Solidarity (Ireland)

Origins: the Militant Tendency (1969 to 1989)

The Irish Militant Tendency began in 1969, when Paul Jones, an Irish student who had joined Militant in Britain while studying in London, returned to Derry and began organising there, as well as holding meetings in Dublin. Peter Hadden had similarly joined Militant while attending Sussex University in England, and on returning to Northern Ireland in 1971 began organising Militant there.^[15] The group grew on both sides of the border and practised entryism within both the Northern Ireland Labour Party and the Labour Party in the Republic.^[16] In 1977 the group was expelled from the NILP and formed the Labour and Trade Union Group to contest elections in the north.^[17][15] In the south, the tendency had been formally founded in 1972 within the Irish Labour Party, grouped around the newsletter Militant Irish Monthly.^[18] It organised within the Labour Party throughout the 1970s and 1980s and briefly controlled Labour Youth between 1983 and 1986. People associated with it include Dermot Connolly, Clare Daly, Finn Geaney, Joe Higgins and John Throne.

Militant Labour and the founding of the Socialist Party (1989 to 1997)

In the late 1980s, several known members were expelled from the Labour Party, having been accused of Trotskyist entryism.^[19] In 1989 they established an independent party under the name Militant Labour, a title also used by other sections of the Committee for a Workers' International at the time.^[20] In 1996 Militant Labour merged fully with the Labour and Trade Union Group of Northern Ireland and changed its name to the Socialist Party, building some electoral support in the Republic of Ireland while finding it harder to gain an electoral foothold in the north, where it nonetheless maintained a minor presence in the trade union movement and a youth wing.^[21][22]

Joe Higgins came within 252 votes of winning the 1996 Dublin West by-election,^[23] before winning the seat outright at the 1997 general election.^[24][25]

2002 to 2007

At the 2002 general election Higgins retained his Dublin West seat,^[26] while Clare Daly narrowly missed out on a second seat in Dublin North.^[27] The Anti-Bin Tax Campaign arose during this period. On 19 September 2003, Higgins and Daly were sent to Mountjoy Prison for a month after refusing to abide by a High Court injunction relating to the blockading of bin lorries.^{[28][29][30][31]}

At the 2004 local elections the party gained two council seats, with Mick Murphy elected to South Dublin County Council and Mick Barry elected to Cork City Council.^[32][33] The party also retained its two seats, held by Daly and Ruth Coppinger, on Fingal County Council.^[34][35] At the European election held the same day, Higgins received 23,218 (5.5 per cent) first-preference votes in Dublin but did not win a seat.^[36]

Councillor Mick Murphy brought the GAMA construction scandal to light in October 2004, after discovering Turkish migrant construction workers living on the building site where they were illegally underpaid and forced to work hours in breach of the EU Working Time Directive.^[37] Murphy brought the matter to Higgins, who raised it in the Dáil on 8 February 2005, bringing public awareness to the workers' plight.^[38] The exploitation, which included pay as low as €2.20 an hour against a minimum wage of €7.00,^[39] led to a strike by immigrant workers.^[40][41][42] The exploited workers each won tens of thousands of euro in unpaid wages and overtime.^[43]

2007 to 2011

At the 2007 general election Higgins lost his Dublin West seat, leaving the party without a TD for the first time since 1997.^[44] The party campaigned for a "no" vote in the 2008 and 2009 referendums on the Treaty of Lisbon.^[45][46]

At the 2009 European and local elections, Higgins won a Dublin European Parliament seat with 50,510 (12.4 per cent) first-preference votes and also gained a seat on Fingal County Council in the Castleknock local electoral area.^[47][48] The party held its seats on Fingal County and Cork City Councils, held by Coppinger and Barry respectively, while gaining one seat each on Balbriggan Town Council and Drogheda Borough Council,^[49][50][51] though it lost its only seat on South Dublin County Council, held by Mick Murphy.^[52]

2011 to 2014: the United Left Alliance and the founding of the Anti-Austerity Alliance

At the 2011 general election the party returned two TDs: Clare Daly in Dublin North and Joe Higgins, regaining his seat, in Dublin West. Both stood as part of the United Left Alliance (ULA), which also included People Before Profit and the Workers and Unemployed Action Group alongside independent activists, and which won five seats overall.^[53] Higgins resigned his European Parliament seat and was replaced by Paul Murphy.^[54] Following the death of Brian Lenihan Jnr, the party contested the 2011 Dublin West by-election, with candidate Ruth Coppinger placing third.^[55]

Clare Daly resigned from the Socialist Party in August 2012, over a dispute regarding her support for Independent TD Mick Wallace, whom the party had called on to resign following the revelation of tax irregularities,^[56][57] and the party withdrew from the ULA in January 2013.^[58]

The Anti-Austerity Alliance was launched in February 2014 as a registered electoral vehicle for the Socialist Party's candidates,^[59][60] registered to contest local elections^[61] and running at least forty candidates in the 2014 Irish local elections.^[62] The party altered its registered name that year to Stop the Water Tax to Socialist Party.^[63] Because its elected representatives were, in fact, members of the Socialist Party, the rebranding was criticised by The Journal columnist Aaron McKenna as a front organisation for the Trotskyist Socialist Party.^[3]

2014 to 2016: water charges and electoral breakthrough

On 8 April 2014 the AAA launched a plan to create 150,000 jobs across Ireland, replacing the controversial JobBridge and Gateway initiatives with a "real jobs programme of public works, free education and genuine training schemes".^[64] At the 2014 local elections the party gained seats on Limerick and Cork City Councils, giving it "a national rather than Dublin-centric" profile.^[65] The same day, the 2014 Dublin West by-election returned Ruth Coppinger to Dáil Éireann.^[66] Paul Murphy failed to retain the party's European Parliament seat but went on to win the 2014 Dublin South-West by-election that October, a surprise victory over the favoured Sinn Féin candidate.^[67] According to the Irish Examiner, Mick Barry had by this point been "a leading figure in the Cork and national campaigns" against household and water charges.^[68]

In 2015, water charge protestors, including party elected representatives Paul Murphy, Kieran Mahon and Mick Murphy, were arrested.^[69][70][71] The arrests led to accusations of "political policing" and sparked minor solidarity protests across Europe, including in London, Berlin, Vienna and Stockholm.^[72][73]

On 7 August 2015 the AAA was removed from the Register of Political Parties.^[74] It held discussions that August with People Before Profit about forming a new political grouping,^[75] and on 17 September 2015 the two parties announced they had formally registered as a single political party for electoral purposes, called "Anti-Austerity Alliance–People Before Profit" (subsequently Solidarity–People Before Profit, and, from 2021, People Before Profit–Solidarity).^[76] Under this alliance, in the 2016 Irish general election Murphy and Coppinger were re-elected in Dublin South-West and Dublin West respectively, and Barry was elected in Cork North-Central.^[77] In Northern Ireland, the party instead supported the Cross-Community Labour Alternative at the 2016 Northern Ireland Assembly election, critically calling for a vote for People Before Profit where the two did not stand in the same constituencies.^[78]

Relaunch as Solidarity

On 10 March 2017, the Anti-Austerity Alliance called a press conference and announced it would relaunch as Solidarity. The name change was made to reflect the "many movements emerging on workplace, economic and social issues" and to better capture the organisation's campaigning on Repeal, LGBTQ issues and equality generally, alongside its established work on water charges and housing.^[79][80] Cork City Councillor Lil O'Donnell left the party at the time of the rebranding.^[81]

Rita Harrold unsuccessfully stood for Solidarity in Dublin at the 2019 European Parliament election.^[82]

2016 to 2020: the RISE split

In 2019, divisions arising from a split within the Committee for a Workers' International led Paul Murphy TD to leave the Socialist Party and set up a new grouping, RISE.^[83] The same split led to the formation of Militant Left, which aligned with the reconstituted Committee for a Workers' International (Refounded), a body predominantly supported by the Socialist Party of England and Wales. RISE remained part of the People Before Profit–Solidarity grouping until it fully integrated into People Before Profit in early 2021.

2020 to 2024

At the 2020 Irish general election, Coppinger lost her Dublin West seat, leaving Barry as the party's only TD, amid a significant drop in the party's overall vote share. In Northern Ireland, the party returned to contesting elections directly as the Socialist Party from 2022.

In July 2024, the Socialist Party voted to disaffiliate from the International Socialist Alternative.

2024 to 2026: merger into a single party

At the 2024 Irish general election, Ruth Coppinger was once again elected in Dublin West, while Mick Barry narrowly lost his seat in Cork North-Central to Eoghan Kenny of Labour.^[84]

In early March 2026, the Socialist Party announced it would campaign as Solidarity – the socialist alternative, with its social media presence and publications updated to reflect this.^[13] The change was formalised later that month at Solidarity's National Conference, which adopted a new party constitution declaring Solidarity "one organisation, covering the whole of the island of Ireland, North and South", organised into two regions with unified national structures, and adopted the Irish-language name Dlúthpháirtíocht – na sóisialaigh.^[14] The merger brought to an end the arrangement, in place since 2014, under which Socialist Party candidates stood for election under the separate Solidarity brand, uniting the party's internal organisation and its public electoral identity for the first time since the AAA's launch.^[14][85]

Dáil Éireann

More information Election, FPv ...

Election	FPv	%	Seats	%	±	Dáil	Government
1997	12,445	0.7 (#9)	1 / 166	0.6 (#6)	New	28th	Opposition 25th government (FF-PD minority)
2002	14,896	0.8 (#7)	1 / 166	0.6 (#7)		29th	Opposition 26th government (FF-PD majority)
2007	13,218	0.6 (#7)	0 / 166	—N/a	1	30th	No seats 27th, 28th government (FF-GP-PD/Ind majority)
2011	26,770	1.2 (#6)	2 / 166	1.2 (#5)	2	31st	Opposition 29th government (FG-Lab supermajority)
2016[a]	41,994	1.9 (#9)	3 / 158	1.9 (#7)	1	32nd	Opposition 30th, 31st government (FG-Ind minority)
2020[b]	12,723	0.6 (#10)	1 / 160	0.6 (#8)	2	33rd	Opposition 32nd, 33rd, 34th government (FF-FG-GP majority)
2024[c]	13,137	0.6 (#11)	1 / 174	0.6 (#7)		34th	Opposition 35th government (FF-FG-Ind majority)

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European

Solidarity has contested European elections in the Republic of Ireland but not in Northern Ireland.