Workers Solidarity Movement

As the health budget is cut, a worsening health service will predictably result in higher national morbidity and mortality. Are we prepared to allow this to occur?

This film brings to the big screen the dramatic story of Shell’s blundering, sometimes violent, attempts to impose a high-pressure raw gas pipeline on a small North Mayo community. The documentary features footage taken over three years, from 2006 to 2008, by Risteard O’Domhnaill. It has all the ingredients, stunning landscapes, riveting action scenes and the real-life stories of local people who found themselves on the front line of the drama. The film is short on background to the whole issue and mentions very little on the actual dangers posed by the pipeline and refinery, as well as the giveaway terms the oil companies ‘extracted’ from Irish state.  However, in Willie Corduff, and particularly in Pat O’Donnell, the filmmaker has struck cinema gold. Through the words and, especially, the actions of these figures we get a good picture of just what’s at stake here and what it takes to engage in effective resistance.

The election campaign has hardly begun in earnest but already the Labour Party is in the running for the Most Ridiculous Policy Announcement award. While everyone was distracted by the Fianna Fáil/Green Party circus on Sunday last, Labour’s Education spokesperson Ruairi Quinn launched the party’s new policy on tackling Ireland’s Literacy problems ‘Reading As A Right’.

In what is clearly a concerted effort to smash their union organisation, over 170 Aer Lingus cabin crew have been ‘removed from the payroll’ by management in a dispute about rostering arrangements.

Fine Gael and the Labour party are engaged in a desperate attempt to pass the Fianna Fail/Green party budget into law. A budget containing billions in cuts attacking the poorest sections of Irish society. A budget they loudly opposed only a few weeks ago.

While the soap opera of who will captain Fianna Fail’s sinking ship into the election is obsessed over by the media, the publication of the Finance Bill on Friday last has shown that for some at least it’s business as usual. Having announced in his Budget speech that Section 23 property tax reliefs were to be curtailed (not abolished – just curtailed!), Minister for Finance and wannabe FF leader, Brian Lenihan, has changed his mind.

The government’s economic think-tank, the ESRI, wrote in the Irish Times in the aftermath of the budget that the measures taken over the past four years have been “strongly progressive” i.e. that they redistributed wealth from the rich to the poor. However, this is a somewhat convenient timeframe to apply and ignores the impacts of the measures announced in the 2011 budget.

In the aftermath of the European court of Human Rights finding that the Irish state had violated the rights of a woman who was unable to get an abortion in Ireland a poll in the Sunday Times has confirmed that almost 9 out of every 10 people want abortion available in such cases. This result is a massive defeat for the well funded anti-choice movement that spent hundreds of thousands in an anti-choice advertising campaign in advance of the ruling.

There are now 569 people on trolleys in Irish hospital emergency wards. This is a new record.  The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation released the figures today.

Jimmy Kelly the Regional Secretary of the Irish region of Unite has formally written to ICTU General Secretary David Begg and ICTU President Jack O’Connor proposing a  Campaign against Austerity Cuts.