Rundale

Harun Šiljak

Originally, I contemplated writing this review of Fragments of Victory in a pub in Raheny, to gain more authenticity. The book, however, had enough authenticity of its own. This is both an achievement for the contributors and the editors of this, already famously short, volume.

Edited volumes are unexpectedly hard projects, when done right. In many cases, editors and authors work towards producing a disparate and discontinuous body of work, in hope that the readers will only reach for the book to read individual chapters from it. Fragments of Victory is decidedly not such a compendium; while not complete, this volume projects the social change in the past decade in Ireland onto major axes of its social movements.

Many readers will read this book in the order its chapters are laid out; most will start with the neatly arranged timeline at the beginning. There is something about timelines that makes them a powerful writing tool: like a train on a railroad, the story of the timeline’s bullet points runs without a chance to intervene, towards an end well-known to the reader; and yet it awakens hope, and the wonder what if there was a way to take a different path.

The body of the book resembles an afterlife in which the participants are sentenced to go through the same events over and over again: it is not a tedious form of repetition for the reader, as the timeline spirals around the stations of anti-austerity, water charges, abortion, and housing campaigns. Different aspects are revealed from the perspectives of different organisations. With all the difference and repetition, it was surely tempting for the contributors and editors to leave the decade of interest and look further into the future or the past. For most of the contributions, we can say that the temptation was resisted. Where attempts at foreseeing the future were made, the conflation of material conditions in different space, time, and jurisdiction make these visions of future unconvincing.

This is a methodological issue, however–the contributions in Fragments of Victory in majority of the cases do not aim at a materialist analysis of mechanisms, causes and effects. This is not necessarily a shortcoming; the format of the book and its diverse pool of contributors is much more suitable for what we have in front of us, an account of events and interactions different organisations on the left had in the eventful decade of 2010s. There were good stories to be told, and contributors were in a good position to tell them.

David Landy’s Anti-Austerity Struggles 2008-13 opens the body of the book by setting the stage straight away: the financial crash has happened, and Frankfurt’s way was what Ireland was getting, despite promises of alternative possibilities. Landy covers a lot of area in his quick recapitulation of the first half of the decade in focus, and with that he helps the reader navigate later chapters.

Dave Gibney is next with his chapter Water Charges. In this account, the reader gains insight into both the decisions made in the Right2Water movement and structures around it, but also the reasoning and debates behind these decisions. It is not easy to read this chapter in March 2025, after the Government’s signal of bringing the water charges back into policy plans. How do we do it this time? Gibney notes that the structures of Right2Water are long gone, but surely the experience, a record of which is alive and well in this chapter, remains. What will be the best way to put this experience, memory, and knowledge to work, remains to be seen.

Aileen O’Carroll and Máire Ni Chuagáin contributed the chapter Abortion. This chapter’s focus on Abortion Rights Campaign, a large grassroots group within the wider pro-choice movement, has both historical and theoretical value, as it follows the tracks of a non-hierarchical group with innovative tactics finding its way within a wide front of groups and organisations, keeping the eye on the overall goal while attempting to maintain the core principles of the group. Like Gibney’s, this chapter offers a wealth of experience in tactics in the field, putting together structures that will last long enough to achieve the goal, and allow different groups to work together.

The chapter Housing was written by Juliana Sassi, Seamus Farrell, Rosi Leonard, and Aisling Hedderman. Four experienced organisers in Dublin’s housing movement go through the struggles they experienced, from the Apollo House occupation, over Dublin Central Housing Action, to the Community Action Tenants Union. In their methodological framework, they identify the economic drivers of the housing crisis, the challenges for the tenants’ movement, and trace the major interactions of organised groups on one, and state and capital on the other side.

Trade Unions is the title of Mary Muldowney’s contribution. Technically complex, this chapter makes sense of the trade union policies, political decisions, and negotiations in the years of Frankfurt’s way in Ireland. Muldowney brings in relevant statistics, and provides a clear and informative chronology while navigating a complex sequence of actions. One paragraph towards the end of the contribution is interesting as it breaks away from the rest of the text in a claim that the future of the trade union movement might involve a shift towards Sinn Féin, which “does not promise any great hope” (p.113) based on Sinn Féin’s record in government in the Six Counties. Without going into the credibility of this thesis, it is interesting to note its inclusion after discussing the previous role of trade unions in electoral politics, backing Labour.

Paul Dillon’s chapter Centre Left is a chapter on the Labour Party. Namely, Dillon writes the 2011-2016 Labour Party, the campaign that put Labour into the 2011 Government, and the post-Government reputation of the party. The title of the chapter would have allowed more context on the emergence of the Social Democrats–Dillon himself has had significant experience in both Labour and Social Democrats, and could provide a critical perspective on the two sides of the centre left.

Kevin Doyle’s chapter Anarchism is stylistically the best-written one in the book, or at least the one that departs the most from the established style. Written in a popular non-fiction manner, Doyle made it a dynamic, exciting read on the rise and the fall of the Workers Solidarity Movement.

In the category of “best understanding of causes and effects”, David Landy’s chapter Trotskyism takes the prize. Studying the “collapse into success” of Socialist Workers Party and collapse “in the customary way of Trotskyist parties” (p. 141) of the Socialist Party, Landy successfully charts out the landscape of Trotskyism in Ireland, its electoral success and the dynamics of its largest groups between each other, and with respect to other groupings. Landy also succinctly documents the reasons for “distrust of the party, especially by those who have worked with them” (p. 153) as another important contribution of this chapter’s interpretation of Trotskyist dynamics in Ireland and their relationship with social movements.

Dan Finn, Stewart Reddin, and Damian Lawlor penned the chapter Republicanism. After documenting the rise and the fall of Éirígí, and the subsequent emergence of Anti-Imperialist Action, Saoradh, and Lasair Dhearg, the authors proceed to analyse Sinn Féin–the dominant lens in this interpretation is that of electoral and parliamentary politics. In the focus on Sinn Féin’s activity in the Twenty-Six Counties, the effects of the political struggle in the Six Counties are left in a negative space.

The book ends with Oisín Gilmore’s Conclusion, where the events in the book expand in time and space. Gilmore contextualises them in the international state of affairs, and looks behind the corner at what may be ahead for the left in Ireland.

Inevitably, in a book like this, universalist but not universal, readers will have something they wanted to read about that did not make an appearance. Landy and Gilmore themselves wrote, in the introduction of the book, a list of topics that did not make it into the Fragments of Victory. Indicative is the explanation given about non-inclusion of environmentalism: “[w]e couldn’t justify including the Green Party.” (p. 20) There, we see the horizon of activity on the left, outlined by the roof of Leinster House; the commitment to parliamentary politics seen in other chapters as well. Not only is it hard to see beyond the government buildings, but also beyond Dublin: methodologically restricted to Twenty Six Counties, practically the scope of the book, more often than not, collapses to Dublin. While the authors suggest that the Shell to Sea campaign does not fit the timeline of the book well, it can be argued that its long shadow goes deep into the austerity years and beyond – both as an organising experience, and as a damning case study of the state and capital collusion.

Another notable omission listed by the authors is that of anti-racism. With the increased racist and xenophobic violence in 2020s, as referenced by Gilmore in the conclusion, the study of anti-racism activism in Ireland is important both for the understanding of far right mechanisms at play and for building effective resistance. Furthermore, it is the foundation of meaningful organising within our society beyond the white, settled Irish population.

If the list of topics left out of the book was to be continued by the reader, one topic is transversely in short supply: class. This once again ties in with the methodological frame of the book. The conversation about the relationship of the left and the working class in Ireland, without essentialist or reductionist pretense, remains underrepresented. Leaving the class element invisible inevitably reinforces the hegemonic relationship of the nominal left, or centre left in the book’s nomenclature, with capital and power. Departing from this reformist standard is a task for all of us in the future–and this might connect the fragments of victory into something more substantial.