Workers Solidarity Movement

Footage of the Working Class Queeroes bloc on Dublin Pride 2017 including the banner drop before Pride and the bloc smoking up the rainbow flag prior to crossing the river Liffey.

With at least 12 confirmed dead at the London towerblock fire this morning (14th June) it has emerged that repeated warnings to the landlord and council of a fire hazard were ignored.  Early reports indicate that tower was home to 120 families, many drawn from poor migrant communities. 

The Grenfell Action Group this morning posted "we have posted numerous warnings in recent years about the very poor fire safety standards at Grenfell Tower and elsewhere in RBKC." - they had previously called KCTMO "an evil, unprincipled, mini-mafia" in their blog where 8 warnings about this tower had been posted.

Details of the latest national plan agreed between the government and union leaders have appeared in the media today, as usual well ahead of the union leaders bothering to tell their membership anything. Then union leaders intention is to present workers with a ‘take it or leave it’ choice accompanied by dire warnings that there is no choice.

The deal as expected is pretty rotten and in effect ensures that the pay cuts imposed on public sector workers from 2009 will at least partially be in place for some workers a full decade and a year later in 2020. What’s even worse is that the worse pay and conditions imposed on workers employed after 2012 are being set in stone rather than overturned. This despite it seeming an essential basic demand of a union that workers doing the same work should receive the same pay.

Mayday 2017 saw the annual Dublin Council of Trade Unions (DCTU) organised march through Dublin. The theme of the march was the struggle for housing, with it being led off by housing action groups including the Irish Housing Network. Other campaign groups on the march included Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland, Abortion Rights Campaign, Sex Workers Alliance and a range of other campaign groups, unions and left groups.

The Saturday before the start of the show trial of the 7 adults accused of the 'false imprisonment' of then Labour Leader Joan Burton at Jobstown a solidarity rally took place in the centre of Dublin.

About 1000 people marched through Dublin this afternoon as part of the international day of action in defence of science. The March For Science is an international initiative to stand up for science and evidence in the face of an alarming trend toward discrediting scientific consensus and restricting scientific discovery.

Protests took place across Ireland Saturday 22nd April to protest the plan by Health Simon Harris to give the new maternity hospital, which will cost 300 million to build, to the same nuns who ran the Magdeline laundaries!  The Sisters of Charity ran the Drumcondra and Sean MacDermott Street laundaries where expectant and recent mothers were essentially imprisoned and required to provide free labour that the numns profited from.

Over 100 people gathered outside Gianna Care, the rogue ‘pregnancy counselling’ clinic on Dorset Street, to express their anger and disgust after their bogus service was exposed by a journalist, who went undercover as a pregnant woman seeking advice for her crisis pregnancy.

Thousands of protesters converged on Connolly and Heuston stations in Dublin yesterday as part of the 9th national demonstration against the water charges. The demonstration was called by Right2Water, the umbrella group of left wing political parties and trade unions, as part of an effort to pressurise the government to abandon their attempts to implement water charges.

ONE – Because Fine Gael are kicking back and won’t scrap the charges and metering. We’ll force them.