Challenge: Marxist IRA

The Vulture

Banned
With a POD after WWII, have a majority of the IRA adopt Marxist or Maoist philosophy, while remaining in conflict with the RUC and British. Basically, I want the OIRA to come out over the PIRA.
 
I don't know if it's possible. The tacit acceptance of the IRA by the Church would be all but gone, and any non-socialist nationalists would likely form their own group anyway.

After all, isn't that the reason why the group split anyway? There simply weren't enough communists in what is primarily a conservative Catholic nation.
 
Isn't that, to an extent, what the IRA and some of its derivatives (like, for example, the Worker's Party of Ireland and the Irish National Liberation Army) were in OTL?
 
With this POD, I don't know.

Had the Irish War of Independence failed, I could definitely see the IRA developing into a Marxist liberation theology sort of organization. But with a post-WW2 POD, I don't see much of a way for that to occur.
 
Wasn't there a splinter group from the IRA that was marxist :confused:?
If so make it more powerfull and let them take of.
 
Yeah, there was a marxist splinter IRA.

The problem here is we're answering a question greater than WI the IRA was Marxist. We're asking how could a marxist insurgency work in a developed western country. That is a hard question.

I suppose you could go down the red army faction route and have them be ineffectual but famous and they leave the boring regular ira with its bog standard murders out of the limelight.
 

WarBastard

Banned
As the OP points out, the officials were Marxist, broadly speaking. if the civil rights movement had become stronger, it would have helped. Take Bloody Sunday away and who knows
 
You'd need an earlier PoD, one that prevents Marxism from coming out on top in the first place. Otherwise you can't have an Atheist guerilla organisation playing a major part in a sectarian conflict.
 
A Maoist IRA would be more interesting. Especially if they attended the same school of crazy as Sendero Luminoso and the Khmer Rouge
 

Thande

Donor
You'd need an earlier PoD, one that prevents Marxism from coming out on top in the first place. Otherwise you can't have an Atheist guerilla organisation playing a major part in a sectarian conflict.

Sure you can. The IRA's identification with Catholicism and the loyalist paramilitaries' with Protestantism is purely tribal for the most part.
 

Goldstein

Banned
Yeah, there was a marxist splinter IRA.

The problem here is we're answering a question greater than WI the IRA was Marxist. We're asking how could a marxist insurgency work in a developed western country. That is a hard question.

It doesn't need to make sense. The Basque Country is one of the richest areas of Spain and the World, one with a strong Catholic Reactionary social substract, yet ETA is nominally secular and Marxist.

Then again, as The Red points out, the Northen Irish issue has a lot to do with religious sectarianism, so that's the hardest part, actually.
 
PIRA in many respects would have claimed to be marxist. Mind you the classic how can you be a nationalist and internationalist at the same time was addressed by the great James Connolly who said that to be Irish under British rule was to be working class and therefore one could be both at the same time! Connolly by the way did great work for the labor ie worker's movement in the States! It should also be remembered that predominantly catholic countries had strongly left leaning governments before WW2 - France and Spain and both Italy and France had strong communist parties post WW2, though they were not Stallinist, though the Portugese one was!
Mind you Sinn Fein have an issue how can you claim to be socialist etc and then tell old ladies you support them to the core in their conservative catholic views on abortion, mind you they have a get out clause - these matters will all be solved post Irish unification which of course will never happen at all!
 
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