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Mazda's Maps and Mwikiboxes

Dead Baby Club Wikibox: Princess Charlotte of Wales survives giving birth to a son in 1818, but he is never hugely healthy and dies later on - after his uncles have all become infertile. Also, OTL Georg V of Hannover dies, which is pretty plausible as he lost the sight in both eyes as a youngster due to a combination of illness and accidents. After that, pretty much all of the genealogical stuff is OTL, but you've got Ernest Augustus in power during the Chartist marches and every single monarch being succeeded by a random German cousin.

Best bit is 1857, when the British throne is inherited by a guy who has already been deposed as Duke of Braunschweig by his own brother.

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Dead Baby Club Wikibox: Princess Charlotte of Wales survives giving birth to a son in 1818, but he is never hugely healthy and dies later on - after his uncles have all become infertile. Also, OTL Georg V of Hannover dies, which is pretty plausible as he lost the sight in both eyes as a youngster due to a combination of illness and accidents. After that, pretty much all of the genealogical stuff is OTL, but you've got Ernest Augustus in power during the Chartist marches and every single monarch being succeeded by a random German cousin.

Best bit is 1857, when the British throne is inherited by a guy who has already been deposed as Duke of Braunschweig by his own brother.

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Wow Mazda, that's some impressive work! :)
 
European Parliament by-election: Essex South, 20th October 2016

Nigel Farage (UKIP) - 43,578 (34.6%)
Alex Mayer (Labour) - 36,777 (29.2%)
John Flack (Conservative) - 27,079 (21.5%)
Andrew Duff (Liberal Democrat) - 7,431 (5.9%)
Chris Ash (Liberal) - 6,423 (5.1%)
Robin Tilbrook (English Democrat) - 3,275 (2.6%)
Rupert Read (Green) - 1,385 (1.1%)

There was widespread shock on Thursday night as a little-known minor party, the UKIP, achieved an upset victory over Labour in Essex South. The European Parliament seat, which had been held by Ben Howitt since 1994, had been predicted to fall - but most analysts foresaw a Tory gain. Instead, ultra-low turnout of 20.1% and an active campaign from the UKIP's Nigel Farage (who is said to have visited every pub on the Estuary during the short campaign alone) denied the Tories their quarry. Questions must be asked about their liberal leader, David Cameron, if he is pipped at the post by a Eurosceptic a decade into his so-called 'modernisation project'.
 
I've done some OTL election maps and I'm going to post them and there's nothing you can do to stop me.

Clann na Talmhan

As a country with a lot of rural stuff going on, Ireland has been no stranger to agrarian parties. In the pre-War (sorry, pre-Emergency) period, these tended to be dominated by large farmers from the East and to end up being folded into Fine Gael.

In 1939, the Irish Farmers' Federation was working on creating another of these - but it didn't quite go to plan. The grievances of farmers were deepening (unfairly low milk prices caused by the Economic War and the Great Depression triggered a strike by the IFF that year, in which their members refused to send any milk to Dublin for a fortnight) but they were also diversifying. In Leinster, where English colonisation had created a pattern of large farms owned by toffs, who employed agricultural workers to do the grunt-work, the members of the IFF were very keen on abolishing the charging of rates on all agricultural land. And thanks to the work of a few tireless trade unionists, the farm workers were fairly heavily unionised and had recourse to the Labour Party as a protest vote. In the West, though, English erasure of previous patterns of land tenure had been more limited, and the disaffected farmers were usually smallholders who wanted to keep charging rates on large estates - they were worried that a complete derating would force the Government to raise indirect taxes which would fall most heavily on the small farmers. Additionally, the Western farmers favoured the breaking up of the large estates to create a yeoman class of independent honest toilers: a mythologised ideal of their own self-perception. Neither of these policy objectives were popular with the Leinster IFF. And as a side note, Labour were so weak in the West that they often failed to run candidates in the rural constituencies.

So while the big Leinster farmers transformed the IFF into a National Agricultural Party whose agricultural policy was in fact not much different to that of Fine Gael, the small Connacht farmers - most of their leaders being ex-Fianna Fail activists - founded the much more radical Clann na Talmhan ('children of the land') party. Their first leader was Michael Donnellan, a FF veteran and Gaelic Football star, who organised CnT to be a populist, anti-Establishment movement dedicated to eye-catching events such as rallies and marches. Their speeches of the time claimed that Ireland would work fine if all the politicians were dumped on a small island off the coast of County Clare, and that the farmers were being kept down by evil parasitic financiers. Yeah, there was a distinctly Not Good tinge to CnT rhetoric, which is largely attributable to their failure to develop a systematic, historical materialist critique of the unfairness of their situation, and the consequent need to find scapegoats.

Be that as it may, Clann na Talmhan took off and, just before the 1943 election, the National Agricultural Party merged with their more popular rivals. That election saw 14 CnT-NAP Teachtai Dalai elected, and these came to a sufficient extent from Fianna Fail that they held the balance of power. As Michael Donnellan had made all sorts of allegations about the Fianna Fail Minister of Agriculture, it was thought that he might back Fine Gael to take power. But in the event, CnT's preference, as a non-political and indeed anti-political movement, was to fix the problems of party rule by forming an all-party coalition. Neither of the old-line parties were very keen for this, and Donnellan eventually decided to allow Fianna Fail to form a minority Government on the grounds that he certainly didn't want his party to become just another agrarian party to be folded into Fine Gael.

This decision caused some difficulties for CnT and probably prevented it from making any subsequent progress. Donnellan was so mistrusted as a Fianna Fail interloper into the farmers' movement that he was pushed out of the leadership in short order and replaced with the more pliant and less politically radical Joe Blowick. Blowick was the ideal compromise candidate, being both a large farmer and a Connacht man. Unfortunately, he was also completely useless. To his credit, he was the first major politician to propose an anti-Fianna Fail coalition in the mid-1940s: this tactic paid dividends when the Clann joined the Inter-Party Governments of 1948-51 and 1954-57. On the other hand, when they did join those Governments, they were represented at the Cabinet table by Joseph Blowick. In the first draft of the distribution of portfolios in 1948, Blowick was given Agriculture, as you might expect. But before everything was finalised, all the other parties got together and discussed how little command Blowick had of his tipped portfolio (the portfolio that his party was literally founded to sort out) and decided among themselves to make him Minister of Lands instead. In this capacity, Blowick improved state provision for drainage and land reclamation. However, the Government's treatment of dairy farmers still left something to be desired, and this essentially ended Clann na Talmhan as a genuine voice of the farming population.

After the first Inter-Party Government, CnT TDs were essentially Independents in all but name (not that this set them much apart from FF and FG representatives) and indeed Patrick Finucane (Kerry North) swapped between Clann na Talmhan and being a straight Independent no fewer than three times. Quite a few of the Clann TDs drifted towards other parties or Independent status after some dispute or other, and as no new TDs were elected after 1951, the existing TDs gradually just died off or retired.

In 1964, Michael Donnellan died while watching his son win the Gaelic Football championship, and there was a by-election in Mayo East. There was no Clann na Talmhan candidate: his son, John Donnellan, parlayed his sporting success into electoral capital, and won the vacant seat for Fine Gael. This left Joe Blowick as the only CnT TD, until he retired and wound the party up the following year.

You will note from the maps that Clann na Talmhan candidates were almost always successful at first, and could probably have won a few more seats if they'd stood in more constituencies (undernomination wasn't really a factor, though). Subsequent performance was largely down to the machines of incumbent TDs, which in practice meant that the party gradually receded to its Connacht heartlands. Note how quickly the National Agricultural Party side withered away in Leinster.

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Oh, and just to hammer home how terrible Joe Blowick was, this is from Sean MacBride's memoirs:

The discussion went on for a long time in our office. I organised to have tea brought in and all that. Joe Blowick, the Clann na Talmhan man, was present. He was the man who was always afraid that something might happen to the 'cattle trade with Britain'. He came and whispered in my ear over my shoulders, 'Would you mind very much if I went off to the pictures. I like going to the pictures on a Saturday. And I don't understand much about these things like currency and sterling. Only, if I go away, will you see that nothing happens to the cattle trade with this devaluation business?' So I told Joe that he could go off to the pictures and Joe trundled off to the pictures while the cabinet meeting continued.
 
Clann na Poblachta

The story of Clann na Poblachta is essentially the story of two very odd men: Sean MacBride and Noel Browne.

MacBride was born to a Republican family who had fled, like the Wild Geese before them, to France. He spoke with a French accent for all of his life, although many people accused him of putting it on - it became stronger and stronger as he got older. In any case, he had returned by the time of the Drama of the late 1910s, and joined the IRA as a teenager, rising to become Chief of Staff in 1936. But by this point, he had broadened his outlook to be more interested in humanitarian issues, and resigned from the IRA shortly afterwards to concentrate on his work as a barrister - in which role he defended many political prisoners and ex-IRA men. He made a name for himself by forcing the prison authorities to admit that the conditions they'd held a hunger striker in were unfit even for a dog.

On the political side, Sean MacBride was involved in a series of IRA-backed left-wing parties with a Radical Republican Agenda, none of which succeeded in getting off the ground. But by the mid-40s, the people were tired of the Fianna Fail Government and frustrated at the lack of imagination they showed on the Social Question while the rest of Europe was demonstrating the achievability of the Post-War Welfare State. In those conditions, the new Clann na Poblachta (which differed from previous efforts in that it didn't have obvious ties with the IRA) would have struggled not to take off. MacBride's sharp features, slightly alien speech, urbane manner (at least among those he wished to impress) and his boring, detail-oriented speeches were a welcome relief from the politicians of the day. MacBride also set himself apart from the others by actually caring about politics - he once got very angry with some comrades for skiving off from a meeting to watch a GAA match, which would be grounds for a leadership coup in most parties of the time.

The recruits to the new party were from varied backgrounds, and MacBride was even reluctantly able to see the value in running some GAA stars as candidates. But aside from the ex-IRA cohort, the main bandwagon-jumpers were unattached leftists of the post-1916 generation. Peadar Cowan had been in Labour until he started his own micro-party called 'The Vanguard', which went nowhere. Noel Browne, a doctor, had considered joining Labour but thought that his middle-class background would be a barrier. Browne's background was harrowing but tailor-made for political advertising: his father had worked for the NSPCC and thereby become infected with tuberculosis, which then spread to the entire family, who all died of TB apart from Noel. He got through medical school thanks to wealthy benefactors and scholarships, and dedicated his life to eradicating the disease from Ireland. He was driven, but also fairly independent-minded and he never had a kind word to say about anyone (his autobiography his hilariously catty) and this led to the ultimate failure of Clann na Poblachta to break through. I feel a lot of personal affinity for Noel Browne, myself.

Clann na Poblachta first stood in a spate of by-elections, two of which it won. But the victors didn't have long to get their feet under the table, because De Valera considered his losses to be a dire insult to Fianna Fail and he called a snap election. On a new map, which abolished a lot of the larger constituencies and made it harder for smaller parties to get through. And so soon after the founding of the Clann that they didn't have time to hold a conference to vote on their own Constitution and party officers, let alone democratically select candidates.

You can see where this is going, can't you? The Clann underperformed. They were attacked in the media as an undemocratic front for the IRA, and their support was so bimodal that the Executive had to carefully balance their tickets in each constituency with a left-winger or popular local man and an old IRA comrade who they hoped the left-winger would transfer to. This was part of the reason why they stood 93 candidates - about as many as the large parties. The other reason was that they genuinely thought they would break through into the big league like Fianna Fail had. They turned out to be wrong, but the consensus in the event was that if the election had been held a fortnight earlier, they'd have won 40 seats. On the night, they won ten. Most of these were a result of low-placed IRA comrades transferring to the left-wingers, which functionally meant that the unquestionably loyal caucus MacBride thought he was getting suddenly became a bunch of radicals he barely knew.

On the positive hand, CnaP changed Irish political campaigning: they were the first party to make an advertising film (entitled 'Our Country', it featured both MacBride and Browne talking over footage of poor people standing barefoot in puddles), and this was such a good innovation that Fianna Fail persuaded the big cinema chain not to show it. To watch it, you had to go to an independent theatre or watch it projected onto a pub wall at a CnaP public meeting. This added to the mystique. They also released an LP of Sean MacBride reading out the manifesto (no dubstep remix has yet been made) and MacBride also had two simultaneous year-long arguments with FF Minister Sean McEntee in the letters pages of the two main daily newspapers.

Anyway, the Clann got their ten seats and joined the First Inter-Party Government with MacBride as Minister of External Affairs (he was keen for Finance, as he mainly cared about doing Keynesianism, but Fine Gael weren't having it) and Browne as Minister of Health. Both of them fucked up. MacBride spent most of his time at his clab and at important international meetings, meaning that he failed to defend his turf from FG. This came back to bite him when the FG Taoiseach announced that Ireland was leaving the Commonwealth on a whim after the Governor-General of Canada was rude to him over dinner - when MacBride was informed, he was having lunch with a journalist at a swanky hotel and got quite angry about being left out of the loop. This was particularly galling for him, as leaving the Commonwealth was a straight-up Clann na Poblachta policy, which wasn't actually shared by Fine Gael!

Browne's fuck-up was that he invested so much of his time into the Mother and Child scheme, which would have introduced a measure of state funding to the health sector. He was so laser-focused that he let his personal relationships with the Cabinet and with MacBride suffer (often missing Cabinet meetings because he thought his presence at his own Department was more important) and naively assumed that the Catholic Church would abide by their undertakings to let him make his reforms. As it happened, the Scheme went further than had previously been agreed, the Church condemned it in an attempt to retain their own monopoly over social services, and MacBride and the rest of the Cabinet chose not to pick a fight with the Church. The Scheme failed and Browne angrily left Clann na Poblachta.

It's worth saying at this point that MacBride was a terrible manager of personalities: he'd come to maturity within the hierarchical structures of the IRA, and the more individualistic personalities he was forced to work with in the Clann were too much for him. Of the ten TDs in 1948, four left the party by 1951 - and three of those (Browne in Dublin South-East, Cowan in Dublin North-East and Jack McQuillan in Roscommon) were re-elected as Independents while the Clann went down the tubes.

After the Government fell, the Clann retracted to its ex-IRA core. A perennial candidate won them a third seat (Kerry North) in 1954 and died two years later, being replaced at the by-election by his daughter, who at 21 years and 7 months old remains the youngest woman ever elected to Dail Eireann. Otherwise, it was generally downhill, and the Clann never entered Government again - they gave external support to the Second Inter-Party Government but even Joe Blowick was invited back into Cabinet while they weren't.

After being defeated at the 1957 election, Sean MacBride came into his own. He isn't much remembered today, even in Ireland, but he was a founder of Amnesty International, he wrote the first Constitutions of both the Organisation of African Unity and Literally Ghana, he took the matter of IRA internment to the ECHR and he was the only person to win both the Lenin Peace Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize.

It's just a shame he wasn't much good at politics.

Oh - on the map, you will note that the West of Ireland was an area of relative electoral strength for the Clann in 1948, but that they didn't win many seats there. This is partly a result of over-nomination, but is actually largely because Irish voters simply weren't in the habit of voting for a coalition at that point. In later elections, FG and Labour voters second-preferenced each other fairly frequently, and this is also seen with the Clann parties (see the Dublin seats won by CnaP in later elections, particularly), but in 1948, the idea of giving lower preferences to other, radically different parties just because they might work with your own hadn't really filtered through. Clann na Poblachta in 1948 would therefore be thought of as being quite 'transfer-phobic' by today's standards.

Also: the guy who won Dublin South-Central in 1961 - the Clann's only seat in that election - had stood there in every election since the start, and it is incredibly wholesome that he got his turn in the end and saved the party for a few more years.

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Their first leader was Michael Donnellan, a FF veteran and Gaelic Football star, who organised CnT to be a populist, anti-Establishment movement dedicated to eye-catching events such as rallies and marches. Their speeches of the time claimed that Ireland would work fine if all the politicians were dumped on a small island off the coast of County Clare, and that the farmers were being kept down by evil parasitic financiers. Yeah, there was a distinctly Not Good tinge to CnT rhetoric, which is largely attributable to their failure to develop a systematic, historical materialist critique of the unfairness of their situation, and the consequent need to find scapegoats.
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There is nothing new under the Sun.
 
The Workers' Party

With the decline of the Clann parties, Ireland settled down into a comfortable two-and-a-half (or one-and-two-halves) party system of Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and Labour. The end of this period is signaled principally by the complex politics engendered by the Troubles in the North, but also by certain other factors - for instance, internal dissension within Fianna Fail when Charlie Haughey took over as leader, and Labour's frequent changes of mind over whether to go into Coalition or to fight alone. From 1981, the representation of minor parties in the Dail steadily increased.

The first of these to build a base for itself was the Workers' Party. The WP was known as Official Sinn Fein from 1970 to 1977, then as Sinn Fein the Workers' Party, and finally, from 1982, as simply the Workers' Party. The gradual rebrands reflected a steady ideological drift towards a Socialism that had, by the 1980s, little in common with the Sinn Fein heritage.

In the 1960s, following the failure of the IRA Border Campaign, Sinn Fein members like Tomas Mac Giolla (Party President from 1962) began to look for the reasons why the Campaign hadn't been met with universal support among the people of the North. One of the answers they hit on was that Capitalism was dividing the Protestant and Catholic working classes, both from each other and from a critique of the society built by the two Partition states of Northern Ireland and the Republic. The political bent of the Republican movement therefore drifted towards Socialism. Before long, the Sinn Fein demand was for a 32-county Socialist Republic. And with this drift, the supporters of the new line began to involve themselves more in practical politics (for instance, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights struggle) and less in IRA route-marches. It was only a matter of time before the new crowd would start to aspire to contesting elections in the existing states and taking their seats to tout their Republican and Socialist ideas.

Needless to say, the members who were still keen on IRA militarism were not keen on these developments. In 1969-70, the modernisers proposed dropping abstentionism. A (probably rigged) vote in the IRA Army Council backed the proposal, while a subsequent vote at the Sinn Fein Conference failed to achieve the required two-thirds majority, despite a lot of skullduggery going on. The abstentionists decided to abstain from further involvement and withdrew from Sinn Fein and the IRA, forming the Provisional IRA and the Sinn Fein party we know and love today. The Socialists became known as 'Official' Sinn Fein and had their own paramilitary wing in the form of the 'Official IRA' - although this was of course kept under wraps publicly.

At first, it seemed as if the split was fairly even, but the forcefulness with which the PIRA conducted themselves in the Troubles attracted a lot of new members and supporters, both from newly radicalised individuals and from former Officials. The Officials, meanwhile, tended to reject any form of violence which might risk exacerbating sectarian divisions within the proletariat. Most of their violent interventions would have been laughable if they weren't so tragic: in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, they bombed an Army base at Aldershot, killing nobody but a Catholic priest and a few civilian cleaners - some of whom happened to be Catholic. This lost them any support they once had, and they laid down arms in a ceasefire in 1972. Armed feuds continued with the Provos and the Irish National Liberation Army, which was a small off-shoot of the OIRA which rejected the ceasefire. Subsequent growth for the Officials in the North was limited, for obvious reasons.

In any case, the Party began standing in Dail elections from 1973, and first won a seat with Joe Sherlock in Cork East (a bit of Cork city and a whole heap of farmland) in 1981. Sherlock, like most of the WP Teachtai Dala, had already made a name for himself as an effective Councillor and stood in the constituency several times before. Another two seats were won in February 1981, including that of Pronsias De Rossa, a man with both charisma and a beard, who became even more the face of the Party than their leader, Tomas Mac Giolla. Mac Giolla himself only got into the Dail in November 1982. In the first Confidence motions they were privy to, the Workers' Party voted for Fianna Fail as the slightly less right-wing option, but the reality of Haughey's government led them to withdraw their support - a decision that precipitated the November 1982 election. They never subsequently supported a bourgeois candidate for Taoiseach.

The ideological development of the Workers' Party continued. They became so opposed to the Provos and to sectarianism that they grew to be essentially the most Unionist party in Dail Eireann. They depended for money to some extent on Moscow and other Communist states during this period, and did slightly crazy things like inviting North Korean politicians on speaking tours - something which later came back to bite some ex-WP members. Despite that dependence, the decline of the USSR and a hunger for a broader constituency led some modernisers to move towards Eurocommunism in the late 1980s. This faction became dominant in 1988 when Pronsias De Rossa was elected as Leader, taking over from the elderly Mac Giolla.

By this point, there were three major problems facing the Workers' Party. Firstly, their structure was descended from the authoritarian hierarchies of the IRA, leavened with Soviet-style democratic centralism. This meant that few new members were attracted to join, which meant that a lot of hard work fell onto the shoulders of a small number of Very Keen People, which in turn meant that few new members were attracted to join. Secondly, there was internal conflict driven by the push towards social democracy by the ideological Eurocommunists and the careerist politicians in the Party, including the 'Student Princes' Pat Rabbitte and Eamon Gilmore. Thirdly, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the TDs to claim ignorance of the existence of the Official IRA, especially as some (including De Rossa, Sherlock and Mac Giolla) had been named in the press as being former members and a BBC documentary was shown the night before some local elections which demonstrated that the OIRA still existed, despite claims to the contrary by the WP.

The Workers' Party got their best ever result in 1989, winning 7 seats. But the fall of Communism exacerbated the existing tensions and, in a Conference that must have involved a fair bit of deja vu, the modernisers proposed a vote which would have expelled any OIRA members from the Party - it failed to pass with a two-thirds majority, and the modernisers walked out to found a new party. Of the TDs, only Mac Giolla stayed with the traditionalists (he wasn't opposed by the De Rossa faction in the 1992 election but lost his seat by 50 votes) while the Student Princes were both privately tempted to join Labour.

Instead, the splitters chose a placeholder name, New Agenda, before changing it to Democratic Left at the first Party Conference (other proposals included the People's Party or the Socialist Party). Neither name made much of an impression and some TDs had to patiently explain to their voters that no, they hadn't joined the right-wing Progressive Democrats all of a sudden. This lack of cut-through also meant that they failed to attract the new members they had hoped to attract with the rebrand. And the IRA link still caused problems because De Rossa was still leader, and he was faced with fresh allegations that he had known about OIRA activities.

Indeed, the cutting off of the OIRA brought even more problems: beforehand, the Workers' Party were rolling in money for campaigns and lily stickers - they marked themselves out with stickers while the Provos used old-fashioned pins, and this gave them the name 'Stickies'. Some of this money came from foreign powers, but a lot of it came from the OIRA, who were in the habit of fundraising for the Party by printing counterfeit money, committing robberies, and money-laundering. When all this cash dried up, Democratic Left found themselves without a sustainable source of funding.

DL won four seats in 1992 (I haven't mapped the WP after 1989, although they still exist, because they only got halfway decent results in Dublin West and Waterford) and won two by-elections in 1994, which changed the parliamentary arithmetic sufficiently to enable a Fine Gael-Labour-Democratic Left 'Rainbow Coalition'. In the course of this coalition, DL discovered that they actually didn't differ all that much from Labour, and quite liked participating in Government, so after losing their by-election gains at the 1997 election, they threw in the towel and merged with Labour. Ultimately, they failed to articulate a radical-left philosophy between Communism and Social Democracy.

In Government, DL were a bastion of social liberalism (they were the hardiest supporters of the lifting of the ban on divorce), social democracy (De Rossa's main contribution was a technocratic anti-poverty strategy) and, somewhat ironically, support for tuition fees. Despite half of their TDs being Student Princes, they fully bought into the 'middle class subsidy' argument, although they failed to convince the other two Government parties.

After the merger, former Workers' Party members rose to new heights: De Rossa became Labour Party President; both Rabbitte and Gilmore served as Labour Leaders, Liz McManus (Wicklow) was Deputy Leader of the Labour Party; Catherine Murphy (who opposed the Labour merger) became an Independent TD and is now co-Leader of the Social Democrats; and John Halligan, a WP member who refused to go with the DL splitters, is now an Independent TD and Minister of State in the Fine Gael-led Government. Additionally, Joe Sherlock's son is one of seven remaining Labour TDs.

The maps show that support for WP and DL largely flowed from the presence of UPLBs and hard-working activists.

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The Workers' Party

Before long, the Sinn Fein demand was for a 32-county Socialist Republic. And with this drift, the supporters of the new line began to involve themselves more in practical politics (for instance, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights struggle) and less in IRA route-marches.

I know that's how my family first came into contact with elements of the (soon to be) Offical IRA though it was the Bombay Street burnings that eventually brought them fully into the organisation.

Good write up by the way, have you ever read "The Lost Revolution"? Gives a very good overview of the Workers Party and OIRA.
 
I know that's how my family first came into contact with elements of the (soon to be) Offical IRA though it was the Bombay Street burnings that eventually brought them fully into the organisation.

Good write up by the way, have you ever read "The Lost Revolution"? Gives a very good overview of the Workers Party and OIRA.
I haven't, actually, although I probably ought to. I get squeamish about Troubles Books because I'm quite emotionally sensitive and not entirely keen on blood and stupidity. My main source for this was Kevin Rafter's book on Democratic Left, which Isn't Very Good but gives a perfectly tolerable account of the basics.

One of the things that pleasantly surprised me was how excited they got about credit unions in the late 60s and 70s. A bit of wholesomeness amidst the killing.
 
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