Inactive Defunct People's Democracy (PD; Irish: Daonlathas an Phobail)[2] was a political organisation that arose from the Northern Ireland civil rights movement.
A catalyst for its foundation had been the attack on a Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) march in Derry on 5 October by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
At the meeting the group decided on five aims: It was initially led by a committee of ten members which consisted of Queen's University students Malcolm Miles, Fergus Woods, Anne McBurnley, Ian Godall, Bernadette Devlin, Joe Martin, Eddie McCamely, Michael O'Kane and Patricia Drinan, as well as Kevin Boyle, a law lecturer at QUB.
In the mid-1970s, the experience of the Ulster Workers' Council strike led to PD predicting a loyalist takeover in Northern Ireland, but it later came round to the view that this perspective was incorrect, giving loyalism a degree of autonomy from imperialism which it did not possess.
[8] During the 1970s, PD evolved towards Trotskyist positions and, by merging with the Dublin-based Movement for a Socialist Republic, was recognised by the reunified Fourth International as its Irish section.
Following the formation of the National H-Block/Armagh Committee in 1979 to build support for the Republican prisoners then on the "blanket protest" in support of political status and the subsequent death of Bobby Sands and nine of his comrades during the H-Block hunger strikes, a number of members of the organisation, led by Vincent Doherty - then a member of the Political Committee and a former party general election candidate - argued that PD should join Sinn Féin, which had moved openly to the left in the late 1970s and early 1980s.