The left-republican tradition has deep roots in Ireland, encompassing within it struggles against imperialism and those for democracy and social justice.

Its intellectual forefathers were the United Irishmen who, inspired by the French Revolution, led a 1798 uprising. They understood that the elite layers of Irish society, whose interests aligned with those of the British, would not be friends of the republican movement. Wolfe Tone, one of the United Irishmen’s founding members, said that “If the men of property will not help us they must fall; we will free ourselves by the aid of that large and respectable class of the community — the men of no property.”

The next upsurge in left republicanism occurred with the Fenians, who in 1858 organized the Irish Republican Brotherhood and advocated a militant route to independence. Their exiled leader James Stephens was a member of Karl Marx’s First International and proclaimed that “The only countries I recognize over the earth are Toil and Privilege; the one of these I shall struggle for, the other against, with all the faculties of my being.”