A new angle on Northern Ireland

Northern Irish politics are an area I keep returning to when contributing to Wikipedia, and I'm becoming increasingly aware of the poverty of sources for some topics.

Election results and many aspects of the Troubles are well covered by ARK and its related sites (with particular appreciation going to Nicholas Whyte). The UUP and some key figures - particularly some in Sinn Féin - are covered by a number of books accessible through Google to greater or lesser extents. There are various reviews of Northern Irish politics giving general overviews, generally not very useful for adding detail to articles.

But try to find information on some other organisations, and you soon come up against a brick wall. Where are the works on the National Democrats, on the later years of the Nationalist Party, or the early years of the Alliance?

This tendency is particularly pronounced when trying to research on the labour movement in Northern Ireland. Key figures barely appear on the web, or at best as footnotes in pieces covering the Parliament. Michael Farrell's work is a more useful source, but his biases are evident in the periods he focusses on and those he ignores.

With that in mind, I'm looking forward to the release of A History of the Northern Ireland Labour Party: Democratic Socialism and Sectarianism by Aaron Edwards. He appears to have also researched the politics of the PUP, which seems a logical starting point for an interest in the later years of the NILP. This should be an area ripe for research, with key figures such as Billy Boyd, David Bleakley still around, and Billy Blease having died only in May. This may be the reasoning for his periodisation, covering 1924 - 58 in two chapters, while devoting three to 1965 - 75.

Discussions of Edwards' work suggest that he is interested in privileging a class conflict model of Northern Irish society over an ethnic conflict model, a position I have considerable sympathy with. Given this, I'll be particularly interested in his analysis of the republican labour tendencies.

Here's hoping that this inspires some more research into the workers' movement - what chance something on trade unionism in the province?