The Communist Party of Northern Ireland was a small communist party operating in Northern Ireland. Its origins lay in the 1941 split in the Communist Party of Ireland, which also produced the Irish Workers' Party in the Republic of Ireland. While the reasons for this split remain unclear, operational difficulties during World War II including Ireland's neutrality and the possibility of orders from Moscow remain the primary suspects - certainly, the split did not garner any reproach from the Comintern. It also enabled the CPNI to recruit extensively in the Protestant working class.
The Irish Workers' Party was able to undertake entrism into the Irish Labour Party, which was not organised in Northern Ireland at the time. Instead, the CPNI stood their own candidates in the 1945 Northern Ireland general election. While they did not come close to winning any seats, they polled a respectable 12,000 votes for their three candidates.
The CPNI was unable to use any momentum from their election result and declined in the following decades. Nonetheless it had a massive influence over left politics in Northern Ireland controlling the trade unions (as the British Labour Party was absent) and trying to politicise the IRA. Its highpoint was the civil rights association (NICRA) of the late 1960s which it effectively controlled, if only bureaucratically. It ultimately became the junior partner in a merger with the Irish Workers' Party, which was once again acting as an independent organisation, which in 1970 became the Communist Party of Ireland.
Read more about Communist Party Of Northern Ireland: General Secretaries
Famous quotes containing the words northern ireland, communist, party, northern and/or ireland:
“... in Northern Ireland, if you don’t have basic Christianity, rather than merely religion, all you get out of the experience of living is bitterness.”
—Bernadette Devlin (b. 1947)
“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“If the Soviet Union let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state, because everybody would join the other party.”
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“I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“No people can more exactly interpret the inmost meaning of the present situation in Ireland than the American Negro. The scheme is simple. You knock a man down and then have him arrested for assault. You kill a man and then hang the corpse.”
—W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)