Northern Ireland and the Democratic Left Party, 1989-1999

When looking at areas of conflict like Northern Ireland commentators may tend to view political allegiances in oversimplified terms, seeing only two protagonists in an otherwise complex and diverse community. The emergence and demise of a small left or labor party in Northern Ireland is a case in point. Much of the commentary on the last thirty years in Northern Ireland has tended to focus on the "two tribes," while leaving out those who regard themselves as belonging to neither tradition. Some may argue that they are an insignificant minority, yet there are a substantial number of people who seek or would seek representation outside the mainstream nationalist-Unionist political camps in Northern Irish politics, if afforded a credible alternative. It was in an effort to provide representation for such a group that the Democratic Left party came into being. It aimed to provide accountable, class-based politics and to weaken the sectarian monoliths.

The historical records of any political party allows the researcher to look at how the policies of a particular party evolved and developed or, in some cases, how shifts in the exterior world power blocs proved disastrous and, in effect, wiped out particular parties unable to adapt quickly to the changed political climate. The Irish playwright Brendan Behan put forward the notion that the first item on the agenda of any new political party in Irish politics is the "split." The split signified the cleavage between those who saw the necessity of reform, renewal, and restructuring and those of a fundamentalist bent whose focus was centered on "lost certainties," instead of the potential advantage to be gained from adapting to meet the new challenges of the future. The history of Irish political parties is littered with splits and countersplits, leaving in their wake not only the political remains of such previously stable parties as the Irish Partliamentary Party or the Sinn Féin party of Arthur Griffith, but also the empty shells of political leaders like Daniel O Connell, Charles Stewart Parnell, and John Redmond. ¹ The political stage thus vacated became peopled with new personages, new ideas and sometimes a new language for the succeeding new era.

Nowhere is this evolution or modernisation more evident than in the emergence of Democratic Left from a variety of foreparents and through a transition not only of name change but also of political ideology. The Democratic Left took its ideology from the development of Irish Republican philosophy of the eighteenth century, through its anti-monarchical phase to its empowerment of peoples' representatives. The teaching of Marx and Engels as applied by James Connolly influenced the 1916 proclamation. Ruth Dudley Edwards's study of James Connolly describes how Connolly's thinking was present in the drafting of the Easter Proclamation of 1916.

Although the Proclamation did not mention socialism by name, it contained a declaration of the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland which could be construed as socialist if subsequent interpreters of it so wished. ¹

The irish socialists who emerged as leaders in the Democratic Left matured through the Civil Rights era of the world-wide political agitation of the 1960s. They married a social democratic program in the Republic of Ireland to a more radical republican agenda in Northern Ireland based on an update of Tom Paine's Rights of Man promoting the rights of Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter. ² They saw this approach to egalitarian politics as a means of respecting the ethos and identities of all, and as a way of progressing along a path of equal opportunity toward the achievement of social goals. In-built in this philosophy was the creation of a just society based on the guarantee of citizen's rights and a correspondent acceptance of social responsibility. Only upon a successful completion of this phase of political development could they foresee a possibility for widening and deepening democracy to allow for the penetration...