Workers Solidarity Movement

Countless walking tours make their way around Dublin daily; generally educating the masses of tourists on the lives lived on these streets before us. It was a different kind of walking tour, comprising around 200 people, that hit the streets around Stephen’s Green on October 9th last.

The purpose of this text is to try and tell the story of our current economic situation, how we got here, and what we can expect from the near future, so as to better understand the tasks facing us.

This is neither an academic text on history, nor yet, god forbid, a treatise on macroeconomics. So in the interests of telling a listenable story we will use the old storytelling technique of jumping directly into the middle and exploring outwards in flashback and flash-forward vignettes to build the big picture. But where is the middle?

The markets have spoken and the verdict is that Brian Lenihan's 6 billion euro package of public sector cuts and extra taxation on ordinary workers is not going to work. The confidence in Ireland's future in the international money markets is reflected in the yields in Irish sovereign bonds. These bonds are the IOUs the government issues to borrow the money to plug the shortfall from income to spending. They vary from 2 to 14 years in duration before the money borrowed has to be repaid, the 10 year being the one most closely followed by market watchers. The yield on a bond is the interest rate the state has to pay the lenders. In these last few days increasingly urgent stories in the business pages of the papers have been warning about the dangers of increasing bond yield spreads.

This afternoons Radio Solidarity show on Near FM will talk about the 1% Network tour of the Golden Circle heartland of Dublin 2 & 4.  If you click on the this 1% Map - you will have a guide to the walking tour .  This will prove helpful when you listen to our report on this walking tour in Radio Solidarity Program 8 - on Resistance going out this afternoon (2 Nov) at 15.30 on NEAR FM. An audio will be available for download later this week.

Saturday 30th October saw the WSM take part in the latest 1% Network event, an after dark Halloween Treasure Hunt around Dublin's exclusive Shewsbury and Ailesbury roads taking in the mansions of multi millionare bankers, developers and financers as well as the HQ of Allied Irish Bank and the 32 million in tax avoidance of the luxury Four Seasons hotel. The tour was led off by a vampire capitalist accompanied by a contingent of Zombie bankers and developers and ghost estates with the vampire showing how much wealth was present at each stop and explaining the contacts between the 1%, the media and the government that enabled them to make hundreds of millions during the tiger.  The tour was accompanied by uniformed Gardai and a car of special branch political police.  The 1% network is a coalition of socialist groups including the WSM, eirigi, ISN and Semora Spraoi formed to highlight the fact that the richest 1% own 34% of the wealth.

“Brian Lenihan might claim that there is no pot of gold to be had from the wealthy.  We intend to show him otherwise” - Gregor Kerr, 1% Network spokesperson

The 1% Network has announced details of the route of its Halloween Treasure Hunt, due to take place on Saturday evening, 30^th October.  Among the venues which the event will visit are the homes of well-known developer Bernard McNamara and former AIB chairman Dermot Gleeson.

Announcing their support for Saturday’s 1% Network ‘Halloween Treasure Hunt’, anarchist organisation Workers Solidarity Movement (WSM) has said that the government’s proposed €15 billion of cuts would not be necessary if the wealthy were “made to pay their share.”

Confirmation that a large amount of wealth remains concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of Irish people has come from an analysis of figures by Tom O’Connor, Lecturer in Economics in Cork Institute of Technology. O’Connor has analysed the figures contained in the Bank of Ireland’s ‘Wealth of the Nation’ report which stated that there were 33,000 millionaires in Ireland in 2006.  The total ‘net worth’ of these individuals (i.e. excluding the value of their principal residences and allowing for any borrowings) in 2006 was €156.21 billion.

Zombie developers….. Vampire bankers….. Ghost estate creators….. Black holes that swallow tens of billions of Euros…. They sound like characters from a particularly eerie Hallowe’en tale of horrors. However while they might be spooky, there’s nothing fictional about this array of characters. They stalked our land during the era of the recently-departed Celtic Tiger. But now they’ve gone to ground. They’ve disappeared, they would have us believe. And if they themselves haven’t actually physically disappeared, then their wealth most definitely has.

On October 30 join the 1% Network for an after dark Halloween ramble around exclusive Shewsbury road where behind the high dark walls of their rambling mansions lie the zombie developers, vampire bankers and ghost estate creators of the long ago Celtic Tiger era sleeping on their piles of accumulated wealth. Shake with horror as you gaze at the AIB HQ and the black hole within that continues to suck billions of funding from hea...lth and education.