Workers Solidarity Movement

Budget day 2011 saw vicious cuts being imposed on ordinary working people across Ireland to pay the massive costs of the bailout of Ireland’s banking system. A deeply unpopular government, in the service of the richest 1% of the population imposed cuts and tax hikes totalling 6 billion euro, cuts which will be supervised by the ECB and IMF. Around two thousands peopled gathered at at the Dáil that evening with the first protest taking place early that morning, when Gardai hastily tore the slogans off a cherry picker that had been placed outside the Dáil.

Several hundred people took part in "A Spectacle Of Defiance And Hope" in Dublin Friday night to protest the way the government have cut funding to vital community services. Janice Feighery a co-ordinator at an after school computer program for young people said “Community programmes are being devastated by the cuts. Our work with young people is strangled by lack of funds."  The spectacle draws to a close the week of protests against the austerity budget.

AIB's timing last week was poor. Announcing that they were going to pay 40 million euro in bonuses to the very incompetents that got us into this mess on the same day as the Dáil was announcing savage cuts to unemployment and family benifits, was definitely negative PR.

Sevinc Karaca, a Turkish anarchist and feminist, describes the fine line that Muslim women must navigate between Islam and the West. "In all Muslim countries, women had to wait until the 1970s and 1980s for a feminist movement that questioned the practise of religion and its role in the oppression of women. As Feminists in the West beat around the bush with an air of multi-culturalist political correctness and go out of their way to show respect for exotic religions, there is a growing number of feminists in countries like Turkey and Iran and among the diaspora in non- Muslim countries whose policies and strategies for feminism do not take the route of Western Liberal Feminism. The majority of feminist ideologies and activism in the developed world today do not address and support the struggle of their Muslim comrades openly, directly or sufficiently."

We all want a better world, but is it possible? The recently published book The Spirit Level joins a growing body of evidence for the viability of a better world.

This new history of anarchism provides a thorough and approachable examination of the tradition’s key ideas, debates and strategies, placing them in the context of the social struggles in which they arose. Anarchism is not blessed with the most attractive of brand names. While dictionaries and news media alike have successfully associated it with disorder and chaos, the anarchist political pantheon itself seems to share these traits; anarchism is label to both capitalists and communists, radical individualists and revolutionary socialists.What can ‘anarcho-capitalists’ such as Murray Rothbard have in common with revolutionaries such as Mikhail Bakunin and Piotr Kropotkin? Even the latter, among the most important of the movement’s theorists, himself claimed that anarchism’s political pedigree stretched back as far as Ancient Greek philosopher Xeno and Lao Tzu, the originator of Taoism. If one tries to and accommodate such a diversity of personas under this single term, the word loses all meaning.

Dr Mary Favier, a Cork GP and a founder member of Doctors for Choice, says the ABC case decision is a hugely welcome, important and significant decision. That will make a fundamental difference and force the government to legislate for the X Case. She then explains the background to the ABC v Ireland case currently before the European Court of Human Rights. She explains why the outcome of the case (and the issues it raises) are central to the predicament currently faced my thousands of Irish women every year in Ireland. Pointing out the Irish Government has fought the three women (A, B and C) along every step of their long and arduous route to the European Court, she also addresses the issue of the silence of within the Irish medical profession in relation to the matter of abortion. Over 5000 Irish women leave Ireland each year to have abortions in European countries.

DUE TO WEATHER CONDITIONS THIS MEETING HAS BEEN POSTPONED TILL THE NEW YEAR

The population of the south have just been subjected to the toughest austerity budget that western Europe has seen in 30 years. Yet the tax hikes that targeted the low paid and those on average income actually saw the richest 1% gain! Someone earning only 15,000 euro could be paying nearly 6% more tax but someone whose income is a million will be paying 6% less tax.