Despite its small size, Ireland has long played an important role in the Marxist imaginary. Karl Marx stressed the importance of the Irish question to the British labor movement, Vladimir Lenin took the Easter Rising of 1916 as a sign of the growing revolt against the imperialist powers, and Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci would have cause to term the fighters for Irish independence as the “Green Bolsheviks.”

At the same time, Ireland’s official Communist Party was relatively eclipsed in the period following independence from the United Kingdom. While the small forces rallying behind the CPI formed in 1921 could draw inspiration from the Bolshevik example — and indeed faced bitter anticommunism from the Church — it never became a mass party in the manner of its continental counterparts.

Emmet O’Connor, Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Humanities at Ulster University, is author of Reds and the Green, a study on the interactions between Ireland, the Communist International, and the Soviet state from 1919 to 1943. He spoke to Jacobin’s David Broder about Irish Bolshevism and the ties between the country’s republican movement and the promise of world revolution.