The opener for this workshop was a call for discussion on the social-movements mailing list. On the basis of this, Maeve O'Grady of ACCESS 2000, Richard Moore of Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance and Laurence Cox of CREC got together to put out a call for papers, which eventually led to a very successful workshop in April 99, and a preliminary report soon afterwards.
Ireland from Below was important in showing that it was possible for people from a wide range of different social movements to connect effectively with each other, but the follow-up showed the limits of communication and cooperation. It was possible to outline a vision of where to go next, but in the end there was no clear sense of where to go next.
Plans were afoot to turn the results of the workshop into a book; for a variety of reasons this didn't happen, but as a step in the right direction we've put up the speakers' and rapporteurs' notes on these pages. Ireland from Below is not necessarily a dead project, and we may well move further with some or all of this in the future.
These are notes for the book that didn't happen (see above); for the moment we've left them as straight text-only transcriptions of the original notes.