Workers Solidarity Movement

Last night we shot some video inside the squatted Debtors prison in Dublin - the courts have ordered those living here to get out by midnight on Sunday, 11.59 to be exact. The abandoned prison in Dublins inner city has been occupied to be used as shelter and an arts space. The prison lies just behind Capel st, the entrance is on Halston st. Many of those occupying were recently evicted from Grangegorman squat The occupation was announced via Grangegorman Resists Eviction page last week.

This is the Kurdish solidarity statement with the Black Lives Matter movement read out by a delegate of Saoirse Jin at the July 12th Dublin protest.‪

Transcript of video
"Thank you.  Saoirse Jin is an Ireland based womens group in solidarity with the Congress of Women’s Freedom, the KJA in Kurdistan which is a pluralist women’s rights movement fighting for the rights of the Kurds and all minorities in Turkey.  And they sent a message of solidarity to this protest. So I’m going to read it for the KJA

To mark todays 80th anniversary of the Spanish revolution and what is also the 4th anniversary of the Rojava revolution in Kobane this recording of a Kurdish version of A Las Barricadas has just been released.

It's recorded in Qamişlo, Rojava by members of the Mohamed Şêxo art and culture centre. The performers say "What happened in Barcelona on 19th July 1936 was repeated 76 years later. We started in Kobanê, and it was there that we put up our fiercest resistance. Countless comrades have fallen to defend this city against the fascists, just like the countless comrades who gave their live to defend the revolution in Catalonia and Spain.

Belfast saw a fantastic Rally for Choice march July 2nd 2016  - by far the biggest pro- choice demonstration in the north in many years, perhaps ever.

Despite being organised on a shoe string is was also bigger than the annual anti - choice march. Even though the organizers of that have access to so much money they had billboard vans driving around the city advertising their event.

We spent the day of the 100th anniversary of the 1916 rising on the streets of Dublin recording the various peoples commemorative events. This was the actual anniversary on 24th April rather than the religious nationalist and state favoured date of the Easter weekend a month back.

In a lot of ways this seperation was a very good thing as the state commemorations with its parades of soldiers and sealed off areas for dignitaries behind which hated politicians laid wreaths had little positive to be said about it.

Dublin saw a day of protests in solidarity with the Kurdish Freedom struggle today. The video shows the protest at the GPO, site of the 1916 rebellion against British colonialism 100 years ago. During that rebellion British forces destroyed much of the center of Dublin and murdered civilians much as the Turkish state has been doing in Bakur (SE Turkey) over the last months.

Recent years in Ireland have seen growing community based resistance to the imposition of austerity programs: the introduction of regressive taxes such as the property tax and water charges, and the homelessness crisis as a direct consequence.

The ongoing attempt to establish Irish Water, a state backed water utility company, designed to pave the way for privatisation of our water and infrastructure, has been met with unprecedented broad based resistance from communities across the country.

Similarly the obscene growth in homelessness across the country is being met with growing grassroots resistance through groups such as the Dublin Tenants Association and Irish Housing Network.

The environmental crisis represents ‘one of the gravest and most severe existential threats to our species survival’. International agreements aimed at curbing fossil fuel emissions have largely been a failure, with the most recent Paris CoP21 conference labelled ‘a fraud and a fake’ by leading climatologist and activist James Hansen. Capitalism’s unrelenting assault on the natural environment has pushed us past the point of continuing any pretence of ‘safe carbon mitigation’. It is becoming more widely accepted that we now need a global restructuring of the economic mode of production; capitalism must be dissolved.

This panel on Feminist struggles was recorded at the 2016 Dublin Anarchist Bookfair.
 

Over the last week the massive abandoned Grangegorman complex has been reoccupied by squatters including many of those who were eviced last year.  As our video shows after the High Court injunction last year the owners who took posession did nothing to bring this huge area back into use for housing.  The sole interest seems to have been in selling it, recently it was sold and when the new owners didn't bother with the 24 hour security on site it was reoccupied.

Some 30 people had been living in the various buildings that make up the Grangegorman complex prior to the High Court injunction.  The injunction ment that those 30 all had to try and find alternative accommodation as a time when the housing crisis in Dublin has deepened and rents have soared above levels affordable even to someone earning two times the minimum wage.