Seamus Costello defends link between socialist and republican struggles.
20 members of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP) resigned on 1 December 1975. Two days earlier, 11 members of its National Executive had walked out of an Ard Comhairle in a dispute over control of the INLA. These included Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, who had helped found the party the previous year with chairman Seamus Costello, and meant that the presence of the IRSP in Northern Ireland was substantially weakened.
Seamus Costello gave this interview to RTÉ News that day, refusing to see the decimation in numbers as a blow.
The policy of the IRSP is that the national liberation struggle and the struggle for socialism in Ireland cannot be divorced from each other, they cannot be treated separately. And these people refuse to accept that policy. They feel that the struggle for socialism can be treated in isolation from the national question in Ireland. And of course, any serious socialist revolutionary in Ireland knows that this just isn't possible.
An RTÉ News report from 1 December 1975.
