Founding members included Tommy McKearney, Tom McFeely, James Tierney, Eugene Bryne and Oliver Corr.
[3][4][5] The league broke away from the Sinn Féin/the PIRA for a number of reasons, such as the vote at the 1986 Sinn Féin Ardfheis to recognise the legitimacy of Dáil Éireann and to stand in elections in the Republic of Ireland.
[6] The league had also come to reject the Armalite and ballot box strategy and believed that the Provisional IRA needed to either return to a "ground war" against the British state or cease fighting altogether, rather than its strategy at that time of seldom but spectacular attacks.
[3][4][6] The league, as a Marxist-Leninist organisation, rejected electoralism and instead called for mass struggle against the British.
Congress had supported the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev in the hope they would rejuvenate socialism in the Soviet Union; the failure of these reforms to prevent the Soviet Union from collapsing left the credibility of its analysis shattered.