Madam, – Mártan Ó Conghaile (January 13th) describes Eamon Gilmore as “a former communist”. In my trawls through the archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union when Moscow correspondent of this newspaper, I discovered that the real Communists in the USSR may not have agreed with Mr Ó Conghaile’s assessment.
In a report to Moscow in February 1986, Mr DS Molodtsov of the Soviet embassy gave an analysis of the Workers Party of which Mr Gilmore was then a member. The party, he wrote, contained at least two tendencies. One was Marxist-Leninist and the other “would be more correctly defined as a Social-Democratic tendency”. The “chief ideologist of the social-democratic tendency”, he wrote, was the trade unionist Des Geraghty while the International Secretary (the late Mr Seán Ó Cionnaith) stood on “solid Marxist-Leninist ground”. Eamon Gilmore and Pat Rabbitte were then, and still are, closely associated with Des Geraghty.
It would appear that while the Communists regarded them as social democrats those of a different political hue now want them to be seen as former communists. Could there be a general election in the offing? – Yours, etc,