While they did not come close to winning any seats, they polled a respectable 12,000 votes for their three candidates (Betty Sinclair, William McCullough and Sid Maitland), who retained their deposits.
It stopped publishing its newsletter, Unity, in 1947,[5] membership fell from 1,000 in 1945 to 172 in 1949, and at the 1949 Northern Ireland general election it ran only McCullough, who took just 623 votes.
[7] A Joint Council was established to co-ordinate the activities of the CPNI and the IWL, although disputes between the two sometimes arose, particularly over the priority given to opposing the partition of Ireland.
[8] By the early 1960s, the CPNI was promoting the Northern Ireland Labour Party, then from 1965 tried to establish a civil rights movement with leading trade unionists and Irish republicans.
[9] It hoped to politicise the IRA; its highpoint was the civil rights association (NICRA) of the late 1960s in which Sinclair was prominent, although she was openly critical of the lack of engagement from colleagues such as Andy Barr and James Stewart.