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.