Workers Solidarity Movement

On Saturday October 9th a political walking tour through Dublin 2 and Dublin 4 will take place. In this area Banks, private mansions and corporate headquarters sit side by side in the heartland of the ‘golden circle’. The tour aims to highlight the deep injustice at the heart of Irish society

Assemble 1pm Saturday October 9th
Wolfe Tone Monument, Stephens Green

The 1% Network will be holding an open meeting to discuss and organise the walking tour around the heartland of the golden circle. If you want to help publicise the tour and are interested in hearing more about the 1% Network then come along to Seomra Spraoi at 7.30pm, Thursday 9th September.

Along with other socialist groups the WSM has launched the 1% Network, a coalition that aims to highlight the gross inequality in Irish society where the richest 1% of the population own 34% of the wealth.  The network will be carrying out a number of activities in the run up to the budget including a walking tour of the private mansions, corporate headquarters, secret meeting spots and private banks on October 9th.

Radio Solidarity - Prog. 6 - "How I came to be involved" is now available to listen to on the Near FM podcast site.

In this show, we at Radio Solidarity went out and spoke to people who are actively engaged in struggle and have a definitive idea of how to change the world for the better.

If you’ve been following the news or listening to Liveline over the last few weeks, you’ll have seen a few references to protesters trying to “storm” the Dáil or to the Guards’ attempt to prevent an anti-capitalist march from, well, marching.

A few hundred people took part in a protest last night at the Mansion house in Dublin where the Taoiseach Brian Cowen was going to dinner with the organisation of the domestic section of the capitalist class that instructs him. As various bosses and Cowen went into the venue protected by ranks of Gardai, with the riot squad on standby outside the back entrance of Anglo Irish Bank and mounted police across the road, they were jeered by the crowd with shouts of 'thieves', 'robbers' and 'scum.'

Just over 300 people took part in the SWP's Right to Work demonstration last night. This was a considerable drop in numbers from the first two demonstrations which saw around 1000 take part and last weeks which saw 600 or more march. This is despite the massive postering effort that had gone into the march. James O'Toole of the SWP said from the stage that 30 people had been involved in postering the city. There was certainly an impressive quantity of posters up all the way out to the canals and beyond. 

Last Tuesday the Gardaí attempted to stop the Anti-Capitalist Bloc marching to join up with the Right to Work Campaign at the Dail protest. Despite riding horses into the march they failed to either deny us our freedom to protest or to provoke a response as we pushed through and around them. Join us this week, same time and same place as we once more assert our freedom to protest.

In August of 2008, Italian media activist Alex Foti visited Dublin. In the middle years of this decade, Alex Foti became known across activist circles for involvement in the Euromayday Parades. In a special themed issue of Green Pepper, Foti and the Chain Workers Collective sketched a very attractive understanding of the work discipline of contemporary capitalism. In their understanding, society had found itself in a situation of profound disjuncture with our working pasts - life today was defined by contingent employment rather than the traditional job for life.    

Working through Chainworkers, Foti and others developed the Euro Mayday Parade as an opportunity for this sentiment pool to express itself in European cities, along the way they developed a graphical tool set and pioneered a new vision of a combatative class movement that drew huge attention to the question of workers marginalised from the traditional unions.

Joe Duffy invited two protesters, Holly, and Leah, who were at the protest at the Dáil on Tuesday the 18th of May, on to his Radio show on RTE.  These two protesters were contacted because they had been wearing fake blood, in an attempt to highlight that the Gardaí had taken quite violent action, including bludgeoning protesters with steel batons, against people who were fighting against public service cuts - indeed fighting against the very cuts that the Gardaí themselves will suffer.