The Irish Republican Socialist Party was founded in Dublin in December 1974, the product of a split within the Official republican movement led by Seamus Costello, a former Official Sinn Féin and Official IRA figure who had grown disillusioned with the Officials’ drift away from the national question. The new party set out to unite the demand for a thirty-two-county socialist republic with a Marxist analysis of class, rejecting the choice between national and social liberation that had divided Irish republicanism before it. From the outset it was paired with an armed wing, the Irish National Liberation Army, the two bodies forming part of the wider Irish Republican Socialist Movement.
The party’s early decades were among the most turbulent of any organisation in this archive. Costello was shot dead in 1977, depriving the movement of its central figure within three years of its founding; the 1981 hunger strike, in which three INLA prisoners died alongside their Provisional comrades, brought it to national prominence even as the decade that followed was scarred by damaging internal feuds and splits. That the IRSP survived those years at all is notable, and it has continued as a presence in Irish republican politics to the present day.
The Irish Republican Digital Archive holds over 120 items relating to the IRSP, spanning the 1970s to the 2020s and making this one of the most comprehensive publicly accessible collections of republican socialist material online. It includes a run of 28 issues of Saoirse (a Belfast IRSP paper of 1980–86, distinct from the later Republican Sinn Féin and Provisional publications of the same name), believed to survive nowhere else online, alongside The Starry Plough, Ard Fheis booklets, policy documents including the Ta Power document, hunger strike bulletins, leaflets, posters, and a substantial body of ephemera. Together they offer researchers an unusually full record of how the movement thought, organised, and presented itself across five decades.
The Starry Plough
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The Starry Plough (Irish: An Camchéachta) is the official newspaper of the Irish Republican Socialist Party. Click here for The Starry Plough section on the archive.
Saoirse
‘Saoirse’ was a newspaper of the Irish Republican Socialist Party in Belfast published in the 1980s. Not be confused with the Republican Sinn Féin paper or Provisional Sinn Féin magazine of the same name.
| 1980 |  September (1) | 1981 |
 April (2) |  April (1) |  August (1) |
 October (2) |  October (2) |  November (1) |
 Saoirse (March 1981) | 1982 |  February (2) |
 November (1) |  December (1) | 1983 |
 28 January (1) |  17 February (1) |  03 March (1) |
 March (1) |  01 April (1) |  21 April (1) |
 May (2) | 1984 |  April (2) |
 May (2) |  June (2) |  July/August (1) |
 September (1) |  September (1) |  November (1) |
| 1985 |  August (2) |  October (2) |
| 1986 |  November (2) |
Policy Documents
1970’s
1980s
1990s
 1998 Ard Fheis Clár (1) |  The Irish Prisoner (1990) |  Stand by the Republic (1997) |
 The Plough (1998) |  Stand by the Republic (Oct/Nov 1997) (1) |  Bua (Easter 1997) |
2000s
2020s
 IRSM 50th Anniversary Celebration (2024) (3) |  Belfast IRSM 50th Anniversary Newsletter (2024) |  Matt McLarnon Commemoration (2021) |
IRSP Related Books
Republican Socialist Youth Movement (RSYM)
The Republican Socialist Youth Movement is the youth organisation associated with the Irish Republican Socialist Party, founded in 2005.
IRSP Ephemera
A collection of miscellaneous IRSP leaflets and posters. Click on the image to download.
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Misc
 In Week article on the INLA |  IRSP Workers Republic (Number 13) |  IRSP Membership Application Form |
 Colm McNutt |  Workers Republic (Belfast IRSP) |  Support the Turkish Deathfast – IRSP Leaflet (2000s) |
(1) Donated by @irish_republican_archive
(2) Donated by Stephen Coyle
(3) Donated by Jason McLean
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