Protest against minimum wage cuts at the Dáil
 A small but vocal crowd of protestors gathered outside the Dáil yesterday to both protest against a cut to the minimum wage and to present a petition against the same cut to TDs. Representatives of all the opposition parties were present at the protest.
Minimum wage worker Miranda Egan Stanley addressed the assembled crowd, saying, ‘As a minimum wage worker, I already struggle as it is and I don’t know how I’m expected to survive if my minimum wage is cut by one euro. If this proposal go ... |
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'You. Me. Everybody.'
 In the weeks leading up to the budget, as the IMF were descending upon us to 'talk' and the plans were being laid out to widen the gap between rich and poor, 120 billboards ran across the country which fitted perfectly into the government rhetoric of the moment. They read 'You. Me. Everybody. We're all just grown up embryos.' By Angela Nagle
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600 March Against Budget in Cork
 At just after 5pm Wednesday evening, 600 angry marchers took to the streets of Cork city to demonstrate their opposition to the 2011 budget and the state's IMF- and EU-designed four-year plan. This article has been cross-posted from the website of the Workers Solidarity Movement.
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Activism 3.0
 (This article originally appeared on RedPepper.org)
Protests are increasingly appearing on the internet in real time in a myriad of ways. Adam Waldron takes a look at the smartphone applications that every activist needs
Karl Marx famously said that capitalism would produce its own gravedigger - and of course he meant the working class would overthrow the world order. But the arch-capitalists at Apple are rapidly arming students and trade unionists with the technology to agitate online, secret
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Protestors call for general strike
 Hundreds of people gathered outside Leinster House yesterday evening to protest against the €6 billion of cuts and tax increases contained in Budget 2011. By Alison Spillane
[Photo by Carole Craig]
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A View from Abroad
 I am not Irish. I live in Canada. I do research in Ireland and I have many friends and colleagues here, so I have been following closely the current political and economic situation. I am not directly affected by the terms of the latest austerity budget, and thus, I don't have the vested interest in its outcome that most readers of this blog do. Nevertheless, I write this intentionally as an outsider, to share one outsider's perspective.
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The creepy millionaires' budget
 (This article originally appeared on Michael Taft's Notes on the Front)
The ‘creepy’ in this budget is in the detail which the Government didn’t reveal.
Social welfare rates will fall by 4 per cent (except for pensioners). Regarding low-average earners this is what the budget tables tell us.
All low-average income earners – self-employed and PAYE (both private and public sector) will suffer considerable falls in income.
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BudgetJam budget day 'teach-ins'
 As part of BudgetJam 2010 lecturers and students at several third-level colleges staged Budget Day “teach-ins” at campus bank branches in protest at the banks’ role in the economic crisis.
Protesters gave short lectures and answered questions about the relationship between banks’ reckless lending during the Celtic Tiger years and the latest Budget austerity measures -- including the increase in fees for third-level students.
The actions took place simultaneously at 3pm at on-campus ban ... |
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The language of charity
 One way the Welfare State is being eviscerated in Ireland, as elsewhere -provided you accept the premise that Ireland had a welfare state worth talking about- is through the tried and tested language of charity.
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Claiming Our Future petition to save minimum wage
 Claiming Our Future this morning launched an emergency petition to save the minimum wage. Their initial aim is to collect 5000 signatures in 72 hours. You can add your name here. The full text of their appeal is below.
As we speak, the government is rapidly moving to ram through a serious cut to the national minimum wage. The proposed cut would slash €40 a week from the household budgets of tens of thousands of working
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We need less consensus, not more
 In a conversation on television last week a journalist from a daily newspaper emphasised the importance of getting this budget passed. By Stephen Kelly
It did not matter what "rogue leftists" were saying, the main parties in the Dáil had to get behind this budget because the eyes of the world were on us and there was no realistic alternative plan. I could continue, but I'm sure we are all familiar with the meme by now.
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Income inequality will worsen with Budget 2011
 Income, access to an adequate income and income equality emerge from the four year National Recovery Plan as key issues of concern. It is certain they will emerge as key issues from the forthcoming budget. By Niall Crowley
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The Debt Default Option
 It is one of the ironies of the current crisis that some of the most radical proposed responses are coming from relatively mainstream economists – both Irish and international. By Andy Storey
David McWilliams, for example, has explicitly called for a default on Irish debt in the following terms:
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Irish social expenditure - how do we compare?
 In a previous post I pointed out that Ireland spends substantially less on public services per person than the average EU-15 country. For all the talk of a bloated public sector, we saw that in actual money terms, our public service resources are rather slim-line.
Let’s turn our attention to social expenditure – which the OECD defines as expenditure on: Old Age, Survivors, Incapacity-related Benefits, Health, Family, Active Labour Market Programmes, Unemployment, Housing, and Other social p ... |
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Fianna Fail, EU and IMF protect the most vulnerable
 The government recently published a draft memorandum that will give legal effect to the negotiations between the EU/IMF and Ireland. Essentially the draft details, by quarter of each year, how the government intends to implement an incredibly far-reaching austerity programme to help get us back on our feet.
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Budgetary Concerns
 It's budget day tomorrow and people are all screaming and shouting.... "Not me!" We're all looking out for our lot, trying as best we can to maintain some of the material wealth we have become accustomed to. Of course, some of us have become accustomed to greater levels of material wealth than others. By Seamus Bradley
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Emigration: we still can't all live on a small island?
 It could have been almost any school in Ireland in the early 1930s. About forty five eleven- to twelve-year old boys, in short trousers, most sitting cross-legged, many barefoot. A formal occasion, in an age when photographs were still uncommon.
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Rage within the Machine
 One of the sure signs that cages are rattled amongst the architects of this crisis is the anger with which dissent is met. Earlier today Conor McCabe crystallised an excellent argument about mass media doing exactly what they're supposed to do: culminating in shouty rage which is amplified by Frontline and Liveline. Conor writes of mainstream media in Ireland:
"Today, when you turn on the radio, pick up a newspaper, or watch the TV, all you see and hear is screaming. Blind, mindless panic ... |
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Needy left behind while TD Gravy Train rolled on
 As public servant salaries come into focus with Labour’s proposed cap of €190,000, Social Justice Ireland (SJI) has contrasted exorbitant TD salaries with meagre rises in welfare payments in the past two decades. Calling on all TDs to vote against any reduction in welfare rates in Budget 2011, SJI has shown that the take-home pay of TDs rose by €980 a week since 1986 while unemployment benefit rates only rose by €143.75 in the same period. Government ministers’ take-home pay rose by mo...
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On the ground resistance
 This will be a week of protests so to help you organise your calendar we've collected a list of events below. We'll be updating it throughout the week, so if we've left anything out please mail us -
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
- with details.
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A race to the bottom
 Fianna Fail wants to cut the number of public service employees by 14,700 over the next four years. Fine Gael has mentioned numbers approaching 30,000. Even Labour proposes public service numbers by 30,000 – though on Twitter Labour stated: ‘The 30k referred to also include 10 to 12k who've already lost their job.’ This would mean, then, 18,000 to 20,000.
All this goes to show that the public sector is in for some serious downsizing regardless of who is in the next ... |
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Outsiders at Kilkenomics
 The buzz at the recent Kilkenny-based Kilkenomics economics and comedy festival was terrific. Assembled were economists and comedians bent on explaining the nuts and bolts of our economic crisis – how it came about, who was involved and what ought to be done about it. By Miriam Cotton
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Argentine IMF experience holds lessons for Ireland
Ireland in December 2010 shows many analogies with Argentina in December 2001, when it was bailed out by the IMF. This phase of negotiations cost Argentina dearly; riots, deaths, banking collapse and frozen accounts (the notorious "Corralito"). The peso was all but destroyed with 75% depreciation and this lead to the largest sovereign default in the history of modern finance.
[This article is part of the BudgetJam series on Politico. Photograph by Hilary Quinn]
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Dumbing Down: The IMF and Education
 Contrary to the optimistic view circulating in some media circles that the IMF 'bailout' 'will save us,' this piece looks at the kinds of things that happen when institutions like the IMF and its (ugly) sister institution, the World Bank, come in to 'assist' 'cash-strapped' countries.
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On Tactics & The City
 In London recently I witnessed an evolution in the tactics of demonstrations. For the first time in my life I saw a demonstration tactically out-manoeuvre the police. Anyone who has attended a demonstration in recent years will be familiar with the police tactic of 'kettling' – where the police, using lines of enormous, armed and armoured riot police, herd protestors into a contained area for hours, until eventually they allow individuals to leave, cold, hungry and exhausted, and finally round... |
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Irish Penal Reform Trust: Cuts and Crime
 In the Irish Penal Reform Trust's Budget Submission 2011 (perhaps "statement" would be better, as "submission" implies there is some sort of deliberative process going on!), we throw another dimension of the current crisis into the mix: the consequences of our budgetary decisions on crime and its associated costs.
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A Global Justice Perspective on the Irish EU-IMF loans: Lessons from the Wider World
 The following is taken from Debt and Development Coalition Ireland's publication 'A Global Justice Perspective on the Irish EU-IMF Loans: Lessons From the Wider World'.
This document outlines lessons from the global debt justice movement in responding to debt crises, provides a background to the Irish EU-IMF loans (up to the 28 November 2010 - before the loan documents were made public), and offers some recommendations from DDCI based on these lessons from our work. It also flags up recommendat ... |
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The Strange Temporality of Cowen's Back to the Future
 There is a strange temporality at play in the government's attempts to comfort its people. In advance of the bailout plan's revelation, people repeatedly suggested that they were worried about the future, about what the plan would actually mean on a day-to-day basis. Fianna Fáil sought to give confidence by spinning the entire mess 'in the best of all possible lights'. However, the manner of this spin is remarkable because of its bare-faced nature. At the beginning of his 'Plan for Recovery' sp...
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Another society is not only possible - it is necessary
 Here is an open letter in response to the Claiming Our Future event that was held in the RDS on 30 October. It was sent to us by Mark Malone and put together by students on the Community Education, Equality and Social Activism MA programme in NUIM.
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(Mis)educating our nation’s youth
Have you ever wondered why complex political-economic ideologies and policies, such as neo-liberalism, which present gross economic and social and inequalities as inevitable, necessary or even desirable can be so palatable to so many, such that those on the left are so readily cast and perceived as ‘loonies’? The following nuggets of wisdom, which ‘explain’ global inequalities, ‘underdevelopment’ and poverty, are taken from second-level textbooks currently being used in an Ir ... |
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Other people's pain
 Our politicians and our media are never so noble as when they're talking about other people's pain.
Every time we hear a minister, an economist or a journalist talking about the economic catastrophe, we hear them talk about the pain to be suffered by the tax-payer. We should listen carefully to the language they use, because language has a way of turning things into reality.
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Human rights and ‘Sharing the Pain’
 Amidst all the current mainstream rhetoric about sharing the burden of our
economic crisis, there’s been a striking lack of discussion about the
limits of the pain that can be offloaded on the worst-off. Ireland’s
obligations under international human rights law are very relevant here,
but seem to be missing in action at the moment. What follows are a few
suitably po-faced and technical legal points: read at your own risk!
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The meritocracy myth, the 'smart' economy that ain't so smart, & the 'banking model' of education
W e have seen repeated attempts over the past two years to tie justifications for government decisions - both 'common sense' ones and those now widely regarded as disastrous - to the necessity for an educated population.
Or, more directly, to the economic necessity for an educated workforce. Within this instrumentalist framework, which many mainstream media commentators and some educationalists have openly embraced, there is little, if any, room for actually educating society.
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PDF-off: the EU-IMF memo
The Department of Finance has published the Memorandum of Understanding between it and the EU/IMF. Along with the Four Year Plan, this is a document that Fianna Fail and the Green Party are using to tie a millstone around the neck of people in Ireland. It commits the government to 'front loading' (I cannot hear that phrase without thinking of babies' nappies) massive cuts in welfare and services. It is a document that fixes their plan (it is not ours) to something larger than Ireland: the... |
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“Who’s this ‘we’ paleface?”
 A brief history of “they” and “we” in Irish politics.
When an element of political discourse so taken-for-granted as to be almost invisible is suddenly replaced by its diametric opposite, we should ask what this implies. Since 1922, it has been a commonplace in Irish politics to find someone else (“them”) to blame whenever something goes wrong. Yet suddenly “we” are all in this together. What’s going on?
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The stress tests are failing the stress test
 In a lead article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's business section, Markus Frühof writes that both the Portugese and Irish banks passed stress tests last summer. In all 91 banks were stress-tested of which only seven failed the test, the German Hypo Real Estate Bank, the Greek ATE bank and seven Spanish savings banks. Less than four months later the Irish had to receive an €85 billion bailout because of the crisis in the banking sector.
[Image: Portugese Central Bank]
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The IMF sent their best twelve: Myths, Metaphors & Irish (Debt) Redemption
 The metaphor is not yet sovereign.
In a strange twist of globalisation, I listened to RTE Radio 1, driving through Oxfordshire when the announcement about the IMF came. The digital radio cut in and out, pausing and catching itself as it slipped from the 3G Network. As we passed a large born-again Christian sign reading 'Jesus died on the cross to pay for our sins,' the radio cut back in to news that the IMF had sent twelve of their best men to discipline Ireland, to bring the good news. I want ... |
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IMF history - what happened in South Korea?
 Ajai Chopra, the head of the IMF team negotiating the Irish 'bailout', previously worked in the IMF's Asia-Pacific department and led its 'rescue' mission to South Korea after a financial collapse in 1997. So how did that work out? State interventions were curtailed and the government budget was slashed (leading to massive redundancies), despite the fact that government overspending had nothing to do with the Korean crisis. Korean trade unions and other forces opposed these policies but they ... |
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Smashing Open the National Character Reserve Fund
 "Time and again you have proved you can overcome adversity. And this time you do not face the challenges alone. Europe stands by you" – Olli Rehn, 9 November 2010.
Mr Ajai Chopra (pictured), IMF Mission Chief to Ireland, left the country the other day with a parting flourish. RTE's David Murphy asked him if Irish people ought to be fearful of the IMF. Chopra responded that the IMF's role is like that of a firefighter when a house is on fire or a doctor when a patient is sick. This is fortuna... |
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Everybody knows that Ireland is broke. So many important people have told us this so many times that it simply must be true. The story is so familiar at this stage that it almost writes itself. The good times are over and we will have to stop living beyond our means. Even the risk takers and thrill seekers who made the desert bloom in the first place are on their uppers. We will all have to tighten our belts. But at least we're all in this together...By Colin Coulter
Brian Lenihan and those members of the government that now defend the bank bailout are insisting that the funds from the IMF are like an overdraft. They will only be drawn upon should they be needed. These funds have been described by him as the“firepower that stands behind the banking system”, to protect us against the worst effects of the markets.
If there is one phrase that could be used to describe the strategy used by the Fianna Fail/Green Party coalition government since this crisis began it is that there is no alternative to what they are doing. It's an opinion shared by the vast majority of the Irish media when it comes to resolving our fiscal crisis. Slashing government spending is the only way to resolve the crisis – austerity is a fact of life, and the sooner we accept that harsh truth, the better, or so the argument goes. Ther
We are not all in this together because we never were. By Michael Cronin.
When Irish bond yields were widening and the interest rates for Irish government debt were increasing in October and November, we heard a lot about how the bondholders will not accept a default on Irish debt. Here is 
There's a story taking hold already about the arrival of the IMF on Irish soil. Yes, it is a shameful moment in our history to have gotten ourselves into this position. Yes, the Government which brought us to this pass will get a deserved roasting at the next election. But now that we're reached this point, the worst is over. We've hit rock-bottom and the only way is up.
Yesterday students from NUI Maynooth staged a picket at the office of Aine Brady TD (pictured). The protest was organised by the Free Education for Everyone (FEE) campaign, who were also involved in the Castlebar secondary level walkouts. This article has been cross-posted from the 
Good news for a change. While Iceland was one of the first countries after the collapse of Lehman Brothers to get an IMF bailout, it is, according to this Reuters report published in the 
Last Friday, the Kilkenny Chamber of Commerce held its annual President's lunch at the Newpark Hotel. In an audacious move, the theme of the meal was "A Time for Optimism". And who should address this unfashionable notion? Step forward, Brian Patterson, now CEO of Vodafone Ireland, but until April 2008, chairman of the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority. By Roddy Flynn
