Workers Solidarity Movement

International Woman's Day March 8th and the continued refusal of the Irish government to introduce the referendum to remove the hated 8th amendment results in an enormous mobilization peaking at unchtime blocking off O'Connell st bridge is

An enormous and militant protest was called under the title of Strike For Repeal. The purpose is to try and force the government to immediately introduce a referendum to get rid of the Eighth Amendment. This amendment passed in 1983 makes it illegal for abortion to be carried out in Ireland under all almost all circumstances. 

It was passed at the last moment where the Irish Catholic Church still had a strong influence, ever since those years it's faded and most people today including most young people want to get rid of the amendment.

It was notable in the run-up to today's protests that although it had been covered in the international press and some local media there'd been no coverage in national media, the Irish Times, RTE and the Independent had all failed to cover it and that very much reflects the way secure journalists in Ireland are part and parcel of the establishment.  They don't rock the boat very much at all and the big concern in terms of the campaign to repeal the 8th amendment has been that is to militant and dare I say too young.

No doubt the complete disruption of traffic in the city centre will mean journalists were being rushed to the scene and we'll see some coverage of today's event on the evening news but it's important to nderstand that that section of the media is really not on our side.

Instead today's mobilisation was overwhelmingly built through existing contacts between radicals and through socia media, yesterday on Twitter for instance the #Strike4Repeal hashtag was trending at the number five position and and the same again this morning.

As such  the large turnout and the militant action of blocking the bridge again illustrates that the day when the mainstream media could tightly control the narrative and limit it within a very narrow margin of debate has long since passed. And that it can be overcome at a times when people are really pissed off and we are
certainly really pissed off right now! They want change, they demand change!

Official Ireland and its rigid hierarchies that came into existence with independence is rotting, rotting from the inside out. Last weekend there was confirmation that in the mother and child home in Tuam almost 800 babies had indeed been buried in a septic tank out the back in almost complete secrecy.

These homes were run by the Catholic hurch but this was in complete cooperation with the Irish state and indeed the Garda would often pick up and return women who had escaped from them despite the fact that actually there was no legal process whatsoever that they were entitled to do this under. It was all part of controlling the general population and imposing a very rigid hierarchy on them. In today's Ireland

We are fed up with a system which won't change and we want change and we want it now, the question is how to get there. Today provided the answer to that, today's event was organised completely horizontally by a network of activists not by political parties and indeed most of the political parties did very little to advertise it in advance of the events happening. 

We don't need another top down hierarchy to try and sort things out so we need to take power ourselves and work together to transform the society we live in!