British and Irish Communist Organisation

British and Irish Communist Organisation
Leader	Brendan Clifford
Founded	1965
Dissolved	1980s
Ideology	Marxism

The British and Irish Communist Organisation (B&ICO) was a small but highly influential group based in London, Belfast, Cork, and Dublin. Its leader was Brendan Clifford. The group produced a great number of pamphlets, and many regular publications including The Irish Communist and Workers Weekly in Belfast. Its current formation is as Athol Books with its premier publication being the Irish Political Review.

Brendan Clifford was an Irish emigrant from the Sliabh Luachra area of County Cork who had migrated to London and become involved in left-wing politics there. Clifford and some of his followers had been in Michael McCreery's Committee to Defeat Revisionism, for Communist Unity and later they joined the Irish Communist Group. This body consisted largely of Irish people who were living in London and were opposed to the Soviet-aligned communist organisations intended for Irish people. Following a 1965 split, the Maoist wing named itself the Irish Communist Organisation, which later became the British and Irish Communist Organisation. The broadly Trotskyist wing, led by Gerry Lawless, became the Irish Workers' Group.

The ICO undertook an investigation into the development of Maoism, and concluded that it was not a suitable model for an anti-revisionist group. The Chinese Communist Party had supported some aspects of Nikita Khrushchev's "revisionism", and then been dishonest about its past positions.

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