Introduction: the British left and Ireland in the twentieth century

This special issue is dedicated to the history of the British left and Ireland, from the Edwardian era through to the‘Troubles’. The British left has had an enduring, yet uneasy, relationship with their Irish counterparts, as well as the wider Irish republican movement and the ‘Irish Question’. As Sam Porter and Denis O’Hearn wrote in the mid-1990s in New Left Review,‘British Left attitudes toward Ireland have long troubled Irish socialist republicans’. The special issue contains five articles that look at various aspects of this relationship across the twentieth century. It is an expansion of our edited volumes on the history of the British far left, published by Manchester University Press in 2014 and 2017, and a companion to our special issue of Socialist History Journal on British Marxist intellectuals since 1956. We are excited to bring together five articles that will help develop the scholarship and build our knowledge of the long history that exists between the British left and Ireland, which we briefly explore below.