The most striking feature of the presidential election campaign in France is the massive support shown for the Front de Gauche
(Left Front) under the leadership of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Long before
the campaign was really underway, there were clear signs that the most
conscious and active layer of the working class was mobilising around
the Front de Gauche.
This year as every year there will be
marches and commemorations attended by the various strands of Irish
socialism and republicanism to mark the anniversary of the Easter
Rising. There will be a remembrance of those who fell in the struggle
for national liberation and socialism in 1916, during the War of
Independence and since then. Attention is already being given to the
possible events to mark the centenary of the rising in 2016
At Easter every year in every parish
in Ireland and in many places around the world Irish Republicans gather
to pay homage to those men and women who died in the struggle for
independence. This year, 2012, will be no different. However, whereas 50
years ago there was only one Republican Movement, today there are at
least seven different republican traditions that have emerged out of the
northern struggle.
Last Saturday’s rally in Ireland organised by the Campaign against Household and Water
Taxes (CAHWT) demonstrated clearly that the opposition to the Household
Taxes is likely to be a major thorn in the side of Fine Gael and Labour
over the next period. The immediate problem for the Department of the
Environment, Community and Local Government however is not the 3,000
people who attended the rally at the National Stadium and those who
attended the other rallies. It’s the fact that only 328,201 households
have registered for the Household tax, from a total of more or less 1.6
million.
The French and German governments have been hard at work over the last
few weeks berating the Greeks for being unable to organise their
finances. Now, according to reports in today’s press, it turns out that
these self same governments have been pushing hard to get the Greek
government to spend like mad – on arms.
Conditions in Greece are becoming
desperate as unemployment continues to rise, wages and pensions are
slashed, many small businesses close and the country slides towards a
likely disorderly default. The pressure on ordinary working people is
relentless.
February 11 saw 300,000 people march
in the Portuguese capital Lisbon against the reform of the labour law
and the austerity measures proposed by the government as part of the
bailout agreed with the troika. The CGTP trade union, which
organised the demonstration under the slogan of “no to exploitation,
inequality and impoverishment”, described it as the largest in 30 years.
The Greek crisis has now reached the point of a pre-revolutionary
situation. On Sunday we saw the biggest demonstration in the history of
Greece. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered to protest the
reactionary deal before the Athens parliament. Here was the real face of
the Greek people: workers and students, pensioners and shopkeepers,
young and old, came onto the streets to express their rage.
IRELAND: The nineteenth century was
proving to be another age of poverty, oppression and starvation for the
mostly Catholic tenant farmers. They were still at the mercy of the
landlords who charged increasingly exorbitant rents and would not
hesitate to evict any family who could not pay. Keeping his tenancy was a
matter of life or death to the farmer and his family.
William of Orange allied himself to
two popes: Pope Innocent XI (1676/89) and Pope Alexander VIII (1689/91).
These two Popes were more than happy to support William III in his
fight against the Catholic James II, and he was equally happy to support
them in their war against France’s Louis XIV.
When the Irish Catholic priest Fr. Hugh O’Donnell decided it was time to
build a Catholic church in Belfast he had a problem: it costs a lot of
money to build a church. The Catholic population of Belfast was too
small and too poor to provide enough money, so if he had to rely on the
Catholics alone it would take forever. He had to seek help elsewhere. So
he asked the Protestants of Belfast to help him out. As you do.
There are many ways to judge the health of a society. The speculators
in the European Bond Markets judge the health of nations by the state
of their public finances; socialists and trade unionists point to the
way that old people and children are treated and especially the position
of women in society. Economists look at the volume of imports and
exports and at the rate of economic growth. One measure looks at the
scale of inequality within society.