The continuous growth the IRSP had experienced for the past half decade continued during the year just passed. The IRSP gained new members and developed new assets. Strabane 's Teach na Failte office has also become known as an IRSP office to the local community, and the community is making use of this to seek the IRSP's assistance in their day-to-day difficulties. This year offices will be opening in Dublin and Derry, and perhaps in Cork as well.

The movement has erected a new monument to its martyrs in the Republican Socialist plot in Derry, an impressive but tasteful tribute in stone to our martyrs. The IRSP again commemorated our brilliant founding chairperson and chief of staff, Seamus Costello's life and death in the service of the Irish working class. The Easter commemoration this year was well attended.

All but seven RSPOWs have been given early release and are rejoining the political struggle of the party, or at least a portion of them are. Dessie O Hare is pursuing release under the GFA through the courts and at least one other comrade will be released by mid-summer. Yet, sadly, as we prepare to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1981 hunger strike, we face a situation where once again republican and republican socialist POWs are denied Special Category Status, as though the hunger strike had never taken place. Patsy O Hara, Kevin Lynch, and Mickey Devine, who we remember with pride, did not die so that we could watch political prisoners stripped of their rightful status. The proper commemoration of the 1981 hunger strike, therefore, must include efforts to see that the RSPOWs regain political status.

In addition to six INLA prisoners being held in the six and 26-counties, a seventh is fighting here in North America. Eddie John McNicholl, though retired from INLA active service for over two decades, is being forced to fight the US Immigration and Naturalization Service to avoid being deported to Britain. This year we were able to get a commitment from the Friends of Irish Freedom to assist Eddie John financially in regard to his legal expenses, for which we are very grateful. In the coming year, however, we hope to see Eddie John free and returned to his wife and children.

The INLA, having recognized the workers of Ireland's yearning for peace, has maintained the cease-fire they called on 22 August 1998, in fact, they have kept their cease-fire far better than any other organisation presently on cease-fire in Ireland. Still, the INLA demonstrated its preparedness to defend the working class nationalist neighborhoods, carrying out armed patrols in North Belfast when loyalist in-fighting bled over and threatened working class nationalists.

The IRSP held its third successful Ard Fheis since 1997, and the Ard Comhairle elected at the Ard Fheis in October is highly representative of the party and its greatest human talents. The IRSP has shown its continued superiority in putting forward bold and novel perspectives on intractable political issues, such as its document on Community Policing and its Non-Aggression Pact charters proposal, which will soon be re-introduced. The IRSP is preparing to again contest seats in an election campaign, though it was made plain at the Ard Fheis that party activists continue to recognize the inability to find a parliamentary road to socialism, and recognise that electoral participation is a question of tactics only, not of principles. International Department incorporating activists from Britain and North America continues to function well. The party sent representatives to African Liberation Day commemorations in London; Washington, DC; Dallas Texas; and Sacramento, California in May; then in November joined in celebrating the 20th annivesary of the AAPRP-associated All-African Women's Union. The party is preparing for high level talks to be renewed with the Welsh socialists Cymru Goch and will be seeking to deepen our relationship with both Cuba and Libya.

Gino Gallagher once said of the movement: "We trace our tradition, Republican Socialism, back through Irish history to the likes of radicals, Marxists, and republicans as diverse as Thompson, Lalor, Davitt, Connolly, Larkin, Mellowes, O'Donnell, and Seamus Costello. Not withstanding our past problems and difficulties, we come from a proud radical vein of revolutionary politics. We see the other parties (Sinn Fein and the SDLP) as mainstream nationalists, representing all classes therein. We stand with the whole of the Irish working class, regardless of religious background. We are unashamedly a working class, Marxist, and republican movement."

The IRSM has little interest in the sterile confines of the sectarian Left or the ultimately failing perspective of mainstream nationalists and republicans. The party has involved itself in some worthy undertakings of the Left, however, including the struggle against racism and the struggle to expand and defend women's reproductive rights. Increasingly, the IRSP will demand that it be recognised as a revolutionary socialist organisation, and refuse to be coaxed into the senseless bickering of the sectarian Left, but while demanding that it be counted as a part of the socialist community.

The IRSP well understands that the only national liberation worth fighting for in Ireland is that which brings with it the class liberation of Ireland's workers. It has no interest in accepting, preserving, and certainly not in administering either of the two partitionist statelets on the island of Ireland today. It has no interest in being invited to the White House by the leader of Western imperialism around the globe nor in being wined and dined by the capitalist leaders of America and invited to ring the bell launching the trading in that temple of capitalist greed, the Wall Street stock exchange. It did not organise itself as a movement so that its leaders could have large homes in Donegal, or so that it could direct the educational policy of the British occupied and still partitioned six county statelet.

The IRSM was organised by Irish workers, and continues to be lead by Irish workers, for the purpose of defending the interests of Irish working people and overthrowing imperialism and capitalism in Ireland, to enable the vast majority of the population, who are Ireland's working class, to control both the political and economic resources of the nation in their own interests, and in the interests of working class people around the world. Accordingly, it stands like James Connolly, mocking those who claim that we must be "practical," and seek mere reform within the context of the existing status quo, when we understand that only by remaining "extreme" do we have the slightest chance of gaining something that is worth the sacrifice the workers of Ireland have already made in the fight for Irish national liberation.

The IRSP, which has championed Broad Front efforts since its foundation 26 years ago, and is presently engaged once again in such an effort. With the Irish Republican Writers' Group and the 32-County Sovereignty Movement, the IRSP is pressing for a community inquiry into the killing of RIRA Volunteer Joseph O Conner, who may have been killed by the Provisional IRA. Further, we have joined with these and others to defend the rights of all within our community to freely express their political opinions and have denounced the heavy-handed attempts to censor the IRWG by Sinn Fein.

As an unabashedly revolutionary socialist and republican movement, the IRSM deserves--even demands, simply by its existence--the solidarity and support of other revolutionaries internationally, just as it is compelled to lend its solidarity to others fighting for the same aims as itself. We cannot but question the political integrity of those who call themselves Marxists and revolutionary socialists in Britain, the United States, Canada, or elsewhere, who have made a long-standing practice of studied silence about the IRSM, while rushing to embrace the multi-class, ultimately bourgeois republicans in other movements; often serving as craven apologists for the political shortcomings of those movements, while zealously reiterating the black propaganda of the capitalist media about the IRSM. The revolutionary workers of Ireland will well remember who were the opportunists and who rendered genuine revolutionary solidarity to the proletarian struggle in Ireland, as will we.

The comrades and supporters of the IRSCNA are justifiably proud of the history of the IRSM and the dedication and political vision of our comrades in the IRSP, INLA, and RSPOWs, and our own role in helping to build awareness of, and support for, the IRSM in Canada and the United States. On this, the 26th Anniversary of the founding of the IRSP and INLA, we take this opportunity to reiterate our unswerving dedication to, and support for, the movement. In doing so, we know we stand on the side of the Irish working class, and we ask of those holding back from joining our movement and being counted, which side are you on? For the answer to that question must dictate whether you remain outside or join with us in helping the IRSM as it embarks on the way towards its first half century . . . on the Way Forward and the Road to Revolution.

Happy anniversary to all our comrades in the Ard Comhairle and general membership of the IRSP in Ireland and Britain; the RSPOWs in Portlaoise, Magilligan, and Maghaberry; and the volunteers of INLA. We hope you will share the pride we have in you.