Fresh off the printing press, Sinéad Morrissey’s memoir Among Communists, a story of growing up in a household of Communist Party members in Belfast, has drawn significant attention in the Irish media. Morrissey’s acclaim as a poet is one major factor, but the topic and the way the topic is covered play an important role as well. This article is not primarily a review of Morrissey’s memoir: it is a general reflection on a particular angle from which intimate histories of communists are written by others.
In the genre of family memoirs, Morrissey’s new book joins David Aaronovitch’s Party Animals, a similar story of growing up among communists in Britain. In dealing with the private lives of Irish communists, Morrissey’s book will share the shelf with Maurice Casey’s Hotel Lux, reviewed in the Socialist Voice a few years back (https://socialistvoice.ie/2024/09/hotel-lux-an-intimate-history-of-communisms-forgotten-book-review/). Morrissey describes growing up as a child of two members of the Communist Party of Ireland, with her grandfather Seán as a former IRA man and a prominent member of the Party as well.
Róisín Ingle interviewed Morrissey about the book for the Irish Times in April. The lens the Irish Times takes on communism is rather aligned with that of Morrissey, and some of the quotes from the interview illustrate the problematic points well. The opening paragraph is a treasure trove already:
“Acclaimed Belfast poet Sinéad Morrissey lived in four different houses growing up in Northern Ireland, but mostly she lived inside an idea. That idea, propagated by her parents at home and by their tiny community of comrades in smoke-filled meeting rooms of the 1970s and 1980s, was Western Communism.”
First of all, the surgical separation of “an idea” from the material world described here is a textbook example of anti-materialism, so on the nose that it could have been an example in an introductory lecture on Marxism. It is not accidental; the line in different variations appears again and again in Morrissey’s memoir—that she wasn’t living in Belfast, but in the Soviet Union (or rather, to push it to the new idealistic extreme, a “utopia” of it). As far from utopian socialism (or utopian anything) as Marxism fundamentally is, the insisting on a utopian worldview, realm of ideas, and an ability to detach from the local context is uncanny. And then comes “Western Communism”.
To this reader, it is rather unclear what Western Communism is—should it be read as “actually non-existent socialism”? Clearly there is an attempt to distance from communism (or socialism! Or the Soviet state!), but it is very much unclear where that attempt leads. To quote Morrissey: “you were tied by a kind of ideological umbilical cord to a rotten system”. The Western distinction also ties with the previous point about disinterest in the material conditions of the immediate surroundings, creating an image of a foreign body, an invasive species that cannot take ground. Western Communism is something you would find pressed in a herbarium.
A lot of motifs rhyme in Morrissey’s memoir: her parents’ marriage and their politics, her coming of age, writing poetry and the changing world of the late eighties. A lot of the rhymes may have been forced, though. A lot of contrast was forced as well, in particular that of “not living in the physical reality.” There is something to be said about the popular liberal appeal of memoirs from the North which externalise the war and tell a tale that somehow makes it go away. Good Vibrations, the biopic based on Terri Hooley’s life, comes to mind.
In the end, Among Communists is Morrissey’s story: this is how she remembers it, how she chooses to tell it. For a book about communists, it does lack a communal aspect, sense of organisation, and collective. Outside of Morrissey’s family, two other members of the Communist Party are mentioned—were there more? (Yes.) Would mentioning them hurt the idiosyncratic framing of the memoir? (Probably.)Among Communists: A Memoir (Sinéad Morrissey, Carcanet/Dubray Books, 2026) is available from Connolly Books, Temple Bar, Dublin. https://www.connollybooks.net/product/among-communists
