Today marks Occupy Dame Street's 100th day of occupation in the shadow of the Central Bank of Ireland building in central Dublin. It is a good time for us to reflect on where we are now, and where we can go from here.

The last 100 days have been exhilarating and exhausting for those of us involved in this occupation. There have been moments of great hope, but we must also recognise there have been moments of difficulty. Today we mark 100 days of direct opposition to the economic suffering being imposed on Ireland and we look to the future and the alternatives we can create together.

In our demonstrations we saw the positive and hopeful energy of vast diversity of people in this city who were no longer prepared to obey this government's demands, on behalf of the EU and IMF, that we tighten our belts and give in to unnecessary and unfair use of public money.

We have made many new friends, and forged new alliances with people who saw, as we did, that this country and its institutions are increasingly run in the interests of the privileged few - the 1% - and at the expense of the many - the 99%. The Central Bank plaza became a key site in the city for dialogue, learning, song, poetry, friendship and resistance.

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Lately, I find myself having a recurring conversation. The people and the places change but the basic premise stays the same. I meet friends whom I haven’t seen in some time, I ask them how they are, what they’ve been up to.  They shrug. “Nothing,” they say.  They are either unemployed or working in an area divorced from that of their training - part-time in a bar perhaps. These are people from a wide variety of backgrounds: qualified carpenters and electricians, science and engineering graduates, graphic designers and academics. When I tell them I am working I suffer from a vague sense of embarrassment, as if I somehow cheated and escaped the recession that we are all embroiled in. I know in reality this is not the case. I am also caught up in the noxious landscape of austerity. I may not be as victimised as some others but I am not immune. I am the 99%.

This very savvy tagline is, of course, that of the global Occupy movement, which is also currently visible in various cities across Ireland. In one sense, this is a piece of inspired branding. But the critique underlying the statement is also significant. It stands for a number of things, but I will mention just two. Firstly, it stands for the increasing concentration of wealth within fewer and fewer hands (the 1%). Secondly, it aims to mitigate the possibility of a protest movement being divided and conquered by effacing internal differences under an umbrella banner (the 99%).  Occupy is a movement that incorporates multiple peoples and perspectives; multiple political aspirations and pessimisms. It unites all of these under a very simple principle: that the system as it currently stands is not fair and something needs to change.

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Without Guns (unmastered) by Niamh de Barra

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Harry Browne at Occupy University

Recently a number of educational projects linked to social movements have emerged in Dublin. The three described here are Occupy University, the Provisional University and Praxis. All three share not only a critique of the neoliberalisation of higher education but, perhaps more importantly, a commitment to re-appropriating education by engaging in autonomous or independent educational activities outside of the university context. Rather than limiting themselves to the critique of the existing university each of the three projects is an experiment in creating alternatives.

Moreover, the alternatives developed are directly linked to social movements and, in the case of Praxis, community activism. This has created an interface between research and teaching, which all too often remain within the university, and activism. The mutual engagement with takes place makes for a more egalitarian, inclusive and politicised education as well as strengthening social movements.

Occupy University

Occupy University, unlike the others, was very much an ad hoc development, emerging as a response by a number of university-based activists to the sense of possibility that accompanied the beginning of the Occupy Dame Street movement. Despite being the youngest and most improvised of the three projects, OU has hosted over 77 talks, discussions and workshops outside the central bank, making it one of the most consistent fixtures at Occupy Dame Street. OU revealed, certainly to myself as a younger activist, the existence of a layer of researchers and teachers anxious to make a connection with social movements. In the context of the overwhelming challenges we face today, not to mention the economic mystification and ideological saturation we encounter in the mainstream media, creating spaces for critical education takes on a sense of urgency. Since the first OU discussion on 11 October, there has been a public space on the streets of Dublin were people could discuss ‘taboo’ topics, such as taxing wealth, the critique of representative democracy or the role of civil disobedience. Recently, as their first semester came to a close, OU have begun discussing future projects. Some of these may include more focused themes around which to organise events, a greater focus on intervening within the university, and the creation of spaces of reflection in and for the occupy movement.

Some reflections on the OU so far can be found here.

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Gene Kerrigan summed up the State We’re In in one word: screwed. He’s right, of course. We are screwed. It’s patently obvious that we’re screwed. The rapidity of Ireland’s descent into screwedity, and the depths to which we have plunged, is unparalleled in what the IMF calls the “advanced economies”. We are, let’s say, very seriously screwed.

One would think that, given the seriousness of this screwedness, this state we’re in; given the effects of this crisis on our public services, our welfare system, our low-paid workers, our emigrating thousands, our jobless thousands; given the despair, the hopelessness, the misery being suffered by so many people all over this country because of stupid decisions made and stupid policies pursued; one would think, given all of this and more, that the months since February’s election would have seen some serious political arguments being played out as the country, and the country’s politicians, grappled with the screwed up state we’re in.

But not much that has happened over the past nine months suggests the seriousness of the state we’re in is being taken seriously. Labour and Fine Gael have spent their bedding in period playing political dress-up, rather than articulating any kind of political position.

Labour’s election strategy was simple – they believed voters wanted a government focused on matters of national concern, a government with a majority overwhelming enough to allow them to focus thus, and so they early on ruled out any possibility of a Left alliance (with Roisín Shortall infamously saying that “It would not be in the interests of the country to have that kind of ragbag government” when asked if her party would form a coalition with Sinn Féin and the ULA). Whether Labour themselves believed stable government was in the national interest is probably irrelevant (they got what they wanted, and we are where we are) – but certainly their behaviour since coming to power would suggest questions of stability and the national interest were never uppermost in their minds. All that talk of stability, and their alignment with Fine Gael in the interests of creating it, was an electoral strategy calculated to maximise their vote, and nothing else.

The deeply self-righteous Fine Gael probably did believe that strong-stable-government-in-the-national-interest was needed – as long as it was led by them, obviously. On election night the party elite no doubt predicted an easy ride – sure, ‘tough decisions would have to be made’, but those decisions could always be blamed on Fianna Fáíl. In the meantime, Fine Gael would go down in history as the leading partner in a coalition government that put politics to one side to focus on pulling Ireland out of crisis. The party’s claws would be hidden in plain sight – Labour cast as the party of cuts, and Fine Gael the good guys who kept income and corporation taxes low in the interest of jobsgrowthbusinessgoingforward.

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Part of the beauty and frustration of the Occupy movement is that we don’t know what it will do next.

But, as the fateful year of 2011 draws to a close, we can at least try to get a grip on what it has done so far. ‘Archiving’ Occupy is complicated, despite and because of the millions of words and tens of thousands of hours of audio and video that have been devoted to the phenomenon and that have emerged from within it.

But there are a few coherent streams of activity that we can look back upon and describe with some certainty. One of them is ‘Occupy University’, the series of talks/workshops/lectures that has run at Dublin’s Occupy Dame Street, and which started just a few days after the occupation itself began in October.

Anyone who has spent time at an Occupy site knows that the experience is to a great degree about conversations. Occupy University has been an attempt to create some specific conversations on topics of relevance to the movement, including but not limited to the economics of the current crisis and the role of social movements in addressing it. People with a wide range of backgrounds and expertise have come to the Dame Street camp - and occasionally, in bad weather, to the pub across the road - to help get the conversations started.

The result has been a learning experience in every sense of those words, one that offers a vision for how we share knowledge and information outside the increasingly commercialised structures of the so-called education system. And it hasn’t cost a cent.

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A while back, I wrote about something I called “economism”, in a spurt of self-parodic buzzwordising. The cornerstone of this was that people had simply stopped viewing the Irish budget as a socio-economic document, and viewed it instead as an accounting exercise; and that only someone bound by a sociopathic devotion to ledger-sheet politics could possibly find Ireland’s economic policy defensible.

Back in 2008 and 2009, the cuts seemed to be inflicted as a result of desperate, bludgeoning, selfish incompetence. Just as Ireland had reacted to BoomTime (cue hollow laughter) by cutting as many taxes as it could, it responded to recession by cutting public services with quiet savagery. It became a simple truism that Ireland had been successful because it was A Good Place To Do Business, and very, very few voices even wanted to think any deeper than that. In much the same way that the Tories believe that the Private Sector will drive the UK’s growth once the state is rolled back, because – um – well that’s what business does, successive Irish governments believed it would naturally get out of this rut if we only kept cutting, because that’s how Celtic Tigers work.

If there’s a difference between the Fianna Fáil government and today’s Blueshirt-piloted brigade, it’s simply that Noonan, Kenny, Varadkar et al do what they do out of ideology rather than cronyism. Fine Gael have long styled themselves as the respectable, pro-business, small-state party who wear well-ironed suits. Fianna Fáil treated the IMF as enemies over whom they had failed to pull a fast one; interest rates on bailouts aside, Kenny sees them as partners. Shrinking the public sector and cutting back on Ireland’s excuse for a welfare state is something he’s more than happy to do. Eamon Gilmore, meanwhile, has apparently decided that it’s Frankfurt’s way after all. Add a comment

It starts with an acknowledgement: we do not live in the best possible world.

The crisis we are living through has layers. If we take a small step back we see that nearly one in four Irish people are now experiencing two or more types of enforced deprivation. Our national suicide rate is the highest in the history of the state. 40,000 of us had emigrated in the year to April 2011, a 45% increase on the same figure last year. About 30% of Irish people between 18-24 are unemployed. We are not in this together, either. Many people will live through this winter without the means to heat their homes or put food on the table. Medical bills, let alone Christmas presents, are luxuries they cannot afford. Yet 36,000 people – Ireland’s 1% – own €130.2billion in wealth. That’s roughly 77% of the country’s entire GDP last year. And they’re getting richer.

Another step back sees the financial crisis as a bonfire of the myths of our system of governance. Democracy has been fatally undermined at the behest of the markets, big finance and the German and French governments who are their enforcers. It was corrupted by coercion and distorted fundamentally when democratically elected governments in Italy and Greece – whose ancient civilisations are the roots of the democratic republic – were replaced by technocratic regimes headed by bankers. Referenda were discouraged, as were any other forms of what José Manuel Barroso dubbed “political games”. There is now little doubt whether our representative democratic system is more representative – of the interests of those in power – or democratic – one that puts power in the hands of the people. It has largely been reduced to a mechanism for gaining our consent to the rule of the élites.

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