LIKE so many influential revolutionaries, Irishman Brendan Scott (1933-73) threw himself into a lifelong and sustained involvement with what appears to have been a multitude of progressive and grassroots organisations.

Although keen to develop his politics electorally, Scott paid equal attention to strengthening struggles in the workplace and community and, inspiring respect from friend and foe alike, helped develop the Dublin Housing Action Committee, an early supporter for civil rights in the six counties.

He unapologetically admired James Connolly’s vision of an Ireland that was free, united and socialist.

John P Swift’s book shows Scott as an early critic of resurgent armed republicanism and he was equally as scathing towards those on the left who put forward the “two nations” thesis, which had a surprising number of followers in Ireland during the 1950s and 1960s on.  

Concerns with national and popular sovereignty also led him to oppose Ireland’s eventual decision to join the EU.

Totally unafraid of Catholic reaction, Scott relentlessly campaigned for a secular republic, put the struggles for women’s liberation at the heart of his organisational work and his internationalism led him to support the movement to stop the war in Vietnam, end racist rule in apartheid South Africa and build friendship with the peoples of the Soviet Union.

But perhaps his most significant achievement was that he was key to the transformation of the Irish Labour Party from a somewhat staid right-of-centre party, happy to get into bed politically with the Establishment, into a militant and socialist organisation almost unique in western Europe.

One wonders what he would have made of the Labour Party today.

Swift’s is very much a partisan work and none the less valuable for it but more could perhaps have been said about why Scott chose the Labour Party and what his understanding was of other groups  on the left.

There are only passing reference to defections from the Communist Party of Ireland and disputes within the wider republican socialist movement during these crises-ridden and tumultuous years of the 1960s and ’70s that remain untouched, if not unrecognised.

Yet this is an admirably well-researched and detailed text that stands as an affectionate tribute to a principled, creative and hardworking socialist.

Combining activism with raising a family and a successful career in academia and the media, Scott was to die at the appallingly early age of 40.

But he had achieved so much and influenced so many and this engaging portrait is a long overdue tribute to him.

Published by Umiskin Press and available at €35 plus p+p from umiskinpress.wordpress.com.