Workers Solidarity Movement

Wednesday 9th December saw the greatest budget attack on workers in Ireland in a couple of decades with services and pay being slashed. Many unions and other organisations called protests outside the Dail from the early morning to the late evening. WSM members took part in these protests throughout the day and provided live updates, photos and video from them via our twitter account which you can view or listen to in this article.

Campaigning Group Social Solidarity Network (SSN) has called on people to come to the Dáil on Budget Day this Wednesday at 5:00p.m. to show their anger at “government attacks on ordinary working people and the poor across Ireland.”

Today, Wednesday the second of December, almost 300 NUI Maynooth students showed up to deliver a petition against the appointment of Bertie Ahern T.D as an Honorary Professor by the University. Campaigners decided to call on those who had signed the 1,000+ petition to help deliver it, and the turnout surpassed all expectations.

The Dublin Council of Trade Unions called a lunchtime protest for Budget day on Wednesday 9th December to "set down a marker that the fight to reverse government policy to solve the crisis on the backs of the lower paid workers and those on social welfare will continue". This was part of a sequence of protests that went on through the whole day.

The Budget is going to be a massive attack on ordinary working people and the poor across Ireland. Lets show our anger in huge number outside the Dail on Dec 9th as they waffle within. The Social Solidarity Network is joining the protests that day at 5pm to demand "Reverse the Cuts Make the Rich Pay" and "Tax the Greedy Not the Needy".

Strike Day
Thursday 3rd December
Protest Rally
Assemble at Department of Education & Science, Marlborough St. at 10:30a.m.
March to Dáil Éireann, leaving Marlborough St. at 11:30a.m.

Celebrating 25 years of the WSM

From before 8a.m. this morning, members of the Irish National Teachers Organisation were on the picket line outside the Department of Education and Science in Dublin’s Marlborough Street, alongside Special Needs Assistant colleagues, members of IMPACT, and workers based in the DES building itself, members of SIPTU, CPSU and PSEU.

The Social Solidarity Network "is a grouping of people who have come together to provide a forum for workers and communities to unite to resist the attacks and to build links across the many struggles which will break out over the coming months" that WSM members are involved in. Some 7000 copies of this SSN text were distributed on the Nov 6th ICTU demonstration against cuts in Dublin.

Friday 6th November saw tens of thousands of workers marching in Dublin as ICTU called protests took place in 9 cities across Ireland against the government attempts to make workers pay for the capitalist crisis.