Irish Left Archive News

We’re currently working towards a new version of the Irish Left Archive website, which is showing its age a bit since we launched it in 2013. That will happen sometime later this year, but in the meantime we’ve refreshed the existing site to match the new style.

Yep, it’s red. We originally avoided red as too on-the-nose, but the old blue always felt a bit contrarian, and the rest of the rainbow gets a bit party-specific. So, red it is!

A full re-write of the site is in the early stages, which will hopefully add some new features as well as generally modernising it. Time and competence allowing, we’ll have an update on that in the Autumn.

I’ve been adding more to the Bibliography of Irish Left Publications on the Irish Left Archive website recently, which was mentioned before when it was first added:

This includes a list of publications that aren’t in the archive, which it seemed useful to have a record of without making it harder to search the collection by cluttering it with publications of which there are no examples.

Some of them are available elsewhere online, particularly more contemporary ones that are usually available as PDFs; others aren’t, to my knowledge, scanned anywhere.

It’s still incomplete, but lists close to 300 publications now, thanks to John Goodwillie for pointing me to his 1986 article in Saothar, “Lesser Marxist Movements in Ireland: a Bibliography, 1934-1984” [paywall] and to a useful list put online by Conor McCabe, as well as the Linen Hall and NLI catalogues.

I’m not sure how broad to make the scope – it doesn’t list trade union publications except for those already in the archive, for example – so suggestions are welcome. Also, if anyone comes across a periodical that’s missing or finds an error, please let us know.

Hopefully it’s a useful reference. It also gives the website the advantage that we can list all the known periodicals at the bottom of each organisation’s page as well, for example you’ll see this list on the BICO page:

The very useful archive of The Worker, later Socialist Worker — the newspaper of the Socialist Workers’ Movement (SWM) and Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) — has been further expanded.

It now includes scans of the first volume of the paper from 1972–1977, when it ceased publication during the period in which the SWM joined the Socialist Labour Party (SLP); and the second volume, which ran from 1980–1984.

The site is working towards adding the remaining issues from the 1980s, which would make it a near-complete archive of the paper from 1972–2018.

You’ll find the Socialist Worker Online here (Issuu link).

Irish Election Literature and the Irish Left Archive have started a joint project to put together leaflets and documents from individual demonstrations, marches, rallies and protests in Ireland.

We hope that making these documents accessible together will give a useful view of the campaigns in which the different strands of the Irish left participate, and provide a documentary record of the political issues that have led to political action and collaboration. One of the interesting facets of documents from a particular march or protest is that they can provide an insight in to the organisations that actively participate in particular campaigns; and in to how left organisations respond to political events and changes — often with a need to respond quickly to a developing situation, in contrast, for example, with regular periodicals.

All the initial material was collected and scanned by Alan Kinsella of Irish Election Literature, who had the idea of making material from particular protests available together as a way to document campaigns taking place in Ireland and the involvement of different strands of the Irish left, and kindly suggested a collaboration with the Irish Left Archive.

You can see the project and demonstrations we’ve covered so far in the Snapshots of Political Action section of the ILA website. So far we’ve included marches and rallies for abortion rights, the Cost of Living Coalition, and National Maternity Hospital, and there are more lined up to be added in the coming weeks.

We hope to continue expanding the collection and provide a broader documentary representation of protests and political events around the island. We’d be delighted to hear from anyone with material distributed at demonstrations, marches, rallies or protests who would like to contribute to the project. In particular, what we currently have is quite Dublin-centric and we hope we can expand to document the range of political action across Ireland.

So if you have relevant material, please get in touch; and if you’re participating in political action — either producing documents or folding them in to your pocket as you continue marching — we’d be grateful if you would collect them and pass them on.

You can contact and either Irish Election Literature  or the Irish Left Archive if you would like to pass on documents.

We’ve added a bibliography of Irish left publications to the left archive website, which you can find here.

This includes a list of publications that aren’t in the archive, which it seemed useful to have a record of without making it harder to search the collection by cluttering it with publications of which there are no examples.

Some of them are available elsewhere online, particularly more contemporary ones that are usually available as PDFs; others aren’t, to my knowledge, scanned anywhere.

If anyone knows of others that should be listed, please let us know in the comments.

You’ll find the list here – you can sort the entries by clicking a heading.

Note: one or two non-Irish publications have slipped in to the list, because those not attached to an organisation aren’t marked with a location. We’ll hopefully get that corrected soon.

We’ve added a small addition to the Irish Left Archive website in the form of pulling out some interesting events relevant to the Left and the materials in the collection for specific dates. You’ll see these on the homepage when there are relevant ones to show, and they link through to a list of events from that date, along with documents published and subject headings – i.e. elections, referendums etc.

The date is probably often the least important detail, but it’s a way to draw out some interesting articles and bits and pieces that might be otherwise missed in the materials.

You won’t see it very often at the moment! There are 366 days, and not so many entries… but we’ll add to it over time, and if anyone has suggestions for events to add that have some relevant material on the website, let us know.

Today (18th July), for example, marks the date of a Garda baton-charge against hunger-strike demonstrators outside the British Embassy in 1981, in which several were injured; and of the start of the Dunnes Stores anti-apartheid strike in the Henry Street shop in 1984.

The online archive of Socialist Worker has been expanded again to bring it almost to the contemporary. It now ranges from the first issue of The Worker in 1972 up to Socialist Worker issue 400 in 2017.

It includes 375 issues of the paper, with fairly complete coverage from the early 1990s onwards. It’s a great resource (and well done to the patient person who did all that scanning…!)

You can find them on SWOnline on Issuu.