WeeklyWorker

03.09.2026
Richard Boyd Barrett: hegemonic in SWN?

An honest and open culture

People Before Profit has enjoyed modest success as a loose alliance. But if we really want revolution and socialism it must, argues Anne McShane, aspire to become a programmatically rooted mass party of the working class

 

Something of a crisis has arisen within what has been the majority tendency of People Before Profit. This matters, even for the Irish bourgeoisie: besides a string of councillors PBP has two high-profile members of the Dáil and one member of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

The Socialist Workers Network is the Irish affiliate of the International Socialist Tendency, led, of course, by the SWP in Britain.1 The SWN was the main initiator of PBP in 2005, and has been its leading force, not least on the six-strong officer board. But now it has lost its dominant position due to the resignation of 15 members, including Dublin Central councillor Conor Reddy, national organiser Aislinn Shanahan Daly and Dublin organisers Damian Kelly and Farah Parvazi. TD Richard Boyd Barrett is now the sole SWNer.

Rumours of conflicts amongst the Cliffites have been circulating for months, but only became public knowledge with the leaking of the resignation letter of the 15 to The Irish Times. It published the gist of it on August 26.2 Disgracefully, the comrades declined to make an open declaration in the workers’ press, so it was the bourgeoisie’s paper of record which first publicly announced the split.

Richard Boyd Barrett responded to a request by The Times for a comment by insisting that it was really no big deal. The debates “about strategy and tactics” are “not something I’m terribly worried about. It’s an ongoing discussion and I think you will find it in any vibrant political project”. He went on to claim that leftwing parties are “possibly more honest about different currents of thought than other parties” like the governing Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael who “have their divergences [such as over Palestine], but are not, in my opinion, very honest about them”.3

If only it were true that the left has a more open and honest culture than the bourgeoisie. The SWN is an example of the opposite - of a closed and intolerant environment. A significant number of the 15 who resigned are experienced leading comrades. They maintain that the reason for leaving was because their criticism of the leadership was obstructed - met with “accusations of being undemocratic, mouthpieces for ‘Belfast’, apolitical, overly personalised, unskilled, ageist and more”.

Their claim is that “political difference in the SWN is repeatedly dealt with through denial of its very existence, or at worst marginalised through dogmatic moralism”. It has a “sect-based” and “hegemonic” culture. This suggests frustration by those who think PBP ought to be much bigger, especially when it comes to parliamentary representation. Note, since the 2016 general election the left has gone from six to just three TDs today. So why didn’t the 15 openly rebel? Why didn’t they begin an open polemic?

But it isn’t just the 15. Some PBP members have admitted to me that there is a siege mentality within the SWN. This seems to reflect a deliberate tactic used to insulate members from polemics that originate from ex-members or non-members. Thus we are told that the Red Network, a tendency that left PBP in 2025, having fought against its closed political culture, has lied and should not be treated seriously. I myself have been accused of slander for open criticisms I made of Boyd Barrett - in particular when I described him as an aspiring junior minister in a bourgeois government. I have been painted as a dangerous wrecker and liar, who has a personal vendetta against the SWN, PBP and their leadership.

Even those comrades who describe themselves as politically sympathetic to my politics are fearful of association with me within the PBP project because of the wrath that will be unleashed on them. While they have no issue with working together in broader campaigns, such as Palestine solidarity, where I have played a leading role, when it comes to PBP, I am deemed to be beyond the pale.

Of course, none of this is about me as a personality. Instead it reflects the willingness of those who view themselves as oppositionists to self-censor. They believe that, if they make their criticisms in a cautious, polite and diplomatic manner, then they can protect themselves from accusations of being wreckers. Polemics are dismissed as containing factual inaccuracies or being too polemical. Not being suitably deferential, or being downright provocative, only makes their job more difficult. The implication is that I and other critics should also tone down our criticisms in order to support the left to make its arguments in PBP.

Comrades, you are placing the blame on the wrong people. You are providing cover for the leadership rather than opening up debate. You are subjecting yourselves to self-censorship and this makes you weak, not strong. There is no way that you can defeat a bureaucratic clique without being very clear and sharp in your challenges. You should be aiming to transform the closed culture by practicing an open culture.

Meanwhile the new IST leadership in Britain has failed to utter a single word of criticism about the increasingly rightwing political direction of SWN. It fails, for example, to criticise the ‘left government’ strategy of going into coalition with Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats - both thoroughly bourgeois parties. Instead it continues to applaud Boyd Barrett, fulsomely welcoming him to Marxism this year.

Of course, in terms of culture the SWN’s internal regime is merely a reflection of the SWP’s. In my personal experience of working alongside SWPers in the Socialist Alliance or Respect in Britain, it was normal for members who raised criticisms to be treated as wreckers, and often deliberately isolated. The experience was too much for many comrades, who left frustrated and demoralised, vowing never to join a leftwing group again. It is an alienating, anti-working class culture - an obstacle that we must overcome to have any chance to develop a mass working class party capable of leading the fight for self-emancipation.

North and south

Back to The Irish Times report. It states that the new leadership of PBP will be based around the Rise tendency led by Paul Murphy TD, independent members, and the 15 who resigned. Rise stands for ‘Revolutionary, Internationalist, Socialist, Environmentalist’ and came about from a split from the Socialist Party of Ireland (the affiliate of the Committee for a Workers’ International). Anyway, Rise and its journal, Rupture, claims, in general, to have a far more open culture than the SWN.

It states, for example, that it stands for “Full democratic rights for all networks and tendencies [in PBP] to make the case for their ideas, and strive to create a party free from sexist, racist, ableist, anti-LGBTQ attitudes or behaviours.”4 The fact that it has not published so far on the split implies a hands-off approach, when it comes to SWN disputes. It appears unwilling to become involved, preferring perhaps a diplomatic arrangement, where every tendency keeps its internal affairs to itself. This does not in any way resemble the dynamic internal culture that some oppositionists have claimed exists.

The Times also reports that the dispute involves the Belfast branch of the SWN, and that a number of Belfast members have already resigned. While there is undoubtedly discontent in the southern SWN about campaigning for government with Sinn Féin, comrades in the north are in a more serious position. They are already opposing the SF-led administration in Stormont and local councils. Gerry Carroll, the PBP member in Stormont and councillors Shaun Harkin and Michael Collins are leading the resistance against SF’s decision to increase the cost of public transport, its imposition of severe cuts to the health service, its refusal to take a stand against the production of military weaponry, and its support for the generous pay increases for Assembly members. SF had shown that it is essentially the same as any bourgeois party in government. These comrades know in practice that a government led by SF will certainly not be a progressive step forward: it will be more of the same.

Those who resigned are to meet with Boyd Barrett this week to discuss the split. It is difficult to know if he can win them back to the SWN fold, given the depth of dissatisfaction. However, it is positive that they remain in PBP and hopefully they will fight against the opportunism of the ‘left government’ perspective, alongside insisting on the creation of an open and democratic culture.

PBP is the most important left organisation in Ireland at the moment. How it uses that position is a key question. Elected representatives need to be held strictly to account and remain under the discipline of the majority. It is inevitable that TDs will be pulled to the right within the Dáil, under the pressure of that environment, of that rightwing milieu, with its horse-trading and deal making.

The SWN undoubtedly relies on Boyd Barrett when it comes to finances. Rightly he only takes a worker’s wage and uses the rest for political purposes - presumably he also gets a generous official allowance to pay for administrative support and research. As his salary alone is well in excess of €100,000 a year, what he has available is quite substantial. Being in this position gives him a great deal of power compared with an ordinary member - another reason why it is vital that PBP controls its TDs. Not the other way round.

The necessity for political control over elected representatives has been hard fought for in our movement, from the German SDP deputies in the Reichstag to the Bolsheviks in the duma. It has been written about at length by comrades such as Alexei Badayev in his The Bolsheviks in the tsarist duma (1929). Badayev was a metal worker who was elected as a Bolshevik deputy to the fourth duma in 1912. In more recent times the work of August H Nimtz on Lenin and revolutionary parliamentarism ought to be mentioned too.5 What comes out, in particular, is the centrality of the programme, democracy, and the tight control exercised over elected representatives.

It is vital that comrades study the rich experiences of the past, especially the Bolsheviks and the role their parliamentary fraction played in building the party and rallying the working class. Our elected representatives too must consider themselves as fighters in an enemy camp, using the platform provided by parliament to build the strength of the workers’ movement and the party to a position where it can overthrow the state.

If you aspire to be Revolutionary, Internationalist, Socialist and Environmentalist, this is the way forward l

  1. 1. Till December 2025 the IST was the responsibility of Alex Callinicos. He was belatedly removed as international secretary because of his prominent involvement with the ‘Comrade Delta’ scandal of 2013.↩︎

  2. www.irishtimes.com/politics/2026/08/26/members-resign-from-internal-people-before-profit-group-over-hegemonic-leadership-style.↩︎

  3. 3Ibid.↩︎

  4. www.letusrise.ie/what-we-stand-for.↩︎

  5. In particular, A Nimtz The ballot, the streets - or both: from Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution Chicago IL 2019.↩︎