IF you do some research from the late 19th & early 20th Centuries, you will discover that the IRA was once simply a FREE IRELAND movement & NOT even “a leftist group” back then, though the English government certainly called them “terrorists”.
(Over time, groups can/do change radically. - For example, The Democrats Party was once “moderate, though left of center”; in 2019 it’s to the LEFT of the Socialists, imo.)
Yours, TMN78247
I’ve done more than my fair share of research. The Irish Republican Brotherhood was always a bastion of socialists. James Connolly was an open communist and a fellow traveler with Lenin.
As far as the Democrats go, way back in 1887 future Dem president Woodrow Wilson wrote that “socialism and democracy are almost, if not quite, one and the same” while at Princeton University in (guess where) New Jersey. That has been in practice among Democrats for a very long while, although they have favored the Fabian path to implementation versus the Marxian.