>>99669508People literally just guess what Irish history was, and what it "stood for in the past"
The IRA for much of the period between the Civil War and the Troubles, was officially Marxist, and the PIRA during the troubles was more pragmatic but still officially socialist, constantly citing and studying leftist literature, and meanwhile the Marxist one was still around just playing second fiddle to them. The smaller splinters were also generally more leftist. Even during the Rising/War of Independence/Civil War era there were substantial leftist elements. A Socialist paramilitary was a substantial part of the rebel force in 1916.
Irish nationalism was by necessity somewhat ethnicity agnostic because not only did they want to have a country with a sizeable protestant(ethnically distinct) minority, but some of Irish nationalism's own greatest heroes like Wolfe Tone were protestant.
There's things I dislike about Ireland and the outcomes of Irish nationalism but people shittalking it are usually from the UK which literally hasn't rebelled or had its people seriously stand up for themselves since like the 1600s, or less often a particular, atypical type of American, a people who had exactly one rebellion in the last 200 years and it was the Confederacy. In neither of these countries do the actual population by any means have more influence on policy than in Ireland