Socialist Democracy (Ireland)
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Socialist Democracy is the successsor to People's Democracy, a left wing current which emerged in Belfast in 1968 during the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. During the 1970s it evolved towards Trotskyist positions and, by merging with the Dublin-based Movement for a Socialist Republic, has become the Irish section of the reunified Fourth International.
In the early 1990s the remaining members of People's Democracy initiated the Irish Committee for a Marxist Programme as an attempt to regroup socialists and left wing republicans. This project ended in 1996 when PD dissolved and reconstituted itself as Socialist Democracy, adopting the programme put forward by the ICMP.
Socialist Democracy has a small membership mainly based in Belfast. In 2004 it fused with the International Socialists, a group of former members of the Socialist Workers Party in that city.
It does not currently contest elections, and remains affiliated to the Fourth International. It is the sympathising Irish section of the International, within which it has been critical of tactics take by its sister organisations in Brazil and France. Like the majority in the Fourth International, it was critical of the evolution of the Socialist Democracy current of the Workers Party in Brazil, which has now left the International. It was also critical of the Revolutionary Communist League's call for a vote against Le Pen in the 2002 French presidential election, rather than for a boycott.
