Socialist Party (Ireland) Struggle, Democracy, Socialism

The resounding rejection of Croke Park II by public sector workers presents an important opportunity for working class people to challenge and defeat the austerity agenda.

It doesn't have to be like this.

The radicalising impact of the crisis in Ireland has thrown up all sorts of responses from people and organisations offering some kind of strategy for opposing austerity.

The Draft Bill legislating for X case is designed to placate reactionary elements of Fine Gael and seeks to criminalise and punish women in crisis pregnancies. The pro-choice movement must mobilise to exert maximum pressure on the government to remove the worst provisions in the draft and maintain the fight for a referendum to repeal eighth amendment.

It is said that where labour is cheap, life is cheap. This is never more so than in the recent horrific deaths of over 400 garment workers crushed in a collapsed building in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Hundreds are still missing and a further 1,000 workers were injured.

"Rashers, applying his mind to the matter, began at the beginning. Anything that lived; men, women, children; dogs, pigeons, monkeys; even lesser things like cockroaches, flies and fleas, had to eat. He had been of their company for long enough to sympathise with them all - the child rooting in the ashbin, the cat slinking along the gutter, the cockroach delicately questing along the wooden joins of the floor, its grey blue body corrugated with anxiety. These were sometimes his competitors, but more often his brothers. He could never watch a dog nosing in a bin without a feeling of sympathy and fellowship."

The release of the latest estimates from the Department of Finance in the Stability Programme Update illustrates in cold figures in whose interests austerity is being implemented. The figures prove that society and the economy are being destroyed so that the bondholders will be repaid.

The troika’s bail-out package is an economic and social disaster for the people of Cyprus. How was prosperity so suddenly transformed into penury?

The fall-out from the controversy around the flying of the union flag at Belfast City Hall brought into sharp relief the deep, sectarian divisions which remain a reality of life in Northern Ireland. Tensions were decisively heightened and feelings have been hardened in both communities.

Should a government Minister be allowed to make a far reaching statement that sharply contradicts the thrust of government policy and not be immediately challenged as to the practical implications? If the media afforded acres of coverage to such a statement, should it not then demand that the Minister spell out what concrete action she/he proposed to take if the statement was to mean anything more than empty posturing?