Jim Monaghan: LWR, Workers’ League, Official Sinn Féin, People’s Democracy, & the H-Block Armagh Committee

In this episode we talk to Jim Monaghan. Jim first became politically active as a student in the late 1960s in Dublin. We discuss the increasing politicisation in Ireland at that time, and Jim’s political activity, initially with Labour and Students for Democratic Action, the League for A Workers’ Republic, and briefly the LWR-breakaway, the League for a Workers Vanguard.

Jim then describes his move to Official Sinn Féin, the contrast of moving from a small left group to a larger party, and the direction of Republican politics at that time; his later involvement with the Movement for a Socialist Republic and People’s Democracy, after they merged; his involvement as Chair of the Dublin H-Block/Armagh Committee during the Hunger Strikes; and the contemporary political landscape, and the extent of the social and political change that has occurred since his early political involvement.