1999 was a good year for the IRSM and the IRSCNA. For the Movement, we continued a pattern of growth that has been ongoing since at least 1994. The party held an ideological conference, and as the year draws to a close the Ard Comhairle has assigned various members the task of drafting position papers on a number of pressing issues. Offices were opened in Strabane and Dublin. The annual commemoration of Seamus Costello was re-initiated. And, the Party was represented at two international conferences and attended two additional international events. The best news of all is that a number of RSPOWs were released and this trend is expected to continue. The INLA passed its first full year under cease-fire and did so with a loss of very few volunteers from its ranks.

The IRSCNA held its first Ard Fheis (the first so called, as they were previously known as "North American Conferences," and passed a number of important resolutions. We contributed a record sum to of funds to the Movement and made significant progress in providing the means for the Party to launch internal educational efforts in a number of cities throughout Ireland. The Web site continued to make the movement more visible and expanded to include historical archives including copies of the Starry Plough from years gone by. Irish Workers' Republic gained a new editor, we gained a Youth Coordinator, added a RSPOW Liaison Officer, and launched a new news/discussion list. Though IWR only brought out two issues this year, it improved the publication schedule over the previous year and we hope that in the coming year it will resume quarterly publication and move towards publication every other month.

In revolutionary politics, however, to rest on ones laurels for even a moment is to be left behind, so we look forward to the coming year with a sense of renewed responsibility. Though we did well with fund raising this year, the level of contribution still lags far behind what the movement needs to succeed in its tasks. We increased by 50% the amount of our support over 1998, we hope to increase by the same percentage in the coming year. We gained new members and supporters and they have proved to be serious and committed activists, but this is the area we must work on the most in the year to come.

If the IRSCNA is to play the role it should in being the Left within North American Irish republican activism and the Irish section of the North American Left, it must grow, and it must grow considerably. It is for this reason that we ask our supporters to seriously think about committing to membership in the IRSCNA, and we ask our members to remember that the purpose of membership is not to receive from the organisation, but to give to it. That is, the organisation is only - at the end of the day - its membership, and can only be as active and successful as its members make it. As a small organisation, and as a revolutionary organisation, we need our members to be creative, show initiative, be daring, and be committed. Moreover, we need our members to think always of how they can advance the IRSCNA, and thereby, how they can advance the IRSM.

We are hoping to sponsor a speaking tour by a member of the IRSP Ard Comhairle in the coming year. This will be the first IRSP speaking tour in nearly a decade. We are also looking into the possibility of sponsoring tours of North Americans to Ireland, where they can meet party activists, RSPOWs, learn first hand what the nation is like, and what the struggle is about.

We are hoping to expand the resources we are able to make available to our membership to include additional literature, additional video tapes for loan, additional badges, and perhaps add posters, new audiotapes, and other items not previously available. The North American Coordinator made plain at the committee's Ard Fheis that he was available to travel as needed, if travel costs could be covered by host cities.

We will be taking a sharper line with socialist organisations in North America. We expect their support for the IRSP and will begin to judge these organisations on whether they provide such support or remain apologists for the increasingly bourgeois Provisional Irish Republican Movement.

Whether we will succeed in these goals and exceed them, we do not know. What we do know, however, is that the working class struggle remains as pressing a task as ever. We know that so long as capitalism continues, imperialist wars, starvation, poverty, social deterioration, deprivation, ignorance, racism, sexism, national chauvinism, despair, cultural genocide, homophobia, environmental destruction, species extinction, and exploitation in all its various forms will continue. We know that a better way of administering human society exists and that the needs of the masses of humanity -- the working class -- can only be met by uprooting the present economic system and replacing it with a system responsive to human need and administered by working class people themselves.

We know that the Good Friday Agreement provides the Irish people with nothing more than more of the same, the perpetuation of partition, of sectarianism, of occupation, of oppression, of violence, and of exploitation. We know that the "Celtic Tiger" is a paper tiger. That the wealth it creates is created by Irish working people who receive in return only the crumbs from the table of the wealthy. That it is partially fuelled by multinational corporations seeking an English speaking workforce and access to EU markets but that these corporations will exit as quickly as they came if greater profits and similar benefits for them can be found elsewhere. We know that Irish capitalism, like capitalism generally is inherently unstable. That the next crisis looms ahead, and that when it comes noone will be prepared to protect the interests of working people except working people themselves.

We know that the Irish national liberation struggle cannot be won without liberating the masses of the Irish people, who are its working class. We know that only a socialist revolution can obtain that liberation. Likewise, we know that a socialist revolution cannot be made in an Ireland that remains divided by partition. We know that this partition perpetuates the division of one section of the working class in Ireland from the other. We know that class consciousness is necessary to make a socialist revolution and that the most class conscious elements of the Irish working class are collected in the Irish Republican Socialist Movement.

That the Irish Republican Socialist Party provides the leadership necessary to building for a revolution in Ireland. We know that capitalists in Ireland will be no more willing than capitalists anywhere else to give up their wealth -- stolen from the working class -- and their power to the masses without a fight and we know that for this reason, if no other, the Irish National Liberation Army should never surrender its weapons. We know that a guerilla army cannot bring socialist revolution by itself, nor can socialism be won by electing party members to a bourgeois parliament -- only the struggle of the masses of Irish workers can win a 32-county Irish Socialist Republic.

For all of these reasons, we know that we are prepared to rededicate ourselves to supporting the Irish Republican Socialist Movement in the coming year. We commit ourselves to building awareness of that movement and support for it in North America. We will continue to demonstrate the Movement's politics by showing our solidarity with other revolutionary movements and do so also in recognition that the struggle of the working class, like the system of capitalism, must be international in scope, though we fight nation to nation for our liberation.

As we approach the year 2000, we declare without faltering, that we remain a revolutionary socialist organisation determined to see the end of capitalism in Ireland and throughout the world. And, we say to those of you who are not yet members of the IRSCNA, join us in this struggle. Join the IRSCNA. Fight the good fight!

Happy New Year, comrades. Adh mor (good luck) for this coming year to all those in struggle.