Workers Solidarity Movement

The Barricade Inn was a squatted social centre in the centre of Dublin.  During the peak of its activity over the summer of 2015 hundreds of people were involved in putting on events in the space that thousands of people attended.  In this audio we talk to three WSM members who were involved in opening up and running The Barricade about what happened there and what lessons they drew from the experience. 

Right in the centre of Dublin city a new squatted anarchist social centre is up and running and open to all. It's in a reclaimed building at 77 Parnell St that was formerly Nearys hotel, which had been left unused for many years, abandoned and left to slowly fall to ruin.

Taking advantage of the fact that a lot of local water charge groups were not seriously mobilsing for the April 18th march we called a last minute Anarchist Bloc to encourage people to attend via our Dublin radical events from WSM group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/radical.dublin)

Early in the morning the crew arrive from the Occupy Cork camp to do their dish washing in the back kitchen of Solidarity Books. At 12 o'clock the days first volunteer arrives to open the bookshop and by lunch time the campers are back for the lunchtime wash up.  By evening the bookshop is closed but will invariably re open by 8 for a meeting or organising group, maybe a movie showing or a talk, the Climate Campers doing their vegan cafe or it could be the Couchsurfers for their meet up, maybe the Campaign Against the HouseHold Tax for an organising meeting or just a crew to paste posters onto corriboard.

The last few years have seen a significant growth in the Freeman of the Land movement. Increasingly, its voice is being heard at environmental and other anarchist based protests and events, from the various UK climate camps to Rossport Solidarity Camp. 

If Captain Jack White DSO, CNT, was the first of the great individual characters of northern anarchism, those that followed soon after into the later twentieth century were every bit as unique. ‘Slumdom’ Jack McMullen and John McGuffin were not merely products of their time and social circumstances, but transcended the context into which they were born and the politics of their generation. They were in every sense truly dynamic libertarians whose politics speak to us of a far greater and more diverse political culture in Belfast than we have hitherto been led to believe. They also have in common a type of writing whose style approximates to a combination of Emile Zola and Spike Milligan. This makes both individuals fascinating to read though at times perplexing, and it is their writing which marks them out as much as their activism.

The government has inflicted growing hardship upon workers and communities across the country, spreading the ethos that we should all commit to sharing the pain. This has been perpetuated by mainstream media, as “sharing the pain” has been portrayed, as the only way out of this crisis.

Mark Malone spoke to Workers Solidarity about Dublin’s social centre. He is a member of the WSM and also of the Seomra Spraoi Collective.

The Grassroots Gathering is a twice-yearly coming together of anarchists and libertarian socialists who are active in political groups and campaigns up and down the island of Ireland. The second of 2008's Gatherings was held in Cork on 14th-16th November. The 90 or so attending, combined with the quality of the discussions, left its organisers very pleased with the weekend. It showed that there's a lot of life left in the Grassroots Gathering as a show-case for trends and thinking among Ireland's libertarian left.