Issues of Workers Solidarity from 1994 - 41 to 43

Date:

Issues of the Irish anarchist newspaper Workers Solidarity that were first published in 1994.  Three issues of Workers Solidarity apeared that year Nos 41, 42 and 43.  At the time it consisted of 8 sides of A3 print.

Workers Solidarity No 41 Spring 1994

For Starters
2 years after X and Workers Solidarity format change

The Downing street declaration and the republicans
The peace negotiations represented the culmination of two trends. Firstly there is increasing war weariness and disillusionment among nationalists. On the British side a second factor has come into play. The massive bill for the devastation of several parts of the business heart of London prompted the British government to begin talking

Thinking about Anarchism: Smash the state
One of the best known catch phrases of Anarchism has got to be "Smash the State". It's also one that's easily open to misunderstanding.

Lets wreck Irelands poll tax
January 1st saw County Dublin divided into three new County Council areas. Residents of all three new Councils now face the imposition of annual service charges of at least £85-£90.

Republican Congress
The picture shows some of the Protestant workers from Belfast's Shankill Road who took part in the Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown in 1934.

Keeping the blackleg truckers out
Workers at Nolan Transport in New Ross joined SIPTU in January 1993. Working hours averaged 15 per day, six days a week. Pay was £2.00 - £2.50 per hour. It was six years since their last wage increase.

Who was Zapata
The name of the EZLN rebels is inspired by the great Emiliano Zapata who played a very important role in the Mexican Revolution {1910-1921}

Aer France Workers show the way
Workers in both France and Ireland were told they would have to accept redundancies and worsening working conditions for the sake of the company. In Ireland it's called the Cahill plan, in France it was the Attali plan.

Explosion in Cork Harbour
The explosion and fire at the Hickson chemical plant in Ringaskiddy, Cork, last August, has gone down as one of the most serious industrial accidents in Ireland to date.

Hicksons chemical spill in Cork - Company pleads guilty Profits came
HICKSON PHARMACHEM, the company at the centre of last year's explosion and fire in Ringaskiddy, Co. Cork, pleaded guilty in July to three charges of negligence and improper handling of hazardous chemical substances. The result of this negligence was a major industrial accident in the harbour area of Cork, which very nearly caused a major contamination and deaths.

Accidents will happen?
Workplace accidents rarely happen. They are caused. It is equally the case that workers end up taking more than their fair share of blame when things do go wrong

Burn that witch
'Not Your Girl', a women's radio programme was taken off the air at Anna Livia FM by an all-male Board of Directors just before Christmas.

More con trick than Concession
Top Trade Union leaders like Phil Flynn, Billy Attley and Peter Cassells have been working flat out to get the employers and government to agree another national deal for pay restraint.

A taste of 1960's Mississipi in 1990's Ireland
The attack on Travellers in Glenamaddy, Co Galway last October was a shocking exposure of the extent of the racist attitudes that Irish people have towards Travellers.

Letter from Freedom
In the course of a review of our publication What is Anarchism? your correspondent  affects a familiarity with ourselves which he does not in fact possess. Neither Freedom not its publisher Freedom Press held or holds meetings about the Poll Tax or anything else

Waiting on the housing list
3,500 households are waiting for housing in Dublin. The average wait for a local authority house in Dublin is now two years and rising.

Censor Censored!
A Censorship law praised by feminists has been used to ban books by a leading anti-porn feminist.

Children wait two years for tonsils operation
The situation on hospital waiting lists for public patients is now so farcical that people are being offered appointments two years away.

Costly speech for Irish dissidents
Three socialists in Cork, members of the Socialist Alliance group, have found themselves up against the guardians of 'public order' for the second time in two months. Their crime? Putting up posters.

General strike in Spain
Spain was closed down by a general strike in January. An Irish worker in Barcelona, and activist in the anarchist National Confederation of Labour (CNT-AIT) union, sent us this report.

Not yet online from this issue

  • Protest at Mexican embassy
  • British anarchist arrested by Turkish Soldiers
  • Politicans and the UDA's genocide plan
  • Who armed the UDA
  • Scientist jailed on Church orders

Workers Solidarity No 42 - Summer 1994

THEY WANT us to pay twice! When domestic rates were abolished the government increased PAYE and VAT to make up the difference. Now they are putting the screws on again. They tried it with the water rates but came up against massive resistance. Tens of thousands refused to pay. When peoples water was cut off local campaigns and sympathetic plumbers turned it back on. In Waterford a gang of contractors who were cutting off non-payers were held hostage by residents and Waterford Glass workers in the Fr Paddy Browne Road area. The upshot was that a lot of people never paid a penny and in Limerick, Waterford and Dublin the local authorites had to abolish water rates.

Now the politicians have decided to have another go. Each local authority has levied a service charge for this year. The one exception is Dublin Corporation which plans to do it next year. They can be stopped just like happened to the Poll Tax in Britain. Look at how that tax was defeated.

That's capitalism

For starters
W
orkers Solidarity changes format and other Spring 2004 news

Wage councils abolished in north
Stake your claim to cash

PLC students demand grants
STUDENTS from low income backgrounds are having to drop out of their studies. If you are doing a Post-Leaving Certificate course you get no grant.

Telethon - A hypocritical sham
Ireland's bosses raise money for the 'poor' while slashing wages

If the cops don't like you
Class War meeting banned in Dublin

French show how to fight... and win!
Edouard Balladur and his government have been in retreat over the last six months as the people of France take to the streets to demonstrate their anger at new policies.

Bosnia, Rwanda and UN intervention
Socialists should not support any intervention by the UN anywhere. What is currently happening in Bosnia and Rwanda demonstrates the reasons why we should not call on the UN to intervene.

Significant minority say NO to union leaders
The PCW is about pay restraint, job losses and promotion of a fictitious 'partnership' between workers, bosses and government.

Don't vote...it only encourages them
Voting for rulers (whether you do so "critically" or any other way) is supporting the idea that society should be divided into rulers and ruled. We want to end that division just as much as we want to end the division into bosses and workers.

Letter - Rail strike averted

Prepare to Sink the service charges
Conor Mc Loughlin examines a new book on how the Poll Tax was beaten in the UK.

Out, Loud and Proud
The coming into effect last June of legislation which decriminalised certain male homosexual acts was the subject of much celebration in the gay community. For many it was felt the battle for equality had been won.

The reasons Emmet Stagg should resign
Emmet Stagg's sexuality is indeed a matter for himself. However he is a member of a government which has introduced tax on certain social welfare payments, brought in the draconian Public Order Bill, stitched up workers yet again through the "Programme for Competitiveness and Work" and failed to tackle the twin crises of unemployment and poverty

Ireland, Sinn Fein and the peace talks
The peace talks represent the ditching of Sinn Féin's left gloss and a return to good old nationalist politics, pure and simple.

Year of the Family - Parents, puritans and poverty
The increased violence in society and fears social decay have even liberal commentators calling for a to return to family values. Yet what does this really mean? What are those values? In this article Aileen O'Carroll will examine the role of the family and the reasoning behind the Back to Basics campaign.

Gas masks and pantyhose
No one should expect human sexual behaviour to be expressed in only one way. It's strange that while we accept diversity in tastes in food, music, book, films when it comes to sex we talk of rights, wrongs and norms.

Evolution and revolution
There can be no islands in the stream of capitalism. Any such group has to enter into economic relations with the modern capitalist economy eventually.


Workers Solidarity No 43 Autumn 1994

 

For starters - 10 years of the WSM
We report on recent WSM activity

That's Capitalism
How bad is capitalism anyway?

Socialism & freedom
The alternative we work for is a world where production is to satisfy human needs and desires. A world where freedom is the rule and not the exception.

World Unemployment
Nearly one out of three workers in the world's labour force either has no job or is earning too little to live decently, the International Labour Organisation reports

Revolutionaries
Capitalism now operates globally. If you are serious about fighting them then there is a glaring need to organise and co-ordinate. It is in answer to this need that revolutionary organisations spring.

letter from Serbia

It was always time to go..Troops out now!
25 years ago, on Thursday, August the 15th, 1969, 400 soldiers from the Prince of Wales Own Yorkshire Regiment took up positions around Derry city.

When British army chiefs refused to obey orders
The Ulster Workers Council (UWC) strike of May 1974 was just one of the incidents that showed, far from being "impartial", the RUC and the British army did their best to prop up loyalism.

Nationalism...No Thanks
Anarchists are for the defeat of British imperialism. But we want more, we stand for the creation of a new society in the interests of the working class and against the bosses, both orange and green.

When the Falls & the Shankill fought together
This year is the 60th anniversary of the Outdoor Relief strike in Belfast, which saw unemployed Catholics and Protestants fighting alongside each other.

Legalise it
The legaisation of Cannabis is now being debated openly by sections of the European ruling class.

The heroin menace
Dublin is experiencing a heroin epidemic similar to the in the late 1970s. That epidemic left hundreds of young people hooked on heroin and dozens of them have since died of AIDS and AIDS related diseases. Some big criminals made fortunes out of it

TEAM workers told not to expect a decent job
The causes of the job cuts and attacks on workers conditions in TEAM are international. They come about as a result of European integration and the drive for the various European airlines to be merged into a few super airlines.

Lets get together
THE ATTACKS on jobs, wages & working conditions at TEAM and Irish Steel are only the beginning. 

Anti-Water charges campaign gets off ground
Considerable progress has already been made in laying the foundations for a campaign against the service charges.

Reasons to bin the bill
Five reasons not to pay the water tax

Interview with Italian anarchist
Italy seems all bad news these days with the new government coalition's that is a mix of the neo-fascist party National Alliance, the separatist Lega Nord and Forza Italia the party of the media tycoon, Berlusconi. A member of the Florence affiliate of the Italian Anarchist Federation tells us of some of the problems facing progressives in Italy.

Ireland..The land of a 1000 welcomes?
On the 1991 figures, of the 9,400 people granted Irish Citizenship not one of them was from either Africa or Asia.

Hicksons chemical spill
The company at the centre of last year's explosion and fire in Ringaskiddy, Co. Cork, pleaded guilty in July to three charges of negligence and improper handling of hazardous chemical substances

37% illegally underpaid
Over 37% of the workplaces visited by wages inspectors were illegally underpaying staff.


From Workers Solidarity No43, 1994