Workers Solidarity Movement

"..the Dublin Trades Council stoppage against the tax system is happening. This will be unlike the stoppage we had in April. Tokenistic gestures from the union leadership! Did the ICTU follow up on the last stoppage with any real action? Thousands of workers had been mobilised on April 13th "Transcription of an article from the June/July 1983 issue of 'Resistance'. The paper of the Dublin Anarchist Collective.

We must reject this deal, which is worse than the status quo. It is so bad that the executives of a number of unions have even gone against their negotiators by recommending rejection of the deal. The union leadership has forgotten how to fight and even those amongst them those who argue for rejecting the deal simply want to get back to the table for further negotiations.

A pay cut, a ‘pension levy’ and a refusal to pay agreed wage rises has been the lot of public sector workers.   Well, not quite all of them.

Former Fine Gael leader Alan Dukes has refused to give up his €100,000 Dáil pension despite earning even more as the state-appointed chairman of the nationalized Anglo Irish Bank.  He was directly appointed by Finance Minister Brian Lenihan in March.

The Dublin Anarchist Collective actively supports the Women’s Right to Choose Campaign. The right of everybody to self-determination is a basic of Anarchist belief. Women in particular are denied this right. In this society we have little or no control over the issues which affect are daily lives. Transcription of an article from the June/July 1983 issue of 'Resistance' the paper of the Dublin Anarchist Collective.

The long days and nights of bargaining between government and union top brass at Croke Park ended when the participants emerged and presented the fruits of their deliberations. It is a pretty awful deal, which rubber stamped the pay cuts already handed out to public sector workers and added a whole layer of new working conditions, essentially extra hours and responsibilities for the same or lower pay. Over the couple of weeks that followed, the various public sector unions in conference or at executive level recommended either accepting or rejecting this deal, with the final call resting with the membership. As we go to print the final result of these ballots are still unknown but recent experience should warn us that, in either case, the battle is far from over.

The CPSU activist group have produced a leaflet calling on members of the CPSU to vote No to the public sector deal.  "Many public sector workers have been shocked and angered that such a deal was agreed in the first place, some general secretaries including our own tried to present the deal as some kind of “victory”. Of course we can now see clearly that this is a rotten deal." 

There will be celebrations of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered (LGBT)
 Pride across Ireland this summer, including Cork's Pride Parade on June 5th and Dublin's Parade on June 26th. The original Pride marches were held to commemorate the Stonewall riots in New York which began on June 28, 1969, and which were led
mainly by working class Black and Puerto Rican trans people, butch dykes and drag queens sick of being beaten up and arrested by the police. The following year, in commemoration of the riots, the Gay Liberation Front organised a march from Greenwich Village to Central Park. Almost 10,000 women and men attended the march. Today, many major cities all over the world hold LGBT/Queer Pride Marches on the last Sunday of June in honour of Stonewall.



Despite the Catholic hierarchy’s shameful efforts to silence the survivors of abuse, we now have some idea of what was happening behind the walls of church-run institutions across Ireland. In the wake of this, many people have begun asking whether the Catholic Church should continue to have any control whatsoever over state-funded education. As it stands, the Church still control 92% of primary schools. However a MRBI/Irish Times poll in January of this year found that a majority of Irish people now want this situation remedied.

This is the audio recording of the second 'Rethinking Revolution' meeting on the topic of 'Will there be a revolution in our lifetime.' "Are we spending our precious time outside of work at protests and meetings because we want to improve our lives or are we just fighting for future generations. In either case what is it that we are trying to do as we move from topic to topic and struggle to struggle?"

This show is produced by the Workers Solidarity Movement.   The Aim of this show is to cover a range of issues and struggles that don’t get covered in the media.

We do not pretend to be unbiased.  We actively engage in politics and struggles to bring about change in society.  We hope to cover some of the issues which we think are live at the moment in Irish society.  We engage in those struggles and talk to others who are actively attempting to bring about change.