Party contested the subsequent 2011 by-election, with its candidate Ruth Coppinger coming in third. The ULA was always an uneasy coalition and in 2012 tensions increased over the political relationship between Clare Daly and Independent TD Mick Wallace, who was at the centre of a scandal over tax irregularities. Daly resigned from the Socialist Party in August 2012 and the WUAG left soon afterwards as it believed that the ULA approach to Wallace was not robust enough. The Socialist Party left the weakened ULA in January 2013. In April 2013, Joan Collins and Councillor Pat Dunne left PBP to form United Left, with Clare Daly.
Anti-Austerity Alliance and Solidarity
The SP sought to build a wider political formation through the mobilisation of the new layer of activists against the cuts. The resulting Anti-Austerity Alliance stood more than 40 candidates in the 2014 local elections and won 14 seats, including on Limerick and Cork City Councils. There was yet another Dublin West by-election on the same day which this time was won by Ruth Coppinger, using skilful tactics to defeat Sinn Fein. For a time, Dublin West had two Socialist Party TDs (there were four TDs in the area). Paul Murphy was unsuccessful in retaining the Socialist Party’s European seat at this time but was elected to Dáil in October 2014 in another surprise by-election, this time in the Dublin South-West. Again Sinn Féin, whose candidate had been favourite to win, was seen off by hard work in the working-class communities and a nuanced political campaign.
In the May 2014 local elections, PBP also won 14 seats including two seats outside Dublin on Sligo and Wexford County Councils on the same day that the Socialist Party-Anti-Austerity Alliance won 14 seats. In September 2015, PBP and the AAA announced they had formally registered as a single political party for electoral purposes. The new organisation was called the Anti-Austerity Alliance–People Before Profit.
In 2015, water charge protestors, including party elected representatives Paul Murphy, Kieran Mahon and Mick Murphy, and more than 20 others were arrested. The defence of the “Jobstown 23” became a central plank of SP campaigning in the following months.
In the 2016 general election Murphy and Coppinger were re-elected in Dublin South-West and Dublin West, respectively, and Mick Barry was elected in Cork North-Central, all running as Anti-Austerity Alliance–People Before Profit.
At the 2016 general election, Boyd Barrett was re-elected, and he was joined by Gino Kenny and Bríd Smith. In February 2018, the SWP renamed itself the Socialist Workers Network (SWN) to reflect “a decision to focus on building People Before Profit, and within that to win and educate as many members as possible in revolutionary socialist politics.” In time the AAA was replaced by “Solidarity” as the SP tried again to form a stable, broader platform.
The period 2014-2019 represented a high-water mark for far-left parties. With 28 councillors and 6 TDs the PBP-AAA coalition was in a strong position. Simultaneously others on the left held seats. Since then, progress was first halted and then the far left began to lose ground.
Significantly the SP stood in the 2019 Euro election with a strong emphasis on socialist feminism and won a comparatively low vote. Rita Harrold won only 1.4% (under 5,000 votes, only one tenth of the vote Joe Higgins had won) against 3% for the PBP candidate and 11.6% for Clare Daly who won a seat.
PBP retained its three TDs in the 2020 general election, and the seat of new member Paul Murphy who had joined PBP after resigning from the SP during a political dispute which caused multiple splits in the SP and CWI in 2019. In contrast, the 2020 general election was less favourable for the SP: Mick Barry was re-elected in Cork North-Central, but Ruth Coppinger lost her seat in Dublin West.
Local and General Elections 2024: Setbacks for the Left
At the 2024 local elections SP-Solidarity was reduced to only three seats. PBP had a better election and now holds 10 seats. In the November General Election People Before Profit-Solidarity went into the election with five seats but emerged with only three. Richard Boyd Barrett and Paul Murphy won for PBP, and Ruth Coppinger for Solidarity, all three in the Dublin area. PBP lost seats in Dublin South Central and Dublin Mid-West, and in Cork North Central, Socialist Party member Mick Barry lost out by a narrow margin. Joan Collins of Right to Change lost her seat, also in Dublin South Central. Despite a high profile ex-Socialist Party member Clare Daly, who lost her MEP seat in June, failed to make a breakthrough in Dublin Central, where she won only 4% of the vote. Thomas Pringle, a TD for Donegal South West from 2011 to 2024, and who usually took left positions, was defeated by a narrow margin.
These reverses were despite the PBP-Solidarity technical group in the Dail provided a platform with increased speaking rights and as a consequence greater media coverage. The presence of a more visible and coherent group in the Dail had little or no electoral impact. Support for the PBP-Solidarity did not grow nationally but has remained constituency-based despite a national profile for the left.
It is important to acknowledge the tremendous effort involved in winning and defending seats for the left, but it is also important to seek to understand why the left went back in the last elections and why it has not been possible to develop the momentum that would have seen the left win up to 10 seats, a target which would not have seemed far-fetched just a few short years ago.
The key to understanding success and failure is the objective situation- that is the overall economic, social and political context. The last five-year term for the Dail was a difficult period for the far left. There were no significant, sustained movements which it could intervene into or lead.
The left in Ireland has also had to contend with the presence of a large, well-organized, well-resourced party, which to the majority of the electorate, is on “the left” and presents a radical alternative. The rise of Sinn Fein to become the largest opposition party after the 2020 election drew attention away from the left as SF became an alternative poll of attraction for dissatisfied voters.
Sinn Fein is not a left party in any real sense. It seeks to be all things to all people. And for this reason, whilst it once presented itself as a left party, it has increasingly openly and loudly moved to the right. Nevertheless, at this time, it remains the single largest credible left force in the eyes of most voters, and for this reason, the far left has to carefully orientate to those who look to Sinn Fein to provide an alternative.
Whilst the overall political, social and economic landscape, is always the overriding factor, this should not be allowed to obscure the importance of the “subjective factor” -the programme, tactics and orientation of the far-left parties. Success, or lack of success, on the electoral plane is related to positions adopted on concrete issues and the overall political trajectory. The correct orientation of left forces is necessary to win layers of working class and young people to active revolutionary socialist politics, and to mobilise a vote to defend current seats, and to win further seats.
Questions of programme, tactics and orientation will be explored further in a third article, which will be published in the coming days.
