Show Notes
On this episode of the show we were joined by Dr. Aidan Beatty to discuss his new book The Party is Always Right: The Untold Story of Gerry Healy and British Trotskyism published by Pluto Press.
Gerry Healy was the Galway born leader of the Socialist Labour League and the Workers Revolutionary Party. He was a key figure in Trotskyism and one of the most controversial leaders on the British left. His legacy is tainted by his expulsion from his own party under accusations of sexual abuse, his use of violence against political opponents and the cult like conditions of his party.
Aidan Beatty is an award-winning historian and lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Private Property and the Fear of Social Chaos, and Masculinity and Power in Irish Nationalism, which was awarded the James S. Donnelly Sr. Prize. He has written for Jacobin, the Irish Times and the Washington Post. He will be the president of the American Conference for Irish Studies in 2025.
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Intro / Outro music “Sliabh” from Aislinn. Licensed under creative commons from the free music archive.
More from The Irish History Show
On this episode of the Irish History Show we have part three of our series on the Fenians. By the late 1890s, the Irish Republican Brotherhood was led by an older, cautious Supreme Council that prioritised self-preservation over direct military action. They officially banned individual assassinations and spent much of this period maintaining a low-profile underground network to survive British intelligence surveillance.
On this episode of the Irish History Show we were joined by Dr. Eoin O’Malley to discuss his new book, Charlie vs. Garret – The rivalry that shaped modern Ireland. In the 1980s, Irish politics was dominated by Charlie Haughey’s Fianna Fáil and Garret Fitzgerald’s Fine Gael.
On this episode of the Irish History Show we returned to the subject of the Fenians. We traced the movement from the end of the 1867 Rebellion onwards. We covered such subjects as the Amnesty Campaign, the Catalpa rescue, the New Departure, splits in the American movement, the Land War and the growth of cultural nationalism in the 1880s and 1890s.
On this episode of the Irish History Show we discussed the Fenians. The Fenians were Irish republican revolutionaries that sought to achieve the independence of Ireland from the British Empire in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century. The main Fenian organisations were the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and their affiliate in the United States, the Fenian Brotherhood. In 1867, they attempted a rising in Ireland which was co-ordinated with raids into Canada from the United States. Although the rising failed, the IRB continued in existence and played a central part in the 1916 Easter Rising and the 1919–1921 Irish War of Independence which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State.
On this episode of the Irish History Show we discussed the Penal Laws in Ireland. The Penal Laws were a series of legal disabilities imposed in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries on the kingdom’s Roman Catholic majority and, to a lesser degree, on Protestant “Dissenters”. Enacted by the Irish Parliament, they secured the Protestant Ascendancy by further concentrating property and public office in the hands of those who, as communicants of the established Church of Ireland, subscribed to the Oath of Supremacy.