Workers Solidarity Movement

A SCORPION is a creature which stings first and asks questions later. When a boy and a girl scorpion meet and wish to "pursue a wider agenda" they first have to go through a long and elaborate ritual dance until they can establish each others' bona fides. One might think that something similar is happening in the present multi-party talks in Belfast. According to the Irish Times "the talks must be shifted into higher gear if the process is to retain credibility". An Irish government source was quoted by the Sunday Tribune (16/11/97) as saying "there is a feeling that more boldness is required". [In French]

Workers Solidarity reporter Joe King spent a couple of hours each month up to last Christmas tracking down the bosses who pay a pittance. Giving himself a good Leaving Certificate, some shop and restaurant experience and a false name he set about answering advertisements, phoning personnel officers and going to interviews. He did his job hunting in Dublin. The story in other cities and towns is, if anything, even worse.

CHRISTMAS IS well behind us but Scrooge refuses to go away. Bosses in many shops, restaurants, garages are still paying wages as low as £2.50 per hour. Civil Servants in junior clerical posts are still so badly paid that they qualify for the Family Income Supplement. Thousands of home helps employed by the Health Boards get as little as the £1.40 an hour paid by the Southern Board (incidentally this is a body packed with politicians and their friends).

In December Minister for Justice, John O'Donoghue, announced a "fast-track" procedure for dealing with the backlog in applications for asylum in Ireland. This announcement came hot on the heels of a Supreme Court judgement which ruled that a Russian woman, Olga Anisimova, should be deported to Britain, because she had passed through that country on her way here.

Paris has had its fair share of famous people die in it. Most of them have ended up in the Pere La Chaise cemetery and Oscar Wilde is one of them. Of all the people buried there, that was the one grave I had to see when I entered that cemetery on a brisk March morning. I admire him because he was the master of that Irish pastime of extracting the Michael.

80th anniversay of the Russian Revolution....
 

IN 1922, after seeing the product of the Russian revolution first hand, the anarchist Emma Goldman described how "Soviet Russia had become the modern socialist Lourdes". Eighty years after the revolution in Russia a reflection on that period has more than just historical value. Many left wing organisations still hold up this era as the model for future revolution. In order to challenge this Bolshevik conception of organisation and revolution we look at what the consequences of this model were.

Over the past few months, members of the Anti-Racism Campaign (ARC) have been involved in a number of public activities aimed at highlighting and promoting the anti-racist message.

Most young people start to become aware of their sexual identity from the age of 11 or 12 onwards. However for young lesbians, bisexuals and gays this can be the beginning of a lot of trouble. They will have to listen to almost constant homophobic (anti-gay) crap from their school mates and will often feel very isolated by the strong emphasis placed in youth culture on the importance of who-is-going-out-with-who.

ON SATURDAY 18th October, a number of Anti-Racism Campaign members were distributing leaflets, advertising an anti-racist public meeting, at the junction of O'Connell St. and Henry St. in Dublin's city centre. The leafletters were approached by a Dublin Corporation Litter Warden, who was accompanied by a garda.

INSIDE MODERN MEXICO the name of Ricardo Flores Magon is well known, and is regarded in a somewhat similar way to that of James Connolly in Ireland. But outside Mexico few have heard of him. Born to a poor family in 1873, he became a journalist on the opposition paper 'El Demócrata' after finishing school. In 1900, along with his brother Jesús, he founded "Regeneración', a radical paper opposed to the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.