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national | arts and media | other press Saturday January 27, 2007 22:08 by E - SWP

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Socialist Worker

Issue contents

Bush’s ‘surge’ of destruction

The Bush administration's decision to send 21,500 more combat troops to Iraq is designed to escalate the bloody civil war in that country. It will do nothing to deal with the humanitarian crisis in healthcare and public services, nor will it alleviate the suffering of Iraqis.

SHELL TO SEA: Gardai launch vicious attack on protestors at gas refinery site

On Friday 19 January Shell's cops outside the gates of the intended gas refinery in Bellinaboy seriously assaulted three local protesters. There were about seventy people walking the route to the refinery early in the morning as they have done since work started there last October. The cops singled out one local man for harassment and tried to bully him off the road. When others spoke up for the man, a number of cops took the law into their own hands and seriously assaulted three others.

Crisis in the A&E service: Support the Nurses

A new report from the Health Service Executive’s (HSE) Accident and Emergency taskforce has used by Mary Harney and the HSE to express satisfaction and complacency about the state of emergency treatment in hospitals. The Minister for Health ‘spun’ the report to try to suggest that the majority of people were satisfied with the service. ‘90% of those that attended said they would go back to the same A&E and I think that is encouraging,’ she said. Of course they would go back to the same A&E; in an emergency people go to their closest hospital. What Mary Harney did not draw attention to, was the finding that more than half of patients were forced to wait over three hours before their first examination.

US occupation feeds sectarian conflict

Even some of those opposed to the invasion of Iraq believe that the demand for immediate withdrawal of US troops would result in chaos and a sectarian bloodbath. Although there are a terrible number of sectarian attacks on civilians and a number of instances of ethnic cleansing, dubbing the conflict in Iraq as a civil war is an oversimplification.

Sinn Fein: The party of law and order?

‘Talking left while turning right’ is a phrase used in South Africa to describe the ANC government. It refers to the fact that the Prime Minister Thabo Mbeki still issues a regular weekly bulletin to ‘the comrades’ even though he implements neo-liberal policies, even to the extent of turning water off from poor people and denying HIV victims proper treatment. All the more interesting then that the Sinn Fein leadership sought assistance from the ANC government when they wanted to convince their supporters in the debate on policing.

Somalia and Ethiopia: a new front in the ‘long war’

To understand the current crisis in the Horn of Africa you have to look at the role of the US and its “war on terror” – or the “long war” as US rulers are coming to call it. This war is no more about terrorism than previous “humanitarian” interventions were about helping local populations.

Coalition and the Left

With the general election looming, debate is hotting up about the possible combinations of parties that might make up the next government. Labour Party leader, Pat Rabbitte, has been under pressure on the question of a possible coalition with Fianna Fail, if his favoured coalition with Fine Gael and possibly the Green Party, fails to be elected. There has also been much debate, as to whether Fianna Fail might come to some arrangement with Sinn Fein, if the current Fianna Fail/PD government fails to get re-elected.

Victims of the Fashion Industry

Recently Socialist Worker looked at the working conditions of young Irish workers in a popular clothes retailer. Many of these companies use expensive advertising campaigns to claim that their goods are ‘fair trade’ or that the workers were paid a ‘living wage’. Reports show that these campaigns are nothing more than slick PR exercises and the reality is very different. Recently, there have been a massive publicity campaigns undertaken by some of the world’s largest retailers and manufacturers of clothing and other goods in an attempt to counteract bad press over the years over sweatshop labour and exploitation of workers in the developing world.

New directions at the Abbey Theatre

The Abbey Theatre appears to have survived the financial and artistic crisis of the last few years. A process of radical reorganisation has reinvigorated the company artistically and a proposal to move to the theatre to a new site in the Dublin Docklands in 2009 should provide it with the means to play a central role in the cultural life of the country.

An inconvenient history: The Belfast Docks Strike of 1907

The Belfast Docks Strike of 1907 saw Protestant and Catholic workers join together to take on the might of the Belfast Industrialists. At its height, with over 100,000 workers marching through the Shankill and up the Falls Road, the strike showed that a future free from sectarianism was possible. The early part of the 1900s saw Belfast become one of the jewels in the crown of the British Empire. Some of the largest factories, the largest shipyards and the richest capitalists lived in the northern port city.

Le Pen’s Fascists on the Run in ‘Second Life’

Class struggle spread from the real world to hyperspace last week, as a popular online universe called Second Life was gripped with running battles between anti-fascist protesters and the French far right. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National appalled many Second Life users when it opened an office in the virtual world’s Porcupine district. Anti-fascists quickly organised and protesters from the French group AntiFN and from the Second Life Left Unity group descended on the FN. Wearing anti-fascist t-shirts and brandishing placards they loudly demanded that the fascists be banned from the Second Life ‘metaverse’.

Big Brother’s Racism and Bullying

It has been a fairly exciting two weeks for couch potatoes, armchair psychologists and Celebrity Big Brother addicts with brutal scenes of bullying and allegations of racism. It would appear that Jade “Kebab” Goody who is famous for once being a contestant on Big Brother led a campaign of harassment against Shilpa Shetty who is a famous Bollywood actress.

Ireland’s hidden Nazis

In James Joyce’s Ulysses, the schoolteacher Mr Deasy remarks that the reason there is no discrimination against Jews in Ireland was ‘because she never let them in’. This strict immigration control was not the case, however, with Nazi party members in the 1930s, several of whom were welcomed into the country and given important positions in the Irish civil service and the semi-state sector.

Non-Payment can stop the Water Charges

The most common objection to the non-payment of water charges campaign is that people might be left in the lurch when and if they are taken to court. Many recall the anti-internment rent and rates strike of the 1970s. Back then, thousands who took a non-payment stance were abandoned by the very people -mainly the SDLP - who had published leaflets and newspaper adverts assuring them that ‘no arrears will be payable.’