Workers Solidarity Movement

What the Flood and McCracken and Moriarty Tribunals have revealed over the last year or so is that politicians and business people regularly exchange massive sums of money without the slightest regard to taxation. £1.1 million was routed into Charlie Haughey's account from supermarket boss Ben Dunne via the "good offices" of accountant Des Traynor. Even more amazingly in 1991 Ben Dunne, himself in person, handed Charlie £210,000 in the now traditional brown envelope - "there's something for yourself". "Thanks big fella" replied the then Taoiseach.

CHRISTMAS IS well behind us but Scrooge refuses to go away. Bosses in many shops, restaurants, garages are still paying wages as low as £2.50 per hour. Civil Servants in junior clerical posts are still so badly paid that they qualify for the Family Income Supplement. Thousands of home helps employed by the Health Boards get as little as the £1.40 an hour paid by the Southern Board (incidentally this is a body packed with politicians and their friends).

What we strive for is a classless society, one where as well as there being no ruling class there is no working class. Why then the obsession with the working class for anarchists rather then with just people? To this audience perhaps a strange question to start with but one that is key when we come to talk about the nature of the working class.