Socialist republicanism

Socialist republicanism joins the demand for a united Ireland to the belief that class solidarity could overcome the sectarian division between Catholics and Protestants. In the book, it is not presented as a settled doctrine so much as a political hope tested by discrimination, street violence, armed struggle and electoral change. Its central wager is that working people on both sides of the religious divide might recognize shared material interests; its central difficulty is that political violence repeatedly narrowed the space in which that solidarity could be built.

Origins in inequality and division

The movement’s social argument emerges against the structure of Northern Ireland after partition. Catholics faced exclusion from good jobs and housing and were denied meaningful access to executive power. The region had its own devolved government at Stormont, yet no Catholic had held executive office during its first half-century. Employment prospects were so restricted that many Catholics emigrated to England, America or Australia. Although the Catholic birth rate was approximately twice the Protestant rate, the Catholic population remained nearly static over the three decades before the 1969 march from Belfast to Derry, because so many people left in search of work.

This unequal order did not mean that every Protestant worker prospered. Dolours Price, attending meetings of People’s Democracy at Queen’s University Belfast, came to see sectarian division as a distraction from class interests. Working-class Protestants might have some advantages over Catholics, she recognized, but they too faced unemployment and poverty. People living in poor housing along Shankill Road lacked indoor toilets. Her socialist hope was that a united Ireland organized around working people’s interests could make the religious antagonism that had shaped the island’s history lose its force.

The march and the promise of solidarity

The Belfast-to-Derry march gave that hope a public form. On 1 January 1969, student protesters gathered at Donegall Square to begin a journey of roughly seventy miles against discrimination. The organizers hoped that peaceful action could expose injustice and that the conflict’s lines might be redrawn: not Catholics against Protestants, but young people against entrenched power. Some marchers looked to the example of the Selma march, believing that a violent overreaction to peaceful protest might itself bring injustice into view and help force change.

Dolours met Eamonn McCann on the march and became fast friends with him. McCann argued against treating Protestant working people as the enemy: he described them instead as victims of the system and of landed and industrialist unionists. His argument gave the socialist proposition a practical human focus. Solidarity was not to be an abstract appeal to unity; it required distinguishing ordinary workers from the political and economic structures that benefited from division.

The march’s exposure to hostility, including the attack at Burntollet Bridge, tested that distinction. The book links that experience to Dolours’s growing conviction that peaceful protest would not convert those committed to violence. She later regarded joining the Irish Republican Army as a return to her family’s republican inheritance. The change registers a reversal within the same political life: the hope of persuading communities across the divide gave way to the belief that force was necessary to alter the conditions that sustained it.

From political hope to armed struggle

Dolours joined the Irish Republican Army in 1971, swearing allegiance in the front room of the Price family home and promising obedience to her superior officers. Her sister Marian joined as well. Their induction also exposed a gendered dispute about what republican participation meant. Seán Mac Stíofáin initially proposed that Dolours enter Cumann na mBan, the women’s auxiliary. She rejected a supporting role and insisted that she wanted to fight as a full soldier. A special meeting of the IRA Army Council then determined that women could, for the first time, join as full members. The account presents Dolours’s determination as an important impetus, while also noting her own speculation that the mass imprisonment of men may have made the organization more willing to admit women.

The shift from protest to armed action did not erase the movement’s socialist aspiration, but it placed that aspiration inside a military argument about means and ends. Albert Price defended the Irish Republican Army as a response to loyalist attacks and to British raids on Catholic homes, describing an escalation from stones to guns and then to bombing. He acknowledged the humanity of individual British soldiers while also treating uniform as a mark of the enemy in what he understood as a war. His stated hope was that a united socialist Ireland might make the struggle worthwhile. That formulation holds together the ideal and its cost: social transformation is the promised end, while violence becomes the chosen instrument.

The massacre on Bloody Sunday intensified the same crisis of confidence in nonviolent action. In January 1972, British paratroopers killed thirteen people and wounded fifteen at a peaceful gathering in Derry. Dolours and Marian were in Dundalk when they heard the news, which filled them with anger. The event galvanized Irish republicanism and was followed by the burning of the British embassy in Dublin and the suspension of Northern Ireland’s Unionist parliament. In the book’s sequence, such events make the armed turn intelligible within the characters’ political experience without resolving the moral or political question of whether it could deliver the society they sought.

Electoral politics and the unsettled legacy

The political means associated with republicanism changed again as electoral action gained importance. After ending her own use of violence, Dolours did not abandon republicanism. She canvassed for Sinn Féin and supported Gerry Adams’s campaign for the West Belfast seat in 1983. Adams said he would boycott Westminster if elected, preserving a distinction from participation in British parliamentary government even while seeking electoral support. Dolours ferried voters to polling stations and urged them to vote for him. The book connects this electoral turn partly to the earlier success of Bobby Sands’s candidacy from prison: a campaign born out of the hunger strike had shown how political representation could amplify republican demands.

This movement from street protest to armed struggle and then electoral politics does not amount to a simple replacement of one goal by another. The book describes socialist solidarity as a hope for crossing the Catholic–Protestant divide, while the armed campaign developed within a setting where violence and fear repeatedly reinforced communal boundaries. Electoral work opened a different route to political influence, but it also left persistent disagreements about compromise and the meaning of republican commitment.

Those disagreements continued into the peace process and the politics of remembering the conflict. Gerry Adams’s refusal to acknowledge membership of the Irish Republican Army contributed to an atmosphere in which coming forward about past actions still seemed unsafe. Sinn Féin’s effort to discredit internal critics also drew accusations that the party maintained a monopoly over the memory of republican armed struggle. At the same time, the Villiers report argued that the continued cohesion and authority of paramilitary organizations had helped leaders restrain members and sustain political progress after the ceasefires. For critics including Dolours Price, Marian Price and Anthony McIntyre, that discipline could look self-interested and illiberal; the report’s analysis suggested it could also help prevent renewed violence. Socialist republicanism therefore remains linked not only to the original promise of class solidarity, but also to the unresolved question of how a movement preserves its political aims while changing its methods and controlling the story told about its past.