Below is the audio of a public meeting commemorating the life of Irish revolutionary activist and militant Peter Graham, who was tortured and murdered by persons unknown in 1971 at the age of just 26. The meeting took place in the Cobblestone on Saturday 18th February 2017. The audio also includes contributions from the floor from people who knew Peter Graham.
LISTEN: Download the MP3 here (hosted by Archive.org)
Politically Trotskyist, Dublin-born Graham was an activist with Saor Éire and the International Marxist Group. He was tortured and shot dead in a near St. Stephen’s Green on 25 October 1971. As Come Here to Me note in their short piece on Graham, “a cloud of mystery, silence and betrayal still hangs over the incident to this day.”
The talk was introduced and chaired by longtime Dublin anarchist activist Alan MacSimoin (also of the Stoneybatter & Smithfield People’s History Project) and the main speaker was historian Rayner O’Connor Lysaght, a close friend of Graham’s who shared the flat in which he was murdered. O’Connor Lysaght is a member of Socialist Democracy. The talk was organised by the Irish Republican and Marxist History Project.
In 2013 a talk covering some of the stories of this era in Irish history, ‘Radical Politics of the late 1960s-70s: Marxists, Anarchists & Saor Eire’, was also hosted by the same same organisers (and features the same two speakers as well as other contributions ). It can be viewed on YouTube here PART ONE – PART TWO.