SDLP leader Dr Alasdair McDonnell has claimed that Stormont assembly members should be entitled to a ‘small increment’ on their 43,000 basic salary a year and better pension payments to keep them from ‘poverty’ in retirement. Yet again one rule for them and another for the rest of us as these gangsters on the hill expect us to bear the brunt of their vicious cuts in jobs and services being imposed by all our local political parties at the behest of their masters from Westminster.

Up to 100 people attended a benefit organised by the Independent Workers Union in Belfast last Thursday. Members and supporters listened to a passionate speech given by IWU organiser Tommy McKearney at the Na Croisbhealai workers café on the need to organise in our workplaces’ and build an alternative to the rotten neo-liberal model being imposed on us. Tommy gave a similar talk at the workers co-operative in Octoberand can be viewed here.

Thousands of health and education workers took strike actionyesterday across the North in protest against Budget cuts in the public service. The 24 hour strike action, the first in over 30 years involves all health workers except doctors, and some school staff.

Wikileaks is currently making headlines daily.  Aside from the various revelations, there are also two widely told stories which are suppose to help us put these leaks into context.

The first story is that the leaks are nothing more than gossip.  They are stories about Gaddafi's nurse[1] and what the ambassador thinks of David Cameron[2].  Anyone who isn't a tabloid reader or nosey-parker should be disinterested in the content.

Joe Stack recently committed suicide by crashing an airplane into the IRS offices in Austin, Texas. He left a manifesto describing the long path which had finally led him to this decision.

Members of WSM and Organise gathered on a bright afternoon light of a cold Janaury day, in the leafy surburbs of Booterstown, Dublin, outside the German Embassy to protest recent Berlin District Court Decision to stop the Free Workers Union (FAU - Freie Arbeiterinnen- und Arbeiter-Union) from being able to call itself a Union.

Today, Wednesday the second of December, almost 300 NUI Maynooth students showed up to deliver a petition against the appointment of Bertie Ahern T.D as an Honorary Professor by the University. Campaigners decided to call on those who had signed the 1,000+ petition to help deliver it, and the turnout surpassed all expectations.

The cancellation of the December 3rd strike is a blow to the developing movement against the cuts on the scale of the cancellation of the March 30th strike at the start of the year. The so called compromise ICTU have been negotiating for is a further blow, it seems designed to drive a wedge between workers and fails to answer the main problem public sector workers have, the inability to take further cuts. But the strike that did happen on 24th November has brought 250,000 workers into their first experience of the power we collectively hold and points towards an alternative

From before 8a.m. this morning, members of the Irish National Teachers Organisation were on the picket line outside the Department of Education and Science in Dublin’s Marlborough Street, alongside Special Needs Assistant colleagues, members of IMPACT, and workers based in the DES building itself, members of SIPTU, CPSU and PSEU.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions’ ‘Get Up Stand Up’ protest on Friday 6th November is of huge importance. The government have made it clear that they intend to make ordinary workers pay for the financial crisis. Friday can be the start of us finally standing up and saying that we are not going to accept this.