The
Communist Party of Ireland
A Critical History, Epilogue by DR O'Connor Lysaght, 1976
The preceding series of lectures were completed by the summer of 1974
and delivered during the subsequent winter. In revising them in the
late spring of 1976, there is little to add to them in the account
of the last two years that changes qualitatively the analysis made
in these pages.
The most serious change in these years occurred in January 1976, when
a number of the leading cadres of the CPI, including Samuel Nolan,
Joseph Deasy and several founder members of the Connolly Youth Movement,
resigned from the Party in protest against an attempt to suppress dissent
over its change of line in support for the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia.
The dissidents have constituted themselves The Irish Marxist Society.
How serious the split is, is as yet uncertain, though it must be serious
enough for Nolan for one to break from the Party after a lifetime.
What is quite certain is that the CPI is now firmly at one with the
CPUSA and the Portuguese CP (and now against the CPGB) in giving uncritical
support to the USSR. It is no longer opportunist for itself but has
returned to an opportunist line for the Kremlin, a line even more directly
subservient thereunto because unsupported even by the forms of international
organisation. It is, thus, closer than it was to the SPI; it will be
interesting to see if Moscow begins to favour the two nations dogma
the better to bring the two parties together.
Two other matters of note have occurred also. In the first place, the
CPI has more than made up quantitatively for its loss of old cadres
by winning new ones from Sinn Féin (Gardiner Place). By and large,
these tend, having rejected nationalism, to be more ardently pro-Russian,
than the remaining old guard.
Secondly, the original unity of the 'United' May Day Committee has
been extended programmatically to enable its participants to form a
new popular front – the 'Left Alternative', with a programme of limited
reforms for Irish capitalism.
All in all, Moscow and, despite the split, the CPI can feel pleased
with the results of the last two years. Whether or not, on the evidence
above, the Irish workers can feel thus is altogether another question.
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