Workers Solidarity Movement

Saturday 21st January saw 1000s take part in a Women's March against Trump in Dublin, a local solidarity march with the Women's March on Washington. It's estimated that 1% of the US population took to the streets to protest the Trump presidency that day with solidarity protests in dozens of cities around the world including Belfast.

The northern Ireland parliament, Stormont, is in one of its usual crises.  In this latest instance we’re talking about a massive fuck up by the DUP whereby Arlene Foster introduced a Renewable Heating Initiative scheme in 2012 which would pay businesses £1.60 for every £1 they spent on heating. This lead to companies heating up empty sheds and barns through the scheme which has amounted to almost half a billion pound being squandered by the so-called political elites. This is one of those crises that has gotten out of control and Stormont is struggling to get a grasp back on things so they’ve rolled out a bit of sectarianism in the hope that we get outraged about that and not the £490 million that has gone up in smoke.

Amazingly, after watching almost half a billion quid go up in smoke, and branding calls for her to step down after such a monumental fuck up as misogynistic - insulting women who have felt the very real consequences of her and her's party's misogynistic policies - Arlene Foster has put a meme on her facebook page of a guinea pig wearing pink heart shaped sunglasses with the words "can't see all the haters with my love glasses on".

In case you missed it, the pope is set to visit Ireland in 2018. Archbishop Eamon Martin has said that this visit will be used to campaign against abortion, and that the church will run a much stronger campaign against it than what they did on marriage equality.

When the pope came to power in 2013 he was hailed and celebrated by liberals as some sort of radical who was single handedly going to bring the church into the 21st century. With statements such as the now famous "who am I to judge?" in regards to LGBT+ people you could almost have been fooled that the liberals were right.

There's days where you physically want to pull your hair out, or run away, live all that you've dreamed of doing. Mothering, is not all it's lived up to be,"the most beautiful moments of your life".

This is a personal one, and also a story that can be hidden for many.

This is the Kurdish solidarity statement with the Black Lives Matter movement read out by a delegate of Saoirse Jin at the July 12th Dublin protest.‪

Transcript of video
"Thank you.  Saoirse Jin is an Ireland based womens group in solidarity with the Congress of Women’s Freedom, the KJA in Kurdistan which is a pluralist women’s rights movement fighting for the rights of the Kurds and all minorities in Turkey.  And they sent a message of solidarity to this protest. So I’m going to read it for the KJA

The audio recording of the Bodily Autonomy at the Intersections panel at the 11th Dublin Anarchist bookfair.

This panel on Feminist struggles was recorded at the 2016 Dublin Anarchist Bookfair.
 

With historic working class centenaries occurring in recent years we have heard a lot about Unfinished Business. This message was strong in 2013 in reference to the 1913 Lockout and the inequality that still prevails in Ireland. Cries of Unfinished Business are once again being proclaimed in this centenary year of the 1916 Rising and it is true, we do have unfinished business.

We still have bosses and businessmen who could give William Martin Murphy a run for his money. The Republic that the rebels envisioned and enshrined in the proclamation has not been achieved and despite the rhetoric of the YES campaign we do not “cherish the children of the nation equally”, and we have a long way to go to get there, with particular work needed on Ireland’s hatred of women.

Here Labour come again, back on our doorsteps to test the waters, to see if we're still mad about the past 5 years of their governance, to find out if we can remember every attack they made against us, probably in the hope that there have been so many that maybe, just maybe, we'll only remember a few.  A party riddled with so much contempt and disdain for us that they genuinely believe they can convince us that things will be different this time. They bombard us with sentences along the lines of "You will get X, Y and Z with Labour in government".

Crudely, they tell us that one of the things we can expect from them is a referendum on the 8th amendment, with top-notch propaganda to go along with that promise, propaganda painting them as pro-woman and pro-choice. There is no propaganda effective enough to cover up the war that they have waged on women for the past 5 years.

An investigation is currently under way at University College Dublin following reports that up to 200 male students allegedly shared explicit images of women they had sexual relations with. The incident not only highlights a culture of misogyny in Irish universities, it also calls attention to the absence of material supports for effectively responding to sexual assault on campus. But what kinds of supports should students demand from Irish universities?

Trigger Warning: Discusses rape and ‘revenge porn’ image sharing