About Snapshots of Political Action

Snapshots of Political Action aims to bring together material distributed at individual demonstrations, marches, rallies and protests in Ireland, providing a view of the different political strands and groups that come together in campaigns.

We hope that making these documents accessible together will give a useful view of the campaigns in which the different strands of the Irish left participate, and provide a documentary record of the political issues that have led to political action and collaboration. One of the interesting facets of documents from a particular march or protest is that they can provide an insight in to the organisations that actively participate in particular campaigns; and in to how left organisations respond to political events and changes — often with a need to respond quickly to a developing situation, in contrast, for example, with regular periodicals.

The collection was initiated as a joint project between Irish Election Literature  and the Irish Left Archive. All the initial material was collected and scanned by Alan Kinsella of Irish Election Literature, who had the idea of making material from particular protests available together as a way to document campaigns taking place in Ireland and the involvement of different strands of the Irish left, and kindly suggested a collaboration with the Irish Left Archive.

We hope to continue expanding the collection and provide a broader documentary representation of protests and political events around the island. We’d be delighted to hear from anyone with material distributed at demonstrations, marches, rallies or protests who would like to contribute to the project. In particular, what we currently have is quite Dublin-centric and we hope we can expand to document the range of political action across Ireland.

So if you have relevant material, please get in touch; and if you’re participating in political action — either producing documents or folding them in to your pocket as you continue marching — we’d be grateful if you would collect them and pass them on.

You can contact and either Irish Election Literature  or the Irish Left Archive if you would like to pass on documents.

We hope these collections provide a useful record of political activity in Ireland and the groups and organisations participating in campaigns.