Workers Solidarity Movement

Up to 20 people took part in the name and shame tour on Saturday of some of the biggest names on our high street including McDonalds, Primark and Top shop organised by Youth Fight for Jobs.  Protestors, including members of the WSM and the Socialist Party, visited these high street stores during the busy shopping day giving speeches and handing out leaflets to members of the public, to the chants of ’No Pay no Way’.

Ireland is to have a referendum after all on the EU austerity treaty and a lot of the left is getting unreasonably excited about this. I say unreasonably because my opinion is that the referendum will not really, as the likes of the ULA claim, be a meaningful ballot on austerity. Austerity is not something simply being imposed on us by Europe through this referendum but something our domestic ruling class are already imposing and have been for a few years. Of course they have used the ECB/IMF as the 'bad cop' to scare us with and when passed will use the EU austerity treaty in the same way. But we need to recognize and organize around the fact that our local politicians and capitalist class are not really a 'good cop' eager to help us avoid the attentions of the 'bad cop' making threatening gestures at us across the room.

An email which has been circulating widely and has appeared on facebook and on many other social media sites, claiming to be from McCann Fitzgerald solicitors has been exposed as being fake.  The email claims that people won’t get a bill for the household tax because “the charge is a statute”.  It goes on to claim that because the tax is a statute it “only carries the force of law upon you if you consent to it” and that “If you do not consent [it] cannot affect you in any way whatsoever.”  

Following his announcement that many of his proposed cuts to teacher numbers in schools serving areas of social disadvantage are to be reversed, Minister for Education and Skills, Ruairi Quinn, has admitted that protests work and that he reversed his decisions because of the huge protests faced by himself and his colleagues on the government backbenches.

“…in relation to the area where all the pressure was coming from and all the protests was [sic] coming from …. I reflected on the impact on those schools….and I reversed that decision,” he said. 

20 years ago this month details emerged of the X-case, when the Irish state injuncted a pregnant 14 year old who had been raped to prevent her traveling of England for an abortion. The x-case was the culmination of a decade of fundamentalist anti-choice hysteria that had flowed from the 1983 referendum designed to make it impossible to ever legalize abortion again in Ireland.

(Pic: Press launch - taken by RAG)

The fiscal treaty, as agreed by EU governments, is clearly an austerity treaty and will impose serious levels of economic and financial pain on Irish workers for years to come.  In his blog ‘Notes On The Front’ Unite economist Michael Taft says “The Government, in signing the Fiscal Treaty, has effectively committed itself to introducing up to €6 billion more in tax increases and spending cuts in the medium-term, over and above what it has already planned”.[1]

“Your letters have sparked riots in the maximum security wing of my heart” - Sideshow Bob, the Simpsons!

On 21st April 2010 I was convicted of assaulting a number of Gardaí in relation to Shell to Sea protests and sentenced to 6 months imprisonment. Remission for good behaviour means that prisoners will have their sentences reduced by a quarter, once you keep your nose clean. I was given credit for 2 weeks time served previously in 2009, before I was bailed out pending my appeal.

So I spent 4 months in jail from April to August in the summer of 2010. 

Art - a Composite of Van Gogh's 'Exercise Yard' & Munch's 'Scream' by Prisoner Mick Connors.

Political poet Catherine Brogan returned home last Friday night to a successful event hosted by Occupy Belfast. Local poets, artists and singers performed at the free event in the ‘people bank’ to a receptive and enthusiastic audience eager to listen to poetry with a political message.

Approximately 200 people – INTO staff representatives and school principals – from across Dublin attended a packed meeting in the Teachers’ Club on Thursday 2^nd February and agreed plans for an escalation of the campaign against the staffing cuts announced in DEIS schools in December’s budget.