Workers Solidarity Movement

About an hour ago the Apollo house occupation received a finally crafted piece of legalistic bullshit designed to divide homelessness activists from the professional services on 'Health & Safety' grounds. Health & safety has become the go to excuse for pushing people onto the streets, when the Halston street (ex) prison was occupied over the summer we say the same 'concern' this time over the fact that the pigeon shit found in that building was a health and concern safety. As we observed then there is plenty of pigeon street on the cold, wet streets of Dublin but now its winter and those streets are very much colder.

RTE Drivetime engaged in some shameful clickbait trolling on Twitter last night to try and get a few more listeners. While they have congratulated posh schools for engaging in token sleep outs they decided to directly attack the occupation of Apollo house and its bringing into use as an emergency shelter for homeless people.

And boy did it fall on its face. Normally far far more people will like a Tweet than reply to it. In this case though 201 people have posted angry replies and only 19 liked it. A far stronger message though had already been sent out when the occupiers Home Sweet Home Eire page attracted over 27,000 followers in 6 days and over 1500 people have actually volunteered to help keep the shelter open. Likewise so many donations of materials were received that within a couple of days out had to be announced that there was no room for more.

Next week sees an exciting speaking tour around Ireland when author Ercan Ayboga who spoke at the Dublin anarchist bookfair will be launching  “Revolution in Rojava.”  Dublin WSM has been running a reading group* on this book over the last month and we highly recommend it as an account of the nuts & bolts of the Rojava revolution essential to anyone who wants to transform the world.

Cork: O’Rahilly Building (ORB 132), UCC, 12th December, 6pm

Dublin: Connolly Book (43 East Essex Street, Dublin 2), 13th December, 6pm
Cavan: Bridge Street Centre, Bridge Street, 14th December, 6,30pm
Dungannon: Éalú Centre, Shamble Lane, 15th December @ 6:30pm
Belfast: Just Books (22 Berry Street, Belfast, BT1 1FJ), 19th December @ 6:30pm

This coming January in Derry, activists will be holding its first evert Radical Bookfair. In a statement on their web page organisers said: On Saturday 28th January 2017 the first ever Derry Radical Bookfair will take place in Pilots Row Community Centre, Rossville Street, Derry, BT48 6LP.

The event takes place on one of the busiest days of the political calendar in the city which is during the Bloody Sunday week of events. Each year the same venue itself hosts the annual Bloody Sunday events such as talks, films and discussions around contemporary social justice issues.

It has emerged that Mike Israel, the US YPG volunteer who fell fighting ISIS in Rojava on the 24th was  a member of the IWW. Initial reports of his killing alongside a German - Anton Leschek - volunteer indicated they may have been the victims of a Turkish airstrike but said they had been killed north of Raqqa where its unlikely Turkish jets would be attacking. The Manbij Military Council has released a statement confirming they were killed in a Turkish attack near Manbij where Turkish jets have carried out dozens of attacks on the SDF.

Saturday 19 November saw a mass fascist attack on an anarchist bookstore in France in the aftermath of a fundamentalist catholics rally of the SPXX organisation which in Ireland is central to the anti-choice movement.

The nation state backed capitalist system can only offer us increasing surveillance, increasing poverty, increasing social problems and the rise of the national security state which is necessary to protect the tiny minority of people who have stolen so much of the worlds wealth from the rest of us, who generate it.

The government may be considering a new approach to the water charges issue at the moment - 20th November. The brute force approach didn't work against us so now they may be trying to be a little smarter about privatising water services. Combined with advertisements extolling the great work Irish Water is doing and RTE leaks of how 'modest' the charges are planned to be, they are hoping to con us into paying for privatisation.

Over the first couple of weeks of November we have witnessed intensification in British state repression and intimidation on the streets of the North primarily directed at republican activists.  The widespread use of stop and search powers, house raids and use of sophisticated surveillance techniques is an attempt not only to criminalize republicans from the wider community but anyone who dissents from the status quo.

This upsurge in stop and search powers comes after the revealing of recent internal PSNI report describing the culture in Garnerville police training college as “more associated with a pseudo-militaristic training environment."(1) From the training to the streets, the RUC/PSNI remain a heavily armed paramilitary force in working class communities whose first priority is to defend the interests of the status-quo. While MI5 maintains controls over issues of ‘national security,’ PSNI is only accountable in name only.

Recent fury over our local ruling class giving away £1.7 million of the Social Investment Fund to Charter NI in East Belfast, headed by a suspected leading member of the UDA, is indicative of a continuing corrupt political settlement where there is one rule for the few and another for the rest of us.