Patrick Trench lived a short life (1905-1948) marked by illness, personal turmoil, financial insecurity, sporadic employment, and socialist activism. On his death, aged 43, from tuberculosis he was remembered in an Irish Times notice (12 March, 1948), as ‘keenly interested in politics, particularly the Labour movement’ and for having ‘fought on the Republican side’ in the Spanish Civil War. Those with a commitment to revolutionary socialism have celebrated him as an early advocate for Trotskyism in Ireland.