Workers Solidarity Movement

This Saturday at 2pm, Right2Water has called a national anti-water charges protest through Dublin city starting at Connolly and Heuston Station.  Many are seeing this as the final shot of the long war against the water charges, they have been suspended for the last year because a mass boycott made them impossible to collect.  

That boycott was part of a massive decentralised campaign that also saw hundreds of direct actions as communites around the country blocked water meter installations, leading to hundreds of arrests and dozens of ongoing prosecutions.  And Saturday is just one of many huge mobilisations that have brought as many as 80,000 onto the streets on multiple occasions.

The Workers Solidarity Movement have called an anarchist/anti-authoritarian bloc to join the Water Charges march Saturday 8th April in Dublin. This bloc will meet at Connolly Station at 2pm . Look out for the red and black flags.   We will be handing out several hundred copies of this 4-page leaflet produced by the WSM, which includes content on the water charges, housing, and the pro-choice struggle, and are looking for folks to help us distribute these on the day. [PDF to download]

Many Battles Won, With the War Yet to Win

We’ve come a long way. Against the forces of the State and global finance the anti-water charges movement has held the line, and through years of direct action, community organising and mass mobilisations we’ve pushed the government to the point of defeat on water charges. 

This is an analysis of events at Woodburn forest (Carrickfergus, County Antrim) during the exploratory drilling operation being carried out by the company Infrastrata in the spring and summer of 2016. It is intended as a reflection on the successes and failures of the campaign to resist a poisonous and violent extraction of resources from the land, and indeed the lease and seizure of some of that land in an aggressive manner. It draws on personal testimonies; both my own and other activists’ experiences of specific direct actions, set within a broader political analysis of the context within which this sort of struggle is taking place, locally and worldwide.

The Barricade Inn was a squatted social centre in the centre of Dublin.  During the peak of its activity over the summer of 2015 hundreds of people were involved in putting on events in the space that thousands of people attended.  In this audio we talk to three WSM members who were involved in opening up and running The Barricade about what happened there and what lessons they drew from the experience. 

The government may be considering a new approach to the water charges issue at the moment - 20th November. The brute force approach didn't work against us so now they may be trying to be a little smarter about privatising water services. Combined with advertisements extolling the great work Irish Water is doing and RTE leaks of how 'modest' the charges are planned to be, they are hoping to con us into paying for privatisation.

Recent fury over our local ruling class giving away £1.7 million of the Social Investment Fund to Charter NI in East Belfast, headed by a suspected leading member of the UDA, is indicative of a continuing corrupt political settlement where there is one rule for the few and another for the rest of us.

The Irish government's attempt to introduce domestic water charges in Ireland is not going well. In fact, for them it's been a disaster because it's sparked off a huge upsurge in working class self organisation and direct action. Saturday saw thousands of anti-water charges campaigners flooding the streets of Dublin o to again voice their opposition to Irish Water & water charges and as a show of strength for the movement.

It has been fully understood since the very beginning of this campaign that Irish Water was simply a vehicle to be used for the privatisation of water services and infrastructure in Ireland. The right wing, neo-liberal political establishment wished to gift the most vital of all resources to capitalist interests who would squeeze as much profit out of commodified water as possible, while cutting off the water supply to anyone who couldn't pay their extortionate charges. However, due to a huge effort on the part of working class organisers, the water charges appear on course to be abolished. The significance of this campaign in laying down a milestone for working class self organisation will be felt for years.

September 17th sees the next major national march against the 'we can't believe they are not dead already' water charges. We respect that many anarchists will be marching with their local groups but for those who are not we thought it would be good to have an anarchist bloc and march together, everyone can then meet up at the end.

When the Corrib refinery was being built & resisted campaigners warned that environmental legislation was set up to have no meaningful impact on multinationals.  Two days ago we saw a very clear demonstration of this in practise when Shell was fined EUR1,000 of an estimated EUR240 million in Corrib sales so far this year.  Such a fine has no deterrent impact at all, it might as well have been one cent.