Paul Murphy's party joins forces with People Before Profit

TD Paul Murphy said RISE placed emphasis on the environment, climate change and biodiversity. Photo: Gareth Chaney/Collins

Paul Murphy's RISE party has joined up with People Before Profit.

Mr Murphy, who is the only elected RISE representative, says his party will move into the larger People Before Profit group after negotiations between the two sides and will be "working together to try and build People Before Profit as a mass broad eco-socialist party".

Mr Murphy said it was "good news for everybody who stands for the rights of ordinary people, of working-class people in this country."

The group say they're coming together to try to offer "a real effective opposition to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael" and to "bring an end to the rule of those establishment parties".

This will be Mr Murphy's fifth political group in 10 years.

RISE had been a separate independent organisation since its inception in 2019, however, it formed part of the Solidarity–People Before Profit alliance for electoral purposes.

Mr Murphy said RISE placed emphasis on the environment, climate change and biodiversity.

Big step forward as @RISEsocialists & @paulmurphy_TD join PBP to #RISEwithPBP

Join us on Thursday for a major online rally to celebrate: https://t.co/fzwrnHkqY3

Get involved in the in PBP today https://t.co/QVJOAxe8Xp pic.twitter.com/J785TLmCso

— People Before Profit (@pb4p) February 28, 2021

He says RISE now see People Before Profit as the "vehicle" for eco-socialism and "through a combination of those discussions, but also the actual experience that we've had working very closely together over the past year, for example, on Zero-Covid, we're convinced that People Before Profit has a real commitment to people's power as the way to win change as opposed to just electing people, and it has clear eco-socialist principles."

The party policies include an effective 10% reduction in carbon emissions year on year.

People Before Profit leader Richard Boyd Barrett said his party have seen "a pretty dramatic growth in membership", since the February 2020 election, with "about 50 to 100 people joining every single month for the last year" and hopes this merger will build on that success.

"We're up to about 3,000 or more members," he said.

So we honestly feel with the addition of RISE and with a fairly dramatic growth in membership, that we have the best opportunity since James Connolly was alive, to put radical, genuine socialist politics on the political agenda in a serious way, to challenge the financial establishment.

Mr Boyd Barrett said the new members include "a very significant number of young people but also a lot of workers", noting that "since the Covid pandemic, People Before Profit and RISE have been to the fore in defending arts workers, taxi drivers, student nurses and midwives, Debenhams workers and pensioners".

The party does not foresee merging with Solidarity, who are also in their alliance, any time soon, as they say both groups have different views on a border poll, which People Before Profit are supportive of as an "inevitability".

The party have ruled out ever sitting in government with Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael in any upcoming elections and have called on Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats to do the same.