Origins
Brendan Clifford (born 1936) was an Irish emigrant from the Sliabh Luachra area of County Cork who had migrated to London and become involved in left-wing politics there. Clifford and some of his followers had been in Michael McCreery's Committee to Defeat Revisionism, for Communist Unity and later they joined the Irish Communist Group. This body consisted largely of Irish people who were living in London and were opposed to the Soviet-aligned communist organisations intended for Irish people. Following a 1965 split, the Maoist wing named itself the Irish Communist Organisation, which later became the British and Irish Communist Organisation. The broadly Trotskyist wing, led by Gery Lawless, became the Irish Workers' Group.
The ICO undertook an investigation into the development of Maoism, and concluded that it was not a suitable model for an anti-revisionist group. The Chinese Communist Party had supported some aspects of Nikita Khrushchev's "revisionism", and then been inaccurate about its past positions.
One founder-member, Dennis Dennehy, was Secretary of the Dublin Housing Action Committee, which organised a highly successful protest in the early 1960s.
They republished works by Joseph Stalin and by James Connolly, accusing the official Connolly Association of seriously misrepresenting his views.
In 1968, the ICO issued a press release which defended the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Read more about this topic: British And Irish Communist Organisation
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