There was a time when the more radical sections of the Irish Left were passionately concerned about Northern Ireland/the North/the Six Counties (delete according to preference). Elsewhere, the main lines of division among left-wingers ran between communists and social democrats, Stalinists and Trotskyists, anarchists and Maoists. All of these tendencies could be found on the Irish left-wing scene, but they often seemed less important than concerns about the North and the issues it required people to take a stand on.

A rose-tinted view of the past more often than not gives rise to a pessimistic outlook on the present and future. Talk about the death of working-class movements often overlooks the fact that establishing and giving momentum to such movements was hard work; contemporary hopelessness as to the potential for new movements of resistance to come into being has perhaps less to do with the strict impossibility of such a thing, and more to do with a failure to remember that the organised and effective resistance of the past more often than not occurred against all odds.

In last week's General Election, fewer than one in five people who cast a ballot lent their support to the outgoing parties of government. While widely cast as a 'democratic revolution', this outcome will in fact barely alter the disastrous course upon which we are set.