Grassroots Gathering 9: Report Back

national | miscellaneous | news report

Tuesday April 05, 2005 10:58

by sovietpop - wsm/dgn

The 9th Grassroots Gathering was held in Dublin at the weekend, seventeen workshops, three gender groups, two plenary’s, one speech, one video, one great night drinking, four meals later and we all are totally exhausted yet re-energised.

Naturally there were problems; we couldn’t show all the videos we wanted, some of the workshops had to be changed at the last minute.

Throughout the weekend, people talked about the problems faced by activists and also the problems with the way we act as activists. In the closing circle people spoke about the need to be more inclusive, to be aware that the language we use (all those three letter anronyms) can be off-putting, that we need to look at why there weren’t as many women as men at the meetings, at our need to create safer communities.

For me, grassroots is a work in progress. At each gathering we experiment, we look at how we might try to do things differently, we learn from each other.

And in this spirit of experimentation, it was decided that the next grassroots should be in a rural location. Galway grassroots (with the help of Cork grassroots) agreed to organise this, details to follow later.

It was impossible to go to every meeting, so perhaps others who were there can report on the meetings they attended.

I did manage to attend the talk on Friday night by Dave Doughlass miner, num official and anarchist. I would guess about 80-100 people attended. For reasons of time it wasn’t possible to show a video about the miners strike (but it should be possible to show this later).
Dave Doughlass spoke for an hour about his experiences. He grew up in a mining community. He described how these were communities you were born into. People became miners because their fathers and their grandfathers were miners. Miners had ßmixed feelings about the job they did, on one hand they were proud of to be miners and to belong to mining community, on the other hand they hated the work that they did, which was dirty, dangerous and difficult. In his speech he described how different mines paid different rates, so that miners in Wales for example, could be paid much much less than miners in Nottingham. Some mines were easier to work than others, had better technology than others.
He also described how the NUM was organised around autonomous branches; it was a very de-centralised organisation. A lot of his speech addressed the issue of whether or not the miners should have had a ballot about the strike and the issue of donations of money from Libya.
I think that younger people in the audience perhaps might wonder why so much time was spend on issues that, with the passage of time, seem relatively unimportant. But for those of us who remember the strike, remember the media onslaught which consequently used these two issues to attack the miners.
Dave Doughlass said that Libya did indeed donate money. Yet the story doesn’t end there. The Libyan government also said that although they raised money to give to the miners, it was stolen and they never deposited it in miners’ bank accounts. This is strange, because money did arrive in this bank account (and is still there to this day). Dave Doughlass asked the question, if the Libyans didn’t put the money there, who did? He believes the British state did, so that they could then use the link with Libya to discredit the strikers.
He also spoke about the about the poverty and hunger felt by the strikers. He said he couldn’t talk too much about this, especially about the miners children, because he found it too upsetting.
He concluded that in his opinion the defeat of the strike was never inevitable. Thatchers autobiography and the autiobiographys of some of the coal board leaders both say that if the miners had managed to hold out for days longer, they could have won.