Irish Left Archive Podcast

This episode is a round up of the Irish Left Archive project in 2025 and answers to some listener questions. Thanks as always to everyone who has supported and engaged with the archive by sending documents, speaking on the podcast, emailing, commenting, and using the site. Thanks also to the editorial team of Saothar, the journal of the Irish Labour History Society, for including an article on the Irish Left Archive in their 50th anniversary edition, Saothar 50. More to come in 2026!

In this episode we talk to Madeleine Johansson of Red Network. Madeleine moved from Sweden to Ireland in the 2000s where she became active with the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and People Before Profit (PBP). She was a party organiser and director of elections for the 2016 General Election campaign in Dublin Mid-West, subsequently co-opted on to South Dublin County Council in 2016, and returned in the 2019 and 2024 local elections. Madeleine was a founding member of Red Network, which was formed in 2021 within People Before Profit before becoming an independent party in 2025. She is the author of Class War – Not Culture War (2025) and Reform or Revolution – Sweden, Socialism and The Welfare State (2022), available from the Red Network website. We discuss Madeleine’s early political experience and the contrast between Sweden and Ireland; her work as an activist and organiser with SWP during the austerity years and campaigns against household charges, property tax and water charges; her experience as a local councillor and the particular challenge of the housing crisis; the formation of Red Network and the political differences that led them to leave People Before Profit; and her position on the politics of class, identity politics, reform and revolution. You’ll find more details of Red Network’s politics on their website at rednetwork.net.

In this episode we talk to Stan Erraught about his book, Rebel Notes: Popular Music and Conflict in Ireland. We discuss Stan’s own political background and work leading to his research for the book; the different facets of Irish popular music since the mid-20th Century; the particular cases of the Wolfe Tones and Kneecap and perceptions of their political and Irish cultural expression; and the changing relationship between popular music and Republicanism, politics more broadly, and Irish culture and language. Stan is a Lecturer in the School of Music at the University of Leeds. His research includes popular music and aesthetics, the political economy of the music industry, and critical theory. As well as several journal articles, he previously published On Music, Value and Utopia: Nostalgia for an Age Yet to Come? in 2018. Before moving to academia, Stan was a member of the band, The Stars of Heaven, in the 1980s. Rebel Notes is published by Beyond the Pale Books

In this episode we talk to Maurice Casey about his book, Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals. Hotel Lux tells the story of May O’Callaghan and her social circle in the Comintern’s Moscow accommodation for international communists. We discuss Maurice’s PhD research, its transformation into the book, and the lives and interactions of May and other communists with whom she crossed paths. Maurice is a historian based at Queen’s University Belfast. His work focuses on the history of modern Ireland, queer history, and the history of international communism in the interwar world. He holds degrees from Trinity College Dublin, Cambridge University and the University of Oxford, where he completed his doctoral studies in 2020. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University from 2018 to 2019. His writing has appeared in a variety of publications including History Today, the Irish Times and Tribune magazine. Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals is his first book. Hotel Lux is published by Footnote Press. You can follow Maurice’s research on his Substack at archiverats.substack.com.

In this episode we talk to Aidan Beatty about his book, The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism. We discuss the history of the Socialist Labour League and Workers’ Revolutionary Party in the UK; the role of the party and their Galway-born leader, Gerry Healy, in Trotskyism; the implosion of the party in 1985 with allegations of sexual abuse against Healy in a context of an already diminished Left; and responses to Aidan’s book. Aidan is a lecturer in history at Carnegie Mellon University and President of the American Conference for Irish Studies. He is currently writing a book about capitalism and Irish nationalism and is also co-editing, with Brian Hanley, a forthcoming edited collection on the global history of the Irish far-right. The Party is Always Right is published by Pluto Press and available on their website.