Despite lacking the gunsmoke of Sinn Féin, the organisational nexus actually running People Before Profit (and various spinoffs) away from the Oireachtas benches has often sparked controversy on the left, not least amid a new split reported in the mainstream press.
Centred around a perceived lack of republican bravado and willingness for PBP regulars to prop up Sinn Féin in the event of a left-coalition to displace FFG, the latest Trotskyist split centres around the party’s young Turks at the Socialist Workers Network (SWN).
Trotskyist genealogy is as pointless and vainglorious as its adherents, but it is sufficient to say SWN (formerly the Socialist Workers Party) acts as a ginger group within PBP, positing itself as its strongest organised tendency against any collaboration with the bourgeois parties. At the 2025 PBP AGM, 10 of the 14 elected Steering Committee members were identified as SWN members, compared with two from Paul Murphy’s more reformist RISE and two unaffiliated members.
To complicate matters of the recent split, ex-SWN members will stay officially under the PBP fold in tribute to the party’s umbrella approach meant to keep mentally unhinged reds from splintering into oblivion.
Benefiting from the activist seeds planted in the Water Protest years and now pondering whether to cash in its political chips with a ‘reformist’ left government when the time comes, the explicit wish of Paul Murphy and his RISE faction is to get their feet under a Cabinet table sometime before the end of the decade.
Aontacht Media reported on 12 August that SWN is functionally dividing into an SWN Left, SWN Right and SWN Belfast, and claimed that RISE (Murphy’s reformists) have consequently become the de facto dominant bloc within PBP. This author hasn’t the patience to compose a Venn Diagram.
Aontacht pins the split down to ‘shameful anti-republican sentiments of PBP ’, with a noticeable generational divide existing between younger trots whose view of republicanism is shaped by meme culture and James Connolly nostalgia as opposed to veterans who saw the lived experience of ethno-sectarianism in the North latently regarding the Provos as nurturing fascistic tendencies that almost shortchange the left.
Councillor Conor Reddy is among those who have opted to split from the Murphy/RISE faction, with the wrangling unlikely to register with the voting public, albeit pointing to the clannish structures within the supposedly broad-based left.
WHO ACTUALLY RUNS PBP?
Historically, PBP maintains a peculiar structure within the left more generally, existing more as a broad church group for warring leftist tribes, appearing relatively loose, activist-oriented, and pluralistic while still having a core group running the show.
Central to this was left-academic Kieran Allen serving for years as PBP’s National Secretary and a member of the party’s general-election “war room.” Until recently listed as one of the four individuals able to approve PBP candidates per electoral records, Allen is synonymous with the broad-left approach of Murphy, with an ideological career preexisting the party.
Effectively at this moment, PBP is being forced to decide whether it is actually a party, or a coalition of revolutionary organisations sharing an electoral vehicle, stamping out the ambiguity that has haunted it from its origins in 2005 with Dublin trots.
Casting SWN and friends into the cold would enable the party to finally enter the big leagues with the welcomed benefit of fewer ideological headcases from the SWP days, albeit destined to be subsumed within the centre left in time per reformist logic.
The remarkable feature of the Irish experience this side of the Bank Guarantee is that the radical left enjoyed during the 2010s almost uniquely favourable conditions. Ireland lacked a substantial radical-right competitor, as republican-populist rhetoric offered the hard left a chance to enter the public consciousness, as it additionally benefited from liberalisation in the 2010s and the climate crusade.
The lesson within PBP almost appears universal. A coalition of activists, academics, students, and a scant few workers forged in the austerity years is now reaching its point of contradiction as power becomes conceivable.
In truth, Murphy and the reformists are correct on this one. If Murphy can move PBP towards credible participation in a left government while retaining its activist organisation and economically radical programme, PBP could potentially occupy political territory that the Social Democrats cannot easily fill.
Contrary to illusions of workers’ democracy, PBP contains very little of either; however, despite the clownish exterior and interior, one should not minimise the ability of Reds to pack a punch should they enter government, nor the wish of the Irish electorate to rush to the right once the trots are done tearing each other apart.
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