Workers Solidarity Movement

The only way to stop cuts is to stand up now

I was disappointed to read that the editorial of this paper (Belfast Telegraph November 11) has pinned the blame of the student riots in London on ‘anarchist elements’. Firstly this assumption is based on a misguided view that students are incapable of acting in there own interests and underestimates the genuine anger and frustration out there.

Why is the director of the IMF complaining that the rate of progress of the IMF negotiations in Dublin is going too slowly? What's wrong with this picture? The answer is nothing, so long as you understand that the IMF are not the driving force in these negotiations.

Despite the newpaper headlines, what is happening is not an IMF bailout. This is a European debt restructuring process in which the IMF are playing a merely supportive role as consultants. This is a Eurozone process and although the political masters of the Eurozone, through their EU Commissioners, have the final say on passing or vetoing the final agreement, the true driving force behind this process is the ECB.

It's now official, the Irish state is in talks with the EU and the IMF about a so called 'rescue plan' to bail out the Irish capitalist class from the disaster created by the international crash of the capitalist economic system. A crisis that was magnified in Ireland by the corruption of local crony capitalism on the one hand and the dependency of the economy on 'globalization' on the other. Trapped between such a cast of crooks and idiots it is perhaps not surprising that many in Ireland hope things will be improved when the running of our lives will be handed over to those who many hope might have a clue.

An article from 1980 that details the available information on extensive prospecting taking place in the Wicklow granites in the context of the succesful campaign  against the plan to build a nuclear reactor at Carnsore that this issue of the Contaminated Crow mostly dealt with.

The society we live in is a long way off the kind of society that anarchists advocate. So the question that anyone interested in creating a better society has to answer is: how best to act for positive change? The question of how anarchists should organise is one that has been debated over and over. It is clear that anarchism, rooted in ideals of equality, freedom and democracy, needs to adopt organisational practices which foster rather than stifle these ideals.

The purpose of this text is to try and tell the story of our current economic situation, how we got here, and what we can expect from the near future, so as to better understand the tasks facing us.

This is neither an academic text on history, nor yet, god forbid, a treatise on macroeconomics. So in the interests of telling a listenable story we will use the old storytelling technique of jumping directly into the middle and exploring outwards in flashback and flash-forward vignettes to build the big picture. But where is the middle?

James McBarron was a long time activist in Sinn Fein before becoming an anarchist in the aftermath of the Good Friday agreement. In this opinion piece he wrote for publication on republican discussion forums he argues that although it is "completely understandable that most thinking republican activists are angry and enraged at how they were duped and used by the former IRA and current Sinn Fein leadership … this does not excuse people from properly examining their own roles and politics and the politics and conditions that have lead to the current situation." He then points to four areas which he thinks represent fatal weaknesses of 'dissident' Irish republicanism in general.

The markets have spoken and the verdict is that Brian Lenihan's 6 billion euro package of public sector cuts and extra taxation on ordinary workers is not going to work. The confidence in Ireland's future in the international money markets is reflected in the yields in Irish sovereign bonds. These bonds are the IOUs the government issues to borrow the money to plug the shortfall from income to spending. They vary from 2 to 14 years in duration before the money borrowed has to be repaid, the 10 year being the one most closely followed by market watchers. The yield on a bond is the interest rate the state has to pay the lenders. In these last few days increasingly urgent stories in the business pages of the papers have been warning about the dangers of increasing bond yield spreads.

During the 1907 Dock strike in Belfast there was a police mutiny involving 70% of the Belfast police.  In this article John Gray argues that "When we look at the 1907 Dock Strike in Belfast and the police mutiny of the same year simple myths begin to evaporate. We find unskilled workers, mainly Protestant, fighting the employers, many their future leaders in the UVF, we find policemen, many Protestant, mutinying, we find the Independent Orangemen mustering hundreds of Protestant workers under a platform asking Protestants as Irishmen to play their part in the development of Ireland as a nation." The article is from Anarchy No 6, published in London in 1970

Confirmation that a large amount of wealth remains concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of Irish people has come from an analysis of figures by Tom O’Connor, Lecturer in Economics in Cork Institute of Technology. O’Connor has analysed the figures contained in the Bank of Ireland’s ‘Wealth of the Nation’ report which stated that there were 33,000 millionaires in Ireland in 2006.  The total ‘net worth’ of these individuals (i.e. excluding the value of their principal residences and allowing for any borrowings) in 2006 was €156.21 billion.