Today’s Irish Labour Party prides itself on its “liberal agenda.” Its former leader, Eamon Gilmore, declared in 2007 that the party’s support for socially progressive causes is one of its core values and that “more than any other political movement, it was Labour and its allies which drove the modernization of the Irish state.”

Although this statement ignores the importance of grassroots activism — which often predated Labour’s advocacy — in forcing social change, it is true that since the 1980s Labour has taken a progressive stance on social issues more often than Ireland’s other major political parties. The party spearheaded the push for reform on issues like contraception, divorce, and secular education at a time when such views were profoundly controversial.

It would be wrong, however, to suggest that progressivism on social issues or secularism were always central to the Labour Party. Indeed, in 1964, American historian Emmet Larkin described the Irish Labour Party as “the most opportunistically conservative Labour Party anywhere in the known world” — a reasonable criticism of a party that, for most of its history, positioned itself well to the right of the British Labour Party and social-democratic parties elsewhere in Western Europe.