Workers Solidarity Movement

If someone were to tell you that in the modern day UK abortion is illegal you’d probably laugh in their face at such a statement. You’d probably write it off as ridiculous and not worth your time debating considering a simple google search will tell you that abortion has been legal in the UK since 1967. It might then be a surprise for you to hear that just yesterday a woman was handed a three month suspended sentence for two years for having an abortion.

A 21-year-old Co. Down woman who was facing life imprisonment for having an abortion through the use of pills obtained on the internet has been given a suspended sentence.  It is understood that after failing to raise the funds to have a legal abortion in England she ordered the drugs, Mifepristone and Misoprostal in order to have the abortion

What ideas inspired the men and women who rose up in 1916? How did those ideas fare in the Irish Free State founded in 1922?

With historic working class centenaries occurring in recent years we have heard a lot about Unfinished Business. This message was strong in 2013 in reference to the 1913 Lockout and the inequality that still prevails in Ireland. Cries of Unfinished Business are once again being proclaimed in this centenary year of the 1916 Rising and it is true, we do have unfinished business.

We still have bosses and businessmen who could give William Martin Murphy a run for his money. The Republic that the rebels envisioned and enshrined in the proclamation has not been achieved and despite the rhetoric of the YES campaign we do not “cherish the children of the nation equally”, and we have a long way to go to get there, with particular work needed on Ireland’s hatred of women.

Five years ago we all scratched bits of paper, and a new government was formed. Today, in 2016, with we are five years down the road, and here we are scratching more paper, and another new government will be formed. It may be different from the last one or it might be the same, but ultimately the policies will appear to be remarkably similar. To serve the economy above all others appears to be the top priority for all governments.

Here Labour come again, back on our doorsteps to test the waters, to see if we're still mad about the past 5 years of their governance, to find out if we can remember every attack they made against us, probably in the hope that there have been so many that maybe, just maybe, we'll only remember a few.  A party riddled with so much contempt and disdain for us that they genuinely believe they can convince us that things will be different this time. They bombard us with sentences along the lines of "You will get X, Y and Z with Labour in government".

Crudely, they tell us that one of the things we can expect from them is a referendum on the 8th amendment, with top-notch propaganda to go along with that promise, propaganda painting them as pro-woman and pro-choice. There is no propaganda effective enough to cover up the war that they have waged on women for the past 5 years.

An investigation is currently under way at University College Dublin following reports that up to 200 male students allegedly shared explicit images of women they had sexual relations with. The incident not only highlights a culture of misogyny in Irish universities, it also calls attention to the absence of material supports for effectively responding to sexual assault on campus. But what kinds of supports should students demand from Irish universities?

Trigger Warning: Discusses rape and ‘revenge porn’ image sharing

We awake to news that more towns in Ireland are under water due to storm flooding. And that perhaps the sea ice at the north pole might melt due to temperatures rising above zero. The first story is given a lot more prominence in Irish media than the second but strangely at the same time another story is being celebrated. The start of yet more greenhouse gases being pumped out of their safe place far below the sea off the Irish shore to be processed and then released into the atmosphere via the Corrib refinery.

December saw the promotion of Fermanagh & South Tyrone MLA, Arlene Foster to the position of DUP leader and the North of Ireland’s First Minister.

Foster is a woman who was once described to have “learned a lot from the likes of Thatcher when it comes to dealing with men in politics."

It is not coming as much of a surprise that some middle-class, career-focused feminists have made claims of this being some sort of an advance of feminism. Many are claiming that this represents a great change in northern Irish society, as a move away from the male dominated arena that we understands politics here to be (the same could be said throughout the World of course).