Workers Solidarity Movement

When the Irish constitution was unveiled in 1937 it set out a special place for women within the home. In Ireland as elsewhere ‘women’s life within the home’ has to a large extent been characterized by long hours of thankless drudgery. While the struggles of Irish women for greater liberties during the last century have improved our lives in many ways, the drudgery of housework remains thankless and the workplace has not brought the liberation that certain feminists promised. As anarchists see it, this is because as long as we live in a capitalist society women (or men) can never be meaningfully liberated.

According to World Bank's 2008 World Development Report, 2.1 billion people live on less than US$2 a day. 880 million of these live on less that US$1 a day

Oil giant Exxon Mobil made a profit of $11.68 billion between April and June, breaking its own record for the highest quarterly profit by a US company.

Foreign Affairs magazine reported that in 2005 six hedge funds managers pocketed €2.15 billion dollars between them

The Irish navy gunboat, the LE Orla has been mobilized in the latest escalation of the standoff between Shell, the Irish state and Shell to Sea campaigners in County Mayo. The standoff comes after a relatively quiet period in the campaign and centers on attempts by campaigners to halt Shell's pipe- laying work in Broadhaven Bay and on Glengad beach, where Shell intend to bring their high-pressure gas pipeline ashore. The Irish navy gunboat has been called in after a request by Gardai and will support Garda facilitation of the Shell's works in the bay.

On 8/8/08, The Department of Social and Family Affairs (DSFA) issued a press release entitled “€238 million saved in first six months of this year through Welfare anti fraud crackdown.” A closer look at the operations of the DSFA reveals a slightly different story however. According to the 2007 Social Welfare Appeals Office (SWAO) Annual Report, 46% of appeals to the SWAO were successful. The chief appeals officer, Brian Flynn, is critical of social welfare deciding officers “applying the ‘fraud’ applications of the legislation in all cases involving overpayments”.

Unemployment has risen by a third in the last year and everyone agrees that worse times are ahead. Worries about losing jobs and not being able to pay the mortgage are growing. Whose fault is it? Is it the politicians administering the economy, or is it the capitalist economy itself?

The Irish Socialist Network is talking to a half dozen other groups about unity. The Socialist Workers Party, always in a hurry, simply wants everyone else to join their People Before Profit creation. Every few years we see the same game played, “why won’t the Judean Peoples Front join the Judean Popular Front?”

Raked over in newspapers since the fifth and final series made its way on to TnaG, it's hard to write anything new about the Wire. It's a portrait of America through Baltimore and the cop show vehicle; of failing school systems and crumbling communities, where drugs gangs and cops act in similar flurries of selfish brutality.

Hamas' recent "clampdown" on Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade in Gaza, rather then its ongoing brutal repression against leftist dissent, including that of feminist voices, dominated Western coverage of life in the occupied territories.

Some things in life are pretty obvious. One is that you don’t attack a heavily armed gang that outnumbers you 30 to 1. 

So what was Georgian leadership thinking when it ordered an attack on South Ossetia? There can be no question that they thought they would be able to defeat Russia. There are, after all, limits to human idiocy.

The recession in the economy means that working people are having to come to terms with growing house repossessions, below inflation pay-increases, and a steep rise in the cost of living. Meanwhile, property developers and banks are busy using the credit crunch and the downturn in the housing market to get Government bail outs, despite the fact that it was their speculative polices that helped created the mess in the first place.