Workers Solidarity Movement

The 'Occupy X' movement arrived in Ireland over the weekend when a core group of around 50 people set up camp at the Central Bank Plaza on Dame street. Numbers grew to a few hundred at times over the next days and nights as supporters came down to join in for a while and the curious stopped to see what was going on. Issues highlighted by participants included the bank bail out, IMF intervention & the ongoing Great Oil & Gas Giveaway.

Plans by the PSNI to visit catholic schools as part of a recruitment drive is a cynical cosmetic exercise designed to a camouflage a paramilitary police that has abandoned working class communities and continues to aggressively intimidate and criminalise any dissenters from the status-quo.

How can you expect growth without investment or stimulus packages?  This is question that is screaming to be asked from the European leaders and the ECB who serve up the same policy: menu du jour, austerity slop/soup.   

The policy in poetic form reads thus,
Austerity, Austerity, and not a recovery in sight.

Look at the growth figures, or should I say non-growth figures of the Gross Domestic Product for various economies in the second quarter and they only serve to prove this point. The UK 0.2% growth, the USA 0.3% growth, Germany 0.1% growth, the eurozone average is an anaemic 0.2%.   Top of the eurozone charts with growth rate of three times the zone average is Belgium.  Belgium has been without a Government now for 15 months. 1

Friday the 16^th September saw a well attended protest outside of the British Embassy called by Minceirs Whiden (Ireland’s Traveller only forum). The struggle continues to keep the 86 Traveller families in their homes in Dale Farm, Essex.  The evictions were scheduled to take place that weekend but since then there have been a series of hearings in court which has prevented the bailiffs moving in.The latest court decision is to review the full extent of the ‘enforcement notices’ and this will be heard on Thursday the 27^th.  The residents have won a temporary reprieve and it remains to be seen what will happen.

New documents uncovered by the Pat Finucane Centre in Derry reveal the endemic collusion between the British army regiments and loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. The declassified official documents uncovered highlight that the Ulster Defence Regiment’s (UDR) Belfast battalion was heavily infiltrated by the Ulster Volunteer Force(UVF) in the late 1970s.

Up to 800 people gathered in Central Bank plaza and marched on the Dáil with a clear message for the government; change up your policy and start protecting the vulnerable or you will find yourselves out of power in the wilderness along with the previous governing party. Banners were on the march from political organisations, community groups,  parents associations, and National Traveller organisations.  The mood was one of strong defiance. 

This is the fifth protest on this very issue but what people have witnessed is a continuation of the cuts which were started by the previous Government.   There had been a rumour which was converted into a promise by the political parties whilst they were campaigning that they were going to protect the vulnerable in this society.  Politicians campaign in the poetry of promises and govern in the prose of policy and they are fooling nobody with this routine.

Dale Farm is a halting site  which is also the largest concentration of Irish Travellers in Britain, being home to over 1000 people (about 100 families), many of whom are said to have their cultural roots in Rathkeale in Limerick.  It was started in the 1960s when a number of families bought the former scrapyard site and Basildon council granted planning permission for 40 houses. This happened in the context of broad progress in race relations and a brief breeze of relative official tolerance for Travellers, epitomised in  the liberal-sponsored 1968 Caravan Sites Act.  Basildon Council have put aside an £18 million budget to bulldoze the site and forcefully evict the families (a staggering figure when you consider that in 2010 the total UK budget for providing Travellers with halting facilities was less than 30 million).

Last Saturday (10th September) over 200 people attended the National Organising Meeting of the Anti-Household & Water Tax Campaign. People from over 16 counties arrived during the first session in the afternoon with more arriving later. The meeting was organised to co-ordinate a mass non-payment campaign against the €100 household charge announced by the government to come into effect on 1st January 2012. The campaign sees this as the “first step in the government’s plans to implement a fully fledged property and water tax by 2014 that could be around €1,200 according to one government economic advisor. “ In the long-term, this paves the way for the privatisation of the water supply, as occurred with refuse collection.

The number of workplace related deaths in the north has increased by 50 per cent in the past year, according to latest official figures produced by the Health & Safety Executive’s annual report. To the end of March this nine people tragically lost their lives with six in agriculture, one in construction, one in general manufacturing and one due to carbon-monoxide poisoning. The increase in a casual and flexible labour force, the global erosion of workers rights and conditions are all the end product of a system which places profit before human need.

The Fine Gael party was confronted with angry scenes at not one but two different blockades during a meeting of the parliamentary party in Galway city yesterday.   Taoiseach Enda Kenny and his cabinet were attending their pre-budget think-in at the luxury Radisson hotel when some 30 students from the NUIG Free Education for Everyone (FEE) group and the Students’ Union blockaded the entrance in protest at the government’s policy of education cuts, registration fee increases and the ever-looming prospect of full fees.  They were joined by two dozen members of the Save Roscommon Hospital Alliance who were equally intent on showing the Fine Gael party what they think of their callous indifference to the welfare of the working class.