Fragments of Victory – The Contemporary Irish Left, edited by Oisín Gilmore and David Landy, Pluto, 2025
(above pic credit: Connolly Books)
Reviewed by Michael O’Brien
This collection of essays by various authors spans the economic crisis that began in 2008, the austerity years that followed, the fortunes of the various campaigns and struggles throughout that period, and the political organisations whose members were active throughout.
It is a partial account of the period, containing omissions and biases. A reader like this reviewer, who has been ‘around the block’ of the Irish left and is familiar with the background of the authors and editors, as well as having been active throughout the period and in the campaigns covered by the book, can discern a significant anarchist slant – or, more specifically, accounts that amplify the role and analysis of members of the now dissolved anarchist Workers Solidarity Movement.
Inevitably in a short review, one is compelled to fill in a few important gaps, bringing one’s own ‘slant’ to the table.
The water charges struggle was pivotal not only because it was the issue around which the working class finally got active and mounted sustained action five years into the austerity agenda but also because it finally put an end to the overall austerity offensive.
The author of that chapter, David Gibney, occupied a prominent position in the Right2Water coalition and gives a basically factual, if not quite complete, account of the struggle. The main internal controversy in the water charges struggle, which is largely passed over, was on the question of the tactic of organised non-payment, which Right2Water was reluctant to commit to because components of the coalition, such as Sinn Féin and the unions, did not agree with advocating organised non-payment. In the end, this did not prove fatal to the success of the campaign, but it did pose a particular danger around the spring of 2015 when the first bills started to be issued and it fell to the radical left, the Socialist Party in particular in partnership with local campaigns under the banner of the Non-Payment Network, to step up with street meetings, mass leafletings etc, to mitigate against people being intimidated into paying.
The chapter on the abortion rights struggle is effectively an account of the Abortion Rights Campaign (ARC), which was the organiser of the annual March for Choice. There is immense detail on ARC’s internal life and decision-making processes. There is a passing acknowledgement of some of the other components of that struggle, particularly in the context of the Together for Yes campaign during the referendum.
However, the absence of any mention of ROSA – Socialist Feminist Movement, formed by women and queer Socialist Party members in 2013, which was active in a sustained way on this issue in the subsequent years, is quite an omission. This is particularly the case in the context of the abortion pill actions spearheaded by them, which were pivotal in bringing home to the establishment the reality that abortion was already here regardless of the constitutional ban. Ruth Coppinger was the first member of parliament in the world to take an abortion pill in a publicity stunt that exponentially increased awareness about the pills and demand for them by post. Abortions happening on Irish soil rather than in Liverpool hospitals was a game-changer, forcing conservative politicians to confront reality.
The essays on housing, the ‘centre-left’, and trade unions are particularly informative. The Community Action Tenants Union (CATU) is one of the few examples of a sustained organisational legacy of the austerity years.
That a preponderance of the authors hold to an anarchist analysis would not disqualify this as a serious attempt to look back at a tumultuous decade of campaigns and struggles, even allowing for omissions.
However, the book is occasionally marred by frankly silly sectarian assertions. On multiple occasions, in the introduction and the chapter on Trotskyism, one of the editors, David Landy, proclaims that the Socialist Party, which produces this journal, has ‘collapsed’ as an organisation. There is no hiding from the fact that the Socialist Party, domestically and in our international affiliations, went through a period from 2018 to 2019 of damaging factional turmoil culminating in the departure of a TD and approximately one-seventh of our then membership, who between them, went on to form two organisations RISE and Militant Left. However, as an organisation, the Socialist Party has continued to build and maintain an electoral presence, and a presence in vital campaigns and struggles.
There is a need for more serious documentation of the anti-austerity and anti-oppression struggles in the period covered by the book. Furthermore, there is a need to seriously engage with the question as to the meagre organisational legacy from all these struggles: the left has not grown numerically; the trade union movement at the official level is largely unchanged; and in many ways, there has been a setback in consciousness, with reactionary ideas having more purchase on sections of the working class than was the case previously. A collection of essays covering five campaigns and five political/organisational trends in under 200 pages would never achieve this. At best, it serves as a partial reference for the period, but no more than that.
