Workers Solidarity Movement

The following has been written by a collective of women activists in Ireland in part in response to an article that appeared in the Irish Times on Identity Politics and the way 'men on the left' engaged with that article.  The version here is the original form as published meaning  the signatures are those who were involved at some level in the drafting process.  Additional names were added after publication, see link at the end.  One of our members, Andrew,  produced a timeline of key documents and discussion around this piece which explains the context in a lot more details.

I'm not a bad protester, I promise. I'm a good protester. I'll be a good protester!

The farce that is the Jobstown [1] trial has mostly been a back and forth about what kind of protest is acceptable and right. Did the people of Jobstown keep Joan Burton and her assistant waiting for too long? Were they too foul mouthed? Too angry? Did they bang on the car too much? What about kids throwing water balloons? The infamous Jobstown brick? Maybe we should put them in prison then. At the heart of this argument is a very important notion: splitting people into 'Good Protesters' and 'Bad Protesters'. This article lays out exactly how that works, and how we should counter this divide and conquer tactic.

The Irish Times has yet again made an entirely cynical intervention in its bid to force its agenda on the campaign to get rid of the hated 8th Amendment.  This time in the form of an opinion poll constructed to reinforce the idea that abortion is a constitutional issue rather than a medical one.

Opinion polls using complex questions have become a common method of political manipulation in our time.  The method is simple, the questions are used to frame the way the subject considers the issue and so direct the answer they give.  That directed answer is then presented as some ‘objective truth’ discovered by the person or group who framed the question.  A poll that simply asks ‘Should women control their own bodies’ is liable to get one response, today’s poll that instead gives a long set of options around the degree women should be judged under law was designed to give another.

RTE Drivetime engaged in some shameful clickbait trolling on Twitter last night to try and get a few more listeners. While they have congratulated posh schools for engaging in token sleep outs they decided to directly attack the occupation of Apollo house and its bringing into use as an emergency shelter for homeless people.

And boy did it fall on its face. Normally far far more people will like a Tweet than reply to it. In this case though 201 people have posted angry replies and only 19 liked it. A far stronger message though had already been sent out when the occupiers Home Sweet Home Eire page attracted over 27,000 followers in 6 days and over 1500 people have actually volunteered to help keep the shelter open. Likewise so many donations of materials were received that within a couple of days out had to be announced that there was no room for more.

The government may be considering a new approach to the water charges issue at the moment - 20th November. The brute force approach didn't work against us so now they may be trying to be a little smarter about privatising water services. Combined with advertisements extolling the great work Irish Water is doing and RTE leaks of how 'modest' the charges are planned to be, they are hoping to con us into paying for privatisation.

The BBC  spread dangerous misinformation about the abortion pills in its broadcast of 27th October.  They have claimed that it is dangerous and that “a number of women will actually require a blood transfusion" after taking the pills.  This is not true. The abortion pills, mifepristone and misoprostol, are extremely safe - safer than viagra and aspirin as a matter of fact. They are on WHO's list of essential medicines.

On Saturday 24th of September the Anti-Internment Group held a protest outside RTE (Irish television and radio station) studios in Donnybrook south Dublin. The protest was held because of RTE’s censorship against the case of the Craigavon 2. The Craigavon 2 have been in jail since March 2009, Brendan McConville and John Paul Wootton (who was only 17 years of age at the time) were accused of the shooting dead of a Police officer.

Their trial was a farce, not only was it a non jury trial, all evidence used in the case used by the prosecution was either circumstantial or witness evidence from a witness whose statements were totally contradictory but also his own father came forward and said he is “walter mitty” (a walter mitty is well known slang in Ireland for a liar).

Even at this late stage in the game, water charge campaigners still come across the odd person on the street who will parrot the government propaganda line "We have to pay for water". Of course, this line is nonsense as we already pay for our water through general taxation and paying extra billions to an utter failure like Irish Water, which they'll just waste on consultants fees, is lunacy.