[4] SWM members helped to organise and publicise public meetings which were addressed by IRSP founder Seamus Costello.

[3] The SWM was long overshadowed on the Irish left by organisations such as the Workers' Party, but the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Warsaw Pact regimes after 1989 saw it grow.

Its traditional workplace bastion, Waterford Glass, has faded in strength but the SWP has developed some limited support in the Dublin Bus unions and the education branch of SIPTU.

The SWM changed its name to the Socialist Workers Party at its conference in 1995, after delegates from Dublin Bus argued that it should now take itself seriously on the left, as it then had a growing and active membership.

In 2014 Bríd Smith of the SWP stood for the Dublin constituency in the European Parliament Elections, which was believed to have been a factor in Socialist Party (Ireland) MEP Paul Murphy losing his seat which had been won by Joe Higgins in 2009.

One of its best known members is Eamonn McCann, a journalist from Derry, who was involved in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

He was present at both the Battle of the Bogside in August 1969 and Bloody Sunday in January 1972, and has campaigned for the families of the fourteen shot dead by the British Paratroop regiment.

McCann writes articles for media such as the Belfast Telegraph and Hot Press, and attracted 9,127 votes (1.6%) for the Socialist Environmental Alliance in the Northern Ireland constituency in the 2004 European Parliament election.

The late John de Courcy Ireland, long-time left-wing veteran and nautical historian, was also an active and dedicated member.

In recent years the paper has sought to change itself from a narrow party publication to a broader, full colour, anti-capitalist 'paper of the movements', occasionally including contributors from the wider Irish left.

[citation needed] However, in earlier years they tended to take a more Republican line on The Troubles, for example arguing in 1985 that "Protestant workers can be compared to the poor whites of the Southern states of the US.

It was supportive of the turn towards socialism by Sinn Féin during the late 1970s and 1980s, and considered merging into the Irish Republican Socialist Party in 1975.

[4] The SWM were active in the mass movements opposing the criminalisation of IRA prisoners in the early 1980s, and members of the SWM were active in local Anti-H Block committees (Dundalk member Phil Toale, a shop steward in the town's cigarette factory, organised a general strike in the town the day that hunger-striker Bobby Sands died).

Following riots in Dublin on 25 February 2006 by Republicans, protesting at a planned 'Love Ulster' parade, the SWP issued a press release in which it expressed its full support for the actions of the rioters.