On Monday April 24 2023 a serious incident occurred outside the family home of Paul Murphy TD (People Before Profit, Dublin South-West) and his partner Jess Spear.
Fair play to Seán Crowe TD (Sinn Féin), a constituency colleague of Paul Murphy, who issued a strong solidarity statement. All other left wing deputies, elected representatives, activists etc should endorse Crowe’s statement. That is a minimum. Paul and his partner Jess Spear must be unconditionally supported, and the left should move forward, openly organising and marginalising far-right anti-civilization thugs.
Paul Murphy TD and General Election 2020 team; Seán Crowe TD speaks to the media; far-right anti-civilization thugs outside Paul Murphy’s house
Statement Issued by Seán Crowe TD (Sinn Féin, Dublin South-West) :
April 24 2023 at 8pm – Far-Right protesters in Ireland’s capital city Dublin protested outside the house of an elected member of the Dáil (parliament), the People Before Profit Deputy Paul Murphy. This is a sinister escalation. Solidarity with Paul Murphy TD and his partner Jess Spear.
Everyone on the Irish Left needs to keep the focus on supporting left wing election candidates who rule out coalition with the right in all circumstances. On this key point, People Before Profit is correct.
Predicting a general election result almost two years from now is unwise. The current Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael/ Green Party FFFGGG coalition can remain in office until February 2025. These three parties will not voluntarily cut and run unless at least one of them is sure they will benefit from a fresh general election. Could the government fall due to external pressures? That’s possible. At the moment one serious crisis follows another. The latest arises from a government decision making it easier for landlords to evict tenants.
We included references to an Irish Times letter signed by 12 Oireachtas public representatives ((TD’s and Senators) – which prompted several critical replies. One of the original Oireachtas 12, Senator Tom Clonan, responded positively to the critics.
On Wednesday March Ivana Bacik TD (Labour Party Leader) joined the discussion – robustly stating
We believe that it is misguided for anyone on the left in Ireland to call for a ceasefire, without making any reference to the need for Russian withdrawal from this illegal and barbaric occupation
Ivana Bacik TD, Irish Labour Party Leader
Ivana Bacik TD (Irish Labour Party Leader) and others discuss the Irish left’s response to Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine
Ivana Bacik’s letter is below, along with a number of other letters.
On the first anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine, February 24 2023, 12 elected left-wing Oireachtas members had a letter published in one of Ireland’s main daily papers, the Irish Times. A number of correspondents rejected the contents of this letter.
On the same day two party leaders, Sinn Féin President MaryLou McDonald and Ivana Bacik of the Labour Party brought an opposite message to thousands of protesters in Dublin’s O’Connell Street.
Both Bacik and McDonald clearly backed occupied Ukraine against the Russian imperialist and ethnic-cleansing invader.
Putin must immediately withdraw his army and end his criminal invasion
The Ukrainian people are foremost on our minds as they suffer under and resist the Russian invasion. Anyone who considers themselves an opponent of imperialism should be in support of their resistance.
We in the ILWU — socialists, anarchists, feminists, trade unionists, anti-imperialists — have watched with dismay, however, as many on the Western left who have campaigned vigorously against US imperialism have failed to recognise the need to do the same with respect to Russian imperialism. If Ukraine has the right to self-determination and to resist the dismemberment and partition of their state then Irish socialists should expend their energy on seeking out practical means of supporting the Ukrainian people’s struggle. This struggle echoes the same fight Ireland undertook over a century ago.
Some left-wing organisations oppose deliveries of weapons to Ukraine. They are fast becoming isolated in the international labour movement. Trade unions, social movements, and organised left-wing parties across the European continent are mobilising in support of the Ukrainian right to self determination.
Indeed some left-wing organisations oppose deliveries of weapons to Ukraine. They are fast becoming isolated in the international labour movement. Trade unions, social movements, and organised left-wing parties across the European continent are mobilising in support of the Ukrainian right to self determination.
Support Irish State Mine Clearance in Ukraine
The ILWU makes this statement to publicly register our support for Irish assistance, by the Irish Defence Forces, with mine clearance in Ukraine. Mine clearance is humanitarian work that will save lives, will clear land to enable farming, and will make towns and villages habitable once again. Defence Forces personnel will use their specialist demining skills to train Ukrainians in this activity.
Left-evasionist and tankie political activists everywhere are promoting a Seymour Hersh post claiming that the USA ruling class blew up the Nordstream 2 pipeline which is designed to allow Russia to supply Germany with Natural Gas, by-passing Ukraine.
In Ireland, Paul Murphy TD (People Before Profit [PBP], Dublin South-West) highlighted this story on the grounds that Seymour Hersh is “one of the world’s best journalists”. In December 2022 a pro-PBP publication, the Irish Marxist Review (a well-produced and often interesting journal published by the Socialist Workers’ Network) carried a Maurice Coakley article which stated “the US Navy were the only force likely to have carried out the attacks on the gas pipeline”. (Maurice Coakley’s article is here : https://irishmarxistreview.net/index.php/imr/article/view/479/464)
Seymour Hersh, decades ago, was a credible journalist. Today he is a conspiracy nut. One correspondent on Paul Murphy’s facebook page, James Doyle, observes “This is all nonsense. For example, Why would the US use a Norwegian aircraft rather than a fake fishing boat in a supposedly covert operation. For those who refer to Hersh as a “respected journalist”, you should know that he thinks the Osama Bin Laden operation was fake and Assad never used chemical weapons in Syria. A good journalist in his day, but sadly has gone off the rails into a rabbit warren of attention seeking conspiracy theories.”
Is this dispute important? It is. In the activist Revolutionary Marxist tradition, theory is needed as a guide to action.
John Meehan February 16 2023
“Left” organisations and personalities retail Hersh’s Nord Stream story uncritically, because it is what they want to hear. Dogma beats inquiry. Innuendo and false claims beat solidarity with the victims of Russia’s scorched-earth war on populations, in Syria in 2014 and 2017, and Ukraine in 2022-23.
Re-forming critical public spaces means challenging the “great men” of the “left” when they offer blinkered, one-sided and untruthful explanations for the dangerous, uncertain realities we face.
Simon Pirani, The Nord Stream Pipeline Explosions – Challenging False Narratives.
The claim that the Nord Stream gas pipeline was blown up by U.S. special forces, made last week by the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, is being used to reinforce false narratives about Russia’s culpability for the war in Ukraine.
On 26 September last year, explosions damaged three of Nord Stream’s four pipelines, which run under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, and sent a large cloud of methane into the atmosphere. Russia has blamed the United States; western media suspected Russia itself of sabotage.
I first met Vincent Doherty in the late 1970’s via People’s Democracy and the Fourth International. Since then we travelled on different political paths, while remaining on very good personal terms. In 2022 Vincent and me – along with a group of left-wing activists who come from different but complementary streams of the Irish Left – have been working actively together in the Irish Left With Ukraine organization.
The comrades who publish the Cedar Lounge Revolution Blog come from a stream of the Irish Left which is different from Vincent Doherty and me. But we converge politically in 2022 on a very decisive issue – the genocidal imperialist Russian invasion of Ukraine.
On the left nothing stands still. There is a strong mistaken current dominant of the Irish Marxist left which does “what if” interpretations of historical events. This interview avoids that approach. It is much better to accept the past, warts and all. We cannot change the past, but we can with 20-20 vision learn from our history. We can apply that knowledge to the present day and the immediate future – which we can influence.
Rayner Lysaght Tribute – Irish Labour History Society Event
Rayner Lysaght RIP (January 30 1941 – July 2 2021) was a close comrade of Vincent and me for many years in People’s Democracy and the Fourth International. The Irish Labour History Society staged a commemorative tribute in honour of Rayner on May 14 2021. I delivered the speech below, which also deals with some of the events described by Vincent Doherty.
I was shocked and dismayed to hear last Sunday morning that my friend and comrade, the socialist activist and Marxist theoretician John Molyneux, had died of a heart attack the previous afternoon. It was all the more poignant because on that Saturday I had had an email exchange with John, something that we had increasingly done over recent years.
John was one of that generation of socialist activists that had been aroused by the events of 1968 in London and Paris, In an interview for a recently published book called “We Fought the Law” John graphically described how he had been both shocked and radicalised by the confrontation with the police in Grosvenor Square outside the American Embassy during the massive demonstration against the Vietnam War in March 1968. Another formative event was a visit to France during May 1968. Shortly afterwards he became a revolutionary socialist and joined the International Socialists, a commitment that he maintained until his death last weekend.
Within the IS and its successor the Socialist Workers Party, John quickly established himself as a significant theoretician. His first major work was Marxism and the Party, a study of the Marxist tradition of revolutionary organisation from Marx and Engels through Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Gramsci. The book emphasised the necessity of a democratically organised activist interventionist party rooted in the working class to prepare for the overthrow of capitalism and lay the basis for socialism.
John not only produced major theoretical works such as What Is the Real Marxist Tradition? and Is Marxism Deterministic? but also a huge amount of material aimed at providing a basic introduction to Marxist ideas in the form of regular newspaper columns in British and later Irish Socialist Worker. These articles also appeared in a number of papers associated with the International Socialist Tendency. Many of them were reproduced as popular pamphlets such as The Future Socialist Society, Arguments for Revolutionary Socialism and “Is Human Nature a Barrier to Socialism?”.
However, John wasn’t just a populariser of a Marxist orthodoxy, he was also prepared to raise awkward questions that sometimes brought him into conflict with many members of his own organisation. A case in point was his second major theoretical work, “Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution”. John was a great admirer of Trotsky, but in this work he raised serious questions about some of Trotsky’s weaknesses, such as his tendency to make sweeping predictions about future developments – some of these resulted in powerful and valuable analyses such as his treatment of the rise of fascism and the fate of the Spanish Revolution, but after his death his predictions about the outcome of World War II led to serious disorientation of many of his followers in the post-war period.
Other bones of contention were his orientation during a major debate in the SWP about women’s oppression and the nature of democracy in a revolutionary organisation. But despite such differences John remained a committed and loyal member of his organisation.
Tomás Ó Flatharta 