Irish Left Archive Podcast

In this episode we talk to Rhona McCord about her political background, the Right2Water and Right2Change campaigns, community organising, and the challenges for the left and Trade Union movement in the contemporary period.Rhona is a longtime activist on the left, she has been involved in Militant, union activism, the United Left Alliance, and a number of campaigns including Right 2 Water and Right 2 Change. She currently works for Unite in Strategic Research, Community Development and

In this episode we talk to Alan Kinsella about his Irish Election Literature collection, how it has developed, and the advantages of a wide online network that has spread internationally; how political activity has changed during the Covid19 pandemic; his podcast “The Others” and the histories that that explores; and also the state of the contemporary party system since the last election and the current coalition was formed.Alan will likely be known to any followers of Irish politics as the man

In this episode we talk to Conor Kostick of Independent Left, and formerly the Socialist Workers Party, about a range of areas including his own history, activism and historical research, materials in the Left Archive that he has contributed to and issues like the use of social and other media in Left organising. Conor is an activist on the left, an historian, a researcher, and a novelist in a range of genres. Amongst other things he was twice chairperson of the Irish Writers Union, and a member of

In this episode we talk to Catherine Stocker of the Social Democrats. Catherine is a local councillor in Dublin City. She has been a member of the Social Democrats since 2016, and since then has been involved in policy formation, sat on the National Executive of the party, and in 2019 was elected to Dublin City Council for the Clontarf LEA.We discuss her experience of joining and building a new political party, policy formation, working with other parties in the repeal referendum campaign, and her

We talk to activist, writer and academic, Laurence Cox about publications in the archive in which he has been involved, the organisational and political aspects of those projects, and the contexts in Left politics and movements from which they emerged.Laurence is an activist and writer on social movements, working class community activism, and global justice struggles. He has been involved in several publications included in the archive: An Caorthann, a magazine for environmental and Green

Introducing the Irish Left Archive Podcast! In this episode, Ciarán Swan and Aonghus Storey discuss how the project got started in 2007 and how it has developed since then.The Irish Left Archive was started as part of the Cedar Lounge Revolution (CLR) blog and later developed into the separate website at leftarchive.ie. We discuss the background to the project, the advantages of a non-institutional, informal archive and how the project has benefitted from the community around the CLR, both for