Workers Solidarity Movement

For the third year in succession the Cork branch of the Workers Solidarity Movement participated in the Cork Pride Parade. Anarchists have been involved in Pride organising in Cork since its beginnings in the mid-noughties and have long seen Pride as both an important civic festival and an opportunity to connect with Cork's burgeoning LGBT community. Cork WSM also distributed a leaflet on Pride and its politics at the parade (see below). The parade was the culmination of a week of hectic activity and celebration by Cork's LGBT community across a number of venues and across a range of activities.

With votes still being counted it has become clear that the largest block of potential voters refused to take part in the fiscal compact referendum, rejecting the arguments that they could either vote for 'stability' or against 'austerity'. Quite possibly more people chose to boycott the referendum then the combined Yes and No voters. On top of this some 17% of the population who live and pay tax in Ireland were excluded from voting at all in the referendum. This means as many as 2/3 of the adult population did not vote in the referendum.

The slow-motion car crash that is the ongoing Eurozone crisis has hit yet another seizure point. The previous weekend’s French and Greek elections, Sunday’s German election in Nordrhein-Westfalen and the threat of a second Greek election next month, has raised the Eurozone stress levels back to panic levels. Hanging over the whole situation is the spectre of a death foretold - a funeral for the vision of the Euro as the party that no-one ever leaves.

The government parties are billing it as the ‘Stability Treaty’, the left opposition – most notably the United Left Alliance – are calling it the ‘Austerity Treaty’. For the next few weeks we can expect the airwaves to be clogged with the pros and cons in the lead-up to the 31stMay referendum on the “Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union” to give it its official title.

But despite all that we will hear between now and the end of the month, does anyone seriously think that how we vote will make one whit of difference?

Thousands of people marched from Eyre Square in Galway to the Labour Party conference at NUIG on Saturday. People had travelled from all over the country to show their opposition to the household tax and other attacks on people’s living standards. The story that made the evening news however, was one of the several hundred strong breakaway protest that reached the doors of the conference centre.

The tragic death of a 77 year old man who died alone and unnoticed waiting for treatment on a hospital trolley for 22 hours in Belfast’s main A&E ward in the Royal Hospital, is the result of savage healthcare cuts and the reduction of A&E services such as the closing down the ward in the Belfast city hospital last November.

As has happened for the last two years, Solidarity Books and Cork WSM hosted an event on the 8^th of March to celebrate International Women's Day. This year, Cork WSM members and other activists got together to put on an evening of food, film and discussion in the city's premier radical bookshop and meeting space. Meals were prepared on site and served by Veg Out! and Lentil Disorder, and was enjoyed by a multitude of women and men from the Cork activist scene and beyond. The food fuelled an hour or more of convivial chat, as people reminisced over previous celebrations and cast an eye over feminist-themed displays in various places about the shop space.

A report on the sucessful Campaign against the Household and Water Taxes (CAHWT) public meeting in Kildare:

Upon arriving at the meeting in the Derby House at around 7:30pm I found a number of members of the Kildare CAHWT branch making final preparations in the function room. A projector was playing a recording of an interview describing the continuing mismanagement of the Irish economic crisis.

At half past one on Saturday March 10 there were 4 members of the Newbridge Campaign Against Household and Water Charges assembled in the driveway of the Patrician Brothers monastery.We had two megaphones and a placard between us. Needless to say we were eagerly looking around for other members and people to bolster our numbers as the start of the march was scheduled for 2pm.

Today’s protest rally in Derry against the vigilante group Republican Action Against Drugs (RAAD) went ahead despite calls for it to be cancelled. Hundreds of people filled Guildhall Square to voice their rage against the recent shooting of two teenage cousins earlier in the week.

Relatives of those recently targeted, attacked and murdered by RAAD also attended the city centre rally calling for an end to the attacks.