Introducing the Irish Left Archive Podcast! In this episode, Ciarán Swan and Aonghus Storey discuss how the project got started in 2007 and how it has developed since then.

The Irish Left Archive was started as part of the Cedar Lounge Revolution (CLR) blog and later developed into the separate website at leftarchive.ie. We discuss the background to the project, the advantages of a non-institutional, informal archive and how the project has benefitted from the community around the CLR, both for gathering relevant political material and building a better picture of the history of the Irish left from discussions in comments with a wide range of participants and interested people.

We are starting this podcast partly in lieu of a planned symposium, which as you might expect, we have delayed in the current circumstances. In the coming episodes, we’ll be talking to a number of people about particular documents in the collection, the history of the Irish Left and activism in Ireland, the advantages and pitfalls of informal projects like this and other similar archives, and lots more.

View this episode on our website: #1: The Irish Left Archive Project.