There is a legitimate debate taking place within what might loosely be called ‘the Irish left’ at the moment. It takes place within campaigns, within trade unions, in communities, online, in homes, and anywhere that concerned citizens meet.
The need for this debate is evident to all who take part in it. There is no argument or disagreement that the housing emergency is a policy-created disaster enabling profiteering and greed to feast upon human misery and suffering. There is no argument that, while headline job figures are spun positively, the precarious nature of work and the race to the bottom in terms of pay and conditions have created real and potentially lifelong ‘in work poverty’, and the current labour market is often debilitating to workers and their expectations of a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. There is no argument that public services like health and education have not recovered from the years of austerity. There is massive personal debt. Deprivation, particularly among children, is among the highest in Europe. We tax middle and lower income earners, we have average consumption taxes, but we are a tax haven for the richest and the greediest. We have a broken media completely controlled by the neoliberal ideology and refusing to engage in an honest debate on these issues. And yes, like much else, that ideology and its followers will still try to privatise our human right to water, our recent victory being just a temporary success that must be built on if we are not to lose in the end.
Continue reading “Do we want a real alternative, or just more of the same?”
Do you remember the infamous ‘Galway Tent’? As a symbol of the sort of gombeenism that pertained as the nation was led to penury, the ‘Galway Tent’ is a good example. Basically, Fianna Fail party fundraisers would hire a marquee at the Galway race festival in Ballybrit and invite their friends to enjoy their ‘hospitality’. Here beer and wine would flow, a canape or two maybe, and brown envelopes packed with wads of cash would be handed to the political worthies as ‘donations’. €150,000 a year is admitted to having been raised in this way. There were even long waiting lists of cash-clad citizens hoping for cancellations so that they might get in, get to dine at the ‘top’ table, and also hand over an envelope full of ‘green’. Of course no favours were ever asked for, or offered, in exchange for this largesse. That would be corruption. In Ireland? Of course not!
In 2015 in Croke Park the Unite Ireland Policy Conference debated the issue of Repeal of the 8th amendment to Bunreacht na hÉireann. I was a proud Unite member that day, not only because of the outcome of the debate, but because we had it. As an observer it was a difficult debate to listen to in many ways. Feelings ran high. If you think of the most extreme views you can imagine on the issue, on both sides, or that you might see on social media or hear on your doorstep from canvassers, rest assured that they were expressed in Croke Park at that conference too.
If, 