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:
“For generations, a wide range of shooting in Northern Ireland has provided all sections of the population with a pastime which ... has occupied a great deal of leisure time. Unlike many other countries, the outstanding characteristic of the sport has been that it was not confined to any one class.”
—Northern Irish Tourist Board. quoted in New Statesman (London, Aug. 29, 1969)
“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 Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death. ... “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan,”controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.””
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The tragedy of Northern Ireland is that it is now a society in which the dead console the living.”
—Jack Holland (b. 1947)