Workers Solidarity Movement

The photos shows the Jobstown 23 'Drop the Charges' banner on its way down the Quays to the courts on Parkgate street. The Jobstown 27 charged in connection with the protest last November which saw Labour Party leader struck in her car because of a sit-in just in front of her. 

Revenge came initially in the form of over the top dawn raids on the houses of water charge activists and now after a long delay many are charged with crimes as serious as false imprisonment  - the maximum sentence for this is 14 years - despite the fact that several Garda were also around her car at all times. The number facing charges means this may be one of the largest political trials in Ireland for some decades.

The print media on Sunday failed to give any prominence to the huge water charges demonstration that had filled O'Connell street the day before. This view shot from 3 locations in the rally gives an idea of the vast numbers, yet as shown the front pages of the main Sunday paper failed to mention it.

One more tens of thousands took to the streets of Dublin as the governements attempt to force water charges on the population looks more and more like it has failed.  This high quality footage of the march in progress will give you a sense of the size and composition of the marches.

The wealthy and their media would like us to be forgetful.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of facts about Denis O’Brien...

Denis O’Brien is a media baron.

Child-care in Ireland is so expensive because it is so undervalued. Only through care-workers’ collective withdrawal of labour will those who rely on us realise how vital our work is.

Across the European Union, childcare costs around 12% of a family’s income, but in Ireland, it accounts for over 35% [1]. Where does that money go? With most childcare employees on minimum wage, it isn’t going to ordinary care workers. At a protest outside Leinster House in February, 2015, the Association of Childhood Professionals estimated that there are around 25,000 people in the early childhood workforce on an average pay rate of less than €11 an hour [2].

Over two years after the last major mass direct action against Shell in Erris the state continues to pursue a vindictive prosecution against some of those arrested that day. In June 2013 at the culmination of a week of action around 70 people entered the Shell compound at Aughoose where the final section of the experimental high pressure raw gas pipeline was being connected.

The local community have been resisting the pipeline and refinery for a decade. During that resistance hundreds have been arrested or injured and several have spent periods in jail. Millions was spent every year deploying hundreds of Garda and at times the airforce and navy to make effective protest impossible. Despite this the protests meant that the project has finished years late and at 3 to 4 times the original projected cost.

The removal of Confederate and Nazi Flags at loyalist bonfire site in Carrickfergus by local community workers is a positive step forward but this should not detract from a political settlement that rests on accommodating and institutionalizing the most reactionary elements in Northern Ireland, rather than seeking to uproot and transcend sectarian division in this mini colonial statelet.

As the clock ticks towards the annual Orange Order 12th of July marches, the sectarian marking of territory is underway as working class communities across the North are besieged with Loyalist emblems and paramilitary flags, indirectly facilitated by the PSNI who have turned a blind eye to this showcase of sectarian triumphalism and intimidation towards anyone who is perceived as the ‘other’ from Catholics to ethnic minorities.