Can the battle in Britain extend to Ireland?  To answer that question we must look at the class forces involved. Britain remains a major capitalist power. This gives force to the illusion of Brexit but gives a mirror illusion of left social democracy a much greater weight. The trade unions, although venal and corrupt, are not in formal partnership with the government and employers. Because there was a battle between capital and labour around the miner's strike, there remains a history of class consciousness on which new struggles can be built.

The situation is very different in Ireland. North and South the country is dominated by imperialism, and that rule is generally accepted. Workers are divided by the border and by sectarianism. Their rights are seen as being dependent on the "fiscal space" allowed by budgetary restraints imposed by the Troika and, in the North, by the British government.

This dependence is based on catastrophic defeats. The first was decades of social partnership between trade union bosses and Irish capital, where the unions leaderships imposed the austerity agenda on their own members, working in collaboration with a reactionary coalition government containing the Irish Labour party. In the North the union leaders have now signed up to the "Fresh Start Agreement” - both an austerity programme and an acceptance of sectarian division.

The second major defeat was the defeat of the republican movement - a defeat so complete that former republicans now administer the system they sought to destroy. The language of conflict resolution and cultural rights eliminates even the possibility of an anti-imperialist and class analysis

The left groups in Ireland are provincial branches of British groups. As with their HQs, they adopted the Lexit line. Along with sections of the republican movement they stubbornly claim workers victory in the face of right wing triumph. Above all the measure of their world is the parliamentary manoeuvres and the electoral gains of their groups, not the needs of the working class as a whole.

For the socialist groups to take leadership of worker's resistance would require a root and branch reformation. An anti-imperialist analysis should move to the centre of their analysis as opposed to absent-minded lip service or being totally absent.

In Britain the task is to attempt to break a working class party out of the Labour party. In Ireland the task is to build a working class party from the foundations.

It can't be done by building a Corbynista movement in the North - to organize as British Labour would be to accept working class division of Ireland and imperialist rule in the country.  The nearest parallel to a Corbyn movement in Ireland were attempts by sections of the trade union left to link with the cynical claims of leftism by Sinn Fein. This has failed utterly.  It was so far removed from the British experience that, where Corbyn has seen a mobilisation of tens of thousands, the move from Right2Water to Right2Change involved demobilising the tens of thousands who had taken to the streets. Where the Corbyn movement shifts left, the Right2Change  movement in Ireland involved a sharp move right.

There are however grounds for optimism. No section of Irish capital has the slightest idea of how to survive Brexit.