Socialist Workers Party (Ireland) - Foundation and Growth

Foundation and Growth

The SWP was originally founded in 1971 as the Socialist Workers Movement by supporters of the International Socialists of Britain (now called the SWP) living in Northern Ireland, who had previously been members of People's Democracy, the Waterford Socialist Movement and the Young Socialists. Many of the members had been active in the new Socialist Labour Alliance. The SWM subsequently affiliated to the SLA, but soon left, claiming that the Alliance was organised to debate, rather than to campaign.

Some of those who joined the SWM after its formation sympathised with a small tendency in Britain and later split away to form the Irish Workers Group, which later became Workers Power. Meanwhile, the SWM grew on a modest scale and published a paper called The Worker.

When the Socialist Labour Party was founded in 1977, SWM joined as a 'tendency' (or subgroup). The Socialist Workers Tendency was noted in the SLP for producing a bulletin more professional than that of the party. They left in 1980 to reform the Socialist Workers Movement.

The SWM was long overshadowed on the Irish left by organisations such as the Workers' Party, but the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Warsaw Bloc regimes post 1989 saw it grow. Unlike most other socialist groups, the SWM supported the revolutions of 1989 against what it saw as state capitalist dictatorships, contending that regimes such as the Soviet Union were not socialist but a form of state capitalism, directed not by corporations but by a Stalinist bureaucracy using the state.

Growing from a small agitation group of about fifty members, the SWM now began to build groups in major colleges such as Trinity College and University College, Dublin. Its traditional workplace bastion, Waterford Glass, has faded in strength but the SWP has developed some limited support in the Dublin Bus unions and the education branch of SIPTU (Services, Industrial, Professional & Technical Union). The party campaigned vigorously in referendums for abortion choice and for divorce.

The SWM changed its name to the Socialist Workers Party at its conference in 1995, after delegates working at Dublin Bus argued that it should now take itself seriously on the left, as it then had a growing and active membership.