Workers Solidarity Movement

Labour party Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte has threatened public sector workers with further wage cuts if they don't deliver cost savings under the Croke Park agreement.  He claimed that since the country "was broke" in his words it is up to the workers to make savings by agreeing to redundancies and increasing their workload.

Yesterday the acting prime minister of Portugal finally threw in the towel and declared the need for an ECB\IMF rescue of the kind that Greece and Ireland already succumbed to last year. So Portugal becomes the third Eurozone country to be press-ganged into the Bailout Brigade.

At the time of Ireland's fall into the clutches of direct rule from Frankfurt, the common consensus was that Portugal would follow not long after. That it has taken until the beginning of April for the inevitable to happen is testament to the desperate struggle of the then Prime Minister José Sócrates to stave off this fate.

On the 1st of April 2011 the government got in on the April Fool's game early, by announcing yet another visit to the trough for the endless bailing out of the country's basket case banks to the tune of 70 billion euros. Anyone remember when Brian Lenihan swore on his life that 40 billion was definitely the last of it? My how we laughed...

The heads of government from around Europe are meeting today to agree a further program of attacks on the wages and conditions of workers across Europe in order to pay for the international capitalist crisis. In a process driven by the core economies of France and Germany under the title of a 'Competitiveness Pact' wages are to be 'restrained' and pension ages are to be raised across Europe.

Amidst the myriad of austerity measures, in both the public and private sectors, there are some signs of resistance.

Today, in an even more meaningless exercise then normal, a minority of the population of Ireland will choose between two almost identical options as to who will implement the ECB / IMF austerity plans for southern Ireland. Outside of this plan the wealthiest 1% will continue to set economic policy tomorrow as they did yesterday and have throughout the last decades. The electoral circus we are now going through provides the rest of us with the illusion of control even though deep down almost everyone acknowledges the ritual as having no real impact on what policies are actually implemented.

Jimmy Kelly the Regional Secretary of the Irish region of Unite has formally written to ICTU General Secretary David Begg and ICTU President Jack O’Connor proposing a  Campaign against Austerity Cuts.

  AFRI calls for Ireland to default on banks debt. Development group asks "why should ordinary Irish citizens now pick up that tab?"

Andy Storey, AFRI chairman, is highly critical of the IMF intervention. He urged that the lessons of the IMFs behaviour in the other countries be learned.  The IMFs intervention had left increased poverty , social inequality and reduced spending on education and health. He gave the example of Argentina as a country that had rejected the IMF after a deep crisis and had a sustained recovery afterwards.

As soon as the scale of the crisis became clear, all rhetoric about free-markets and competition vanished. Bankers, capitalists and right wing politicians were all suddenly huge believers in the role of the state and the importance of regulation.

The first 18 months of the crash from the Credit Crunch to the spread to the 'real economy.