By Kevin McLoughlin
With a straight face, Enda Kenny says he is appealing the Apple judgement in the public interest.
It is speculated that five or six other multinationals operating in Ireland are also being investigated. If the back tax figure for Apple is €19 billion, how much was robbed altogether from the public – in the public interest?
Defending capitalist interests
Could it be €50 billion or more? To say this was done in the public interest shows that the expressions, “public” or “national interest” are just smokescreens to justify rotten policies against the interests of ordinary working-class people.
Karl Marx once said, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie “. He was correct. There isn’t a national interest. We live in a capitalist society which is broken down into class interests and the Irish establishment is siding with the multinationals against the interests of Irish working-class people.
All the main parties – Fine Gael, Fianna Fail, Sinn Fein and Labour – support a low tax regime for big business and in effect are prepared to go along with growing economic inequality and the “race to the bottom” which is seeing people’s conditions and rights and their futures, being bartered away.
Miscarriage of justice
We are presently yet another example of class bias. A young person from Jobstown is currently on trial in the juvenile court for “false imprisonment”, for the protest against Joan Burton in November 2014. The fact that a jury is not involved in a juvenile case makes it more likely that he will be found guilty. The rest of the Jobstown cases will be heard next April.
That these trials are taking place, with the possibility that people could be jailed for years because of a protest that resulted in noting more than a water balloon hitting a Minister and a delay of two and a half hours, is a disgraceful miscarriage of justice and attack on the right to protest.
It also an attempt to strike a blow against the idea of working-class people fighting back and to attack left-wing policies and ideas, as four members of the AAA, including Paul Murphy TD, will be in the dock.
A new party
Apple, Jobstown, everyday there are more and more situations that show that ordinary working-class people are not being represented and that none of the main political parties represent our interests either.
The Socialist Party thinks that the best response to the Jobstown attacks would be for the AAA, as well as fighting the court cases to the fullest, to also use the publicity that the trial engenders as an opportunity to put forward the idea that a new party for working class people needs to be built. In that way their attack can be turned into a platform to build the alternative.
The attacks from the establishment and the media on the AAA mean it will have a unique position to play a key role in helping to establish a new mass party for working-class people to fight capitalism, and that is exactly what the establishment and the state is trying to destroy.
