Workers Solidarity Movement

How many could we house, educate and care for with 19 billion? Our government is currently furiously fighting the European Union to prevent Apple paying us back taxes it owes us. There has been a lot of ‘concern’ about government plans to spend 48 million looking after 4000 people fleeing warfare in Syria and Iraq. The government and the media defend there ‘our own’ is first - the super rich in Ireland and elsewhere!

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.

"Although the EU is not new, and its role in determining the economic and political development of Europe is both substantial and well established, critical analysis of the EU is sorely lacking. Most of what is written on the EU is uncritically liberal and focuses on diplomatic and legislative detail. What little critical literature exists often simply interprets the EU in terms of the function it plays for neoliberal globalization. When analyses of the EU go from what it does to the larger questions of what it is and why it exists, analysis often becomes completely un-rooted."

Europe Forged in Crisis: The Emergence and Development of the EU - discussion with the author Oisin by Workers Solidarity on Mixcloud

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].

As Iarnród Éireann’s contract for operating train services is due to expire in 2019, the National Bus and Rail Union claims that it will vehemently oppose any move towards privatisation [1].

In recent months, the EU Commission has been pressing for changes which would see Irish Rail opened up to tenders from competitors [2]. The successful operation of the Luas by French company Veolia has convinced EU officials that there would be sufficient demand by other investors for the rail contract [2].

A letter accompanied a recent dole payment. It advertised a ‘networking and interview day for Irish Teachers DIRECTLY with UK schools’ (emphasis in original). The exclamation mark in the letter’s heading – ‘Teaching Opportunities in the UK!’ - illustrates neatly how readily, even enthusiastically the Irish state is prepared to export Ireland’s young people in order to preserve the status quo.

The plans of the EU leadership for an engineered 'soft coup' are in tatters given the likely size of the OXI victory. They won't be able to pretend its a society 'divided down the middle'. The opposition leaders they hoped would head up a caretaker government are instead now under pressure to resign as it appears every district in Greece is voting NO.