Irish Left Archive Podcast

The Irish Left Archive Podcast is the audio arm of leftarchive.ie, a digital collection of documents and materials from the left in Ireland. Hosts Ciarán Swan and Aonghus Storey frame a subject, often through a guest's record in a party or through a book, and then let the guest do most of the talking. Two kinds of episode result. The first is testimony from people who organised inside the parties. Eugene McCartan, originally from County Down, joined the Communist Party of Ireland in Dublin in 1974, chaired it from 1989 to 2001 and served as general secretary until 2023. His interview covers the party's development since the 1920s, a short-lived alliance with the Workers' Party and the Liaison Committee of the Labour Left, and the strains of organising through the conflict in the North. It reaches the present too, with McCartan arguing that Britain managed the peace process, that Ireland's main parties present the state as a safe pair of hands, and that finance and foreign capital decide what happens on housing. Madeleine Johansson brings a later chapter. She moved from Sweden to Ireland in the 2000s, organised with the Socialist Workers' Party and People Before Profit, was co-opted onto South Dublin County Council in 2016 and helped found Red Network, which began inside People Before Profit before going independent. Her conversation runs from her early politics in Sweden through the austerity campaigns against household charges, property tax and water charges, and on to class, identity politics, reform and revolution. The second kind of episode starts from a book. Charles Tuba returns for Jack Holland and Henry Macdonald's INLA: Deadly Divisions, and the talk turns on the IRSP's opposition to abstentionism, Costello's pairing of politics with an armed campaign, and how the party never developed as far as it might have on paper. Maurice Casey, a historian based at Queen's University Belfast, explains how his PhD research became Hotel Lux, the story of May O'Callaghan and her circle in the Comintern's Moscow accommodation for international communists. Stan Erraught, a lecturer in the School of Music at the University of Leeds, talks about Rebel Notes, the Wolf Tones and Kneecap, and the changing relationship between popular music, republicanism and the Irish language. At one point that conversation sets the Wolf Tones' crowds beside what happened with football and the tricolour around 1990. '2025 Round Up' sets the guests aside. The hosts talk about the site, the podcast and its future, and thank the people behind events they joined, including a book fair run by Rise, a network within People Before Profit, and the Dublin launch of Rebel Notes. The register stays patient and politically literate, treating factions, publications and contested legitimacy as the substance of the story, with dry asides and a grave respect for hard histories. For a first listen, the McCartan interview is the clearest example of the testimony mode, and the Rebel Notes conversation shows the frame stretching from party politics into music and culture.