Not that long ago, the Republic of Ireland was being
heralded as a Celtic Tiger, with a booming economy, a massive house price
bubble and a rising population as people returned home to Ireland to join the
boom. But all that seems a long time ago now as the government announces a bail-out
plan that will give the Allied Irish Bank and the Bank of Ireland 2 billion
Euros ($2.8 billion dollars) each in return for preference shares. In the case
of Allied Irish this amounts to nationalisation as the government will have 75%
of the voting rights.
After the government agreed to guarantee 100% of Irish
Bank Deposits on September 30th the ISEQ (Irish Stock Exchange)
Financial Index has fallen by 72%, house prices are still falling and, due to
the high rate of the Euro against sterling, thousands of people are travelling
over the border for cheap shopping deals. The stock market falls are put down
to bad debt and the crisis in the building industry. Ireland is supposed to be
one of the most sustainable and relatively rich and peaceful countries on
earth, but even here the crisis is beginning to hit.
The crisis of contaminated pork, which is very
important because of the importance of Irish farming, has also had an effect.
At the moment the numbers of repossessions are running in the 30s every week,
which massively understates the problem as many families are having to cut
everything else out to be able to keep the house going.
The Labour Party is in opposition to the Fianna Fáil
government, but what’s lacking is a clear Socialist programme. The Labour Party
opposed the government’s bail-out plan, but it was left to the Labour Youth
conference in November to call for more far reaching measures. The conference
resolution on finance called for, “A radical revision of the disastrous system of deregulated global
capitalism that caused this crisis, including areas outside the financial
system.”
A further motion supported, “The strong stance taken by the Parliamentary Labour Party in Dáil Éireann
against the Government’s bank bail-out scheme. Conference calls for the
nationalisation of the Irish banks.”
Ireland has changed rapidly over the last period. The
working class has been strengthened by the growth of the economy. But the
economic crisis will threaten much of the increased living standards of Irish
workers. Now more than ever we need a fighting Socialist alternative to the
Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum politics of the two bourgeois parties. Labour needs
to oppose not only the detail of the bank bail-out, but also to provide an
independent Socialist programme as an alternative which challenges capitalism
itself.
As James Connolly explained when he was criticising the
President of the TUC in 1901:
“A Socialist in the position of Mr Bowman would have
striven to infuse into the minds of his hearers a spirit of revolt against the
system that holds them as its slaves, a system that tortures them with want in
the midst of locked-up storehouses of plenty; a Socialist would have taught the
workers to manfully take their destiny, politically and socially, into their
own hands; Mr Bowman taught them to whine for capitalists to come and exploit
them. The wage received by 87 per cent of the wage workers of Ireland is less
than £1 per week; Mr Bowman tells them to achieve the industrial regeneration
of Ireland by establishing “people’s banks” out of their savings!!! Out of the
savings of men who support a family on less than £1 per week?? This is what the
capitalist Evening Herald termed a “splendid statement”.
James Connolly opposed the workers paying for the crisis all that time
ago, these days are in essence no different and more now than ever the Irish
working class needs to “take their destiny politically and socially into their
own hands”.
