Workers Solidarity Movement

Garda assaulting community protesters and the media not reporting? Politicians spinning greater and greater lies about 'sinister fringes' and dissidents? What's happening now to Water Charge resistors happened to the people of Rossport a few years back and we can learn from their determined resistance.

Scenes of Garda violence being used against water charge resistors have come as a shock to many people. Ten years ago if this had happened most people elsewhere might only have heard rumours and assumed that something must have been done to deserve the response. Today however the prevalence of camera phones and the ease of sharing photos and video on Facebook has meant one video after another showing disproportionate violence from the Garda has ‘gone viral’.
 

Running scared from the huge numbers mobilising to resist the water charge the establishment are now pulling out all the stops. Over the weekend we saw an image of a single brick being thrown at a Garda car used to try and divide the movement through saturation coverage of the brick and the demand that resistors condemn 'violence'

Then on Sunday as Enda Kenny drove out of the Mansion house three Garda grabbed Fiona who was protesting there and threw her head first into a metal bollard at the side of the road. In the video of the incident you can hear a sickening thud as she hits the bollard but you can also see the considerable force put into throwing her. But don't expect a media outcry about the violence of 3 large men smashing a women's head* off a metal pole, instead expect to hear once more about that brick that bounced off the back of a car.

One of the key principles underpinning anarchist politics and philosophy is that of self-organisation.  And one of the key principles underpinning self-organisation is the belief that it is by doing that people learn.

Very few people come to radical politics through what they read or through ‘education’ in the traditional sense.  It is usually through becoming involved in a struggle that directly affects themselves and their neighbours/work colleagues that most people come to see the power structures of society and begin a process of analysis of how society operates and how it needs to change if the needs of ordinary people are to be met.

There were significant disturbances in Santry & Coolock last night following a Garda assault on water charge campaigners protesting a visit by Enda Kenny and Denis O'Brien.

These images are from the video at the link  which shows why the campaigners became so outraged. As Enda Kenny drove through the crowd (flashing a dismissive thumbs up sign at the protesters) Garda were assaulting them and throwing them to the ground.

Later multiple arrests were made as Enda left the event and then Garda attacked solidarity protesters with pepper spray who had gone to Coolock Garda station.