Sean Matgamna

Sean Matgamna, also known as John O'Mahony (the English language equivalent of Sean Matgamna) is a Trotskyist theorist. He was born in 1942 in County Clare in the Republic of Ireland.

He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain when he moved to Manchester to work as a docker, while still in his teens. He soon grew disillusioned with what he saw as the Communist Party's reformist stance, and joined the more openly revolutionary Trotskyist Socialist Labour League, led by Gerry Healy.

In the group, Matgamna soon became the youth organiser, but came to disagree with Healy over a number of issues, including Healy's anti-gay rights stance. As a result, Matgamna was expelled in 1964 and with a small number of supporters joined the other Trotskyist group operating in Manchester, the Revolutionary Socialist League. He soon grew dissatisfied with the group, feeling that they had moved away from orthodox Trotskyism and the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. He wrote a pamphlet, What We Are and What We Must Become, outlining his views. When the RSL declined to publish it, he distributed it himself and was as a result expelled from the organisation in 1966.

Matgamna, working with two supporters, formed the Workers Fight group to act upon his views, central to which was a call for Trotskyist unity in Britain. A handful of other RSL members joined the group before, in 1968, the International Socialists also put out a call for unity. Responding to it, Workers Fight joined the IS as the Trotskyist Tendency.

When the IS leadership forced Matgamna's tendency to leave the IS, it took with it a much increased membership. Martin Thomas soon joined, working with Matgamna to take prominent roles in the group. Matgamna became a full time theorist within the group, moving to London.

Throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980's the revived Workers Fight became more and more associated with Matgamnas leadership. This was accentuated by the disputes that led to the split from the group of the Workers Power group qwho had breifly joined Workers Fight in a fused grouping knoqwn as the International-Communist League. Similarly when the I-CL fused with the Workers Socialist League Matgamna was strongly identified as the central leader of one side ion the factional fight that later erupted and then split the fused group into two.

Matgamna was also known, even in the late 1960s, for holding the view that a redivision of Northern Ireland and granting the loyalist/unionist community political autonomy would contribute to a solution to the national question in Ireland. This was a very controversial position for a socialist to hold then as it is now and although it is the position of Matgamnas group as a body was and is closely associated with him as an individual. This approach tot he national question has since been extended, in large part by Matgmanaa, to other communities for example the inhabitants of the Islas Malvinas were considered by Mtgamna to have the right to autonomy during the short war between britain and Argentina over the fate of that archipelago. Mosty controversially of all Matgamna has in recent years argued strongly for a two state solution - that is states for both the Palestinians and Israelis - in the Middle East.

In the 1980s, Matgamna, along with many other members of the group, by then known as the Socialist Organiser Alliance, came to reconsider some of his views. Rereading works by Hal Draper and Max Shachtman led him to conclude that Third Camp socialism offered an expression of many of the conclusions he had come to. it has been argued by many on the left that matgamnas embracing of the politics of Shachtman and draper, which he has described as "the other Trotskyism", merely reverses his embrace of the ideas of James Cannon in the late 1960s and throughut the 1970s.

Matgamna is still a prominent member of the Trotskyist group he founded, now known as the Alliance for Workers Liberty.