The largest
militant mobilisation of students in Ireland for over a decade took
place this Wednesday. Over 20,000 Irish students, from both sides of the
border, descended upon Dublin, in protest against the government
proposals to raise the registration fees for university courses in the
Republic of Ireland, from €1500 to €3000.
The Demo nstration
was organised primarily by the Union of Students in Ireland (USI)
however it was well attended by a mixture of left wing tend encies
and republican students. The protest outside the parliament in Leinster
house passed relatively uneventfully, bar the odd cre ative c hant from time to time. However the demonstra tion took a militant and confrontational turn when a bloc of around 20 00 students br oke off and marched towards the department of finance. Around 50 activists managed to occupy the foyer of the building
amidst the strong presence of Gardai riot police, cavalry and dog
squads. After a confrontation with the Gardai, some students began to
throw eggs and other missiles at the building, at which point the Gardai
moved in to forcibly remove the peaceful occupation of the foyer. What
ensued was the paranoid repression that characterises capitalist state
policing in Ireland: bloodied noses, hospitalisations, video footage of a
defenceless student being knocked uncon scious and the trigger happy use of batons.
Of
course according to media reports the militant action pursued by over
2000 students outside the department of finance, was only as a result of
the outside influence of rogue groups, this was far from the truth. The
visible presence of other organisations at these demonstrations and the resulting medi a
spin isn’t the reason for the confidence the students are now gaining
as a potential mass movement and in forming a revolutionary left wing
trend in society. As a result of these actions by the students
themselves, there is the potential now in Ireland as there is in Britian
and France for a revolutionary consciousness to develop on campus. What
undermines this is the opportunism and point scoring by organisations
unwilling to march as revolutionary students, in
short to refuse to partake in the mass movement and stand arrogantly
above it. Where this destructively manifests itself is within the
consciousness of students themselves, shattering their confidence and
dismissing their own actions as the deviations of a few rogues.
The best chance now for students to build a revolutionary tende ncy in Ireland and elsewhere is to form their own left wing bloc within t
he
student unions in Ireland, organised also into non-partisan pressure
groups like Free Education for Everyone (FEE). Within these structures
there must be dialogue and a range of ideas, however there also must be
unity and discipline in action within the left bloc of students, for the
sake of resisting the attacks on the right of every person to an
education. This must be a priority for both students and society as a
whole now, given the legacy of emigration in Ireland and the forecast
that 100,000 will have emigrated by the end of this year.
The crisis in e ducation
and the brain drain is not unrelated from the crisis that the workers
right across Europe face now. What this boils down to is the contra diction between the working class and the ruling class who can no longer to con
cede
to the workers or students the most basic of social needs, whether this
be free healthcare, social housing or education. Resulting from this
contradiction, the only chance for the salvation of the universal right
to education and the other societal problems we face can be t hrough
the revolutionary struggle for socialism and the resolution of class
contradictions, fought by and alongside the working class. Students can
have a major leadership role in this struggle, if they are willing to
set minor political and sectarian differences aside and organise
themselves into a mass movement.
The lessons we can
draw from Dublin is the need to organise as a mass student movement,
with a focus on the formation of a united left wing bloc within th e
wider movement. The necessity is also to link up with the struggles of
workers in order to contextualise the struggle for education rights as
part of the wider struggle for the working class to be recognised
politically, socially and economically. Wednesday was a major step in
the confidence and boldness of student consciousness; from here we must
build on this confidence and transform it in to an effective tool for
political struggle in Ireland and right across Europe.
