Proinsias de Rossa - Workers' Party Leadership and Split

Workers' Party Leadership and Split

In 1988, De Rossa succeeded Tomás Mac Giolla as president of the Workers' Party. The party had been growing steadily in the 1980s and had its best ever electoral performance in the general and European elections held in 1989. The party won 7 Dáil seats with 5% of the vote. De Rossa himself was elected to the European Parliament for the Dublin constituency, where he topped the poll and the party almost succeeded in replacing Fine Gael as the capital's second-largest party. However the campaign resulted in a serious build up of the financial debt of the Workers' Party, which threatened to greatly inhibit the party's ability to successfully ensure it would hold on to its gains.

In 1992, long-standing tensions within the Workers' Party pitting reformers, including most of the party's TDs, against hard-liners centred around former general secretary Seán Garland came to a head. Disagreements on policy issues were exacerbated by the desire of the reformers to ditch the democratic centralist nature of the party structures and remove any remaining questions about alleged party links with the Official IRA, a topic which had been the subject of persistent and embarrassing media coverage. De Rossa called a Special Ardfheis (party conference) to debate changes to the constitution. The motion failed to get the required two-thirds majority and subsequently De Rossa led the majority of the parliamentary group and councillors out of a meeting of the party's Central Executive Committee the following Saturday at Wynn's Hotel, splitting the party.