Workers Solidarity Movement

The Fine Gael Ard Fheis took place over the course of last weekend (31st March). While hundreds of politicians reinforced an austerity-laden approach to politics in Dublin’s Convention Centre, about 10,000 Anti-Household-Charge protesters took over the docklands in an electrifying show of strength.  This was the final day of the governement trying to force people to register for the tax and by midnight it was clear that the campaigns goal of getting 50% to refuse to register had been met.

About fifty people attended a Campaign Against the Household and Water Charges meeting in the Donore Avenue Community Centre in the Dublin 8 area on the 8th of February. Two speakers who have been involved in building the national campaign addressed the attendees, providing important information about the campaign and the need for community resistance.

The regressive household tax is yet a further embodiment of the government’s will to make us pay for a crisis we did not create.

Globally, 2011 was marked by a surge in grassroots resistance movements that highlighted the inherently disparate nature of global capitalism, from Tahrir Square to the #Occupy movements that mushroomed their way across the globe.

At home however, the sad highlights of 2011 were job losses, another cruel budget that savages the living standards of honest workers, and a rate of emigration that is comparable only to that of several decades back.