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Comments (5 of 5)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5Let's start circulating the phone numbers and e-mails of every TD, and their clinics, and let's fill their mailboxes with complaint. Pack their clinics, and make sure they get no smiley photo-ops from here on in.
Let's get a real grass roots momentum going.
The problem with the Saturday protest was that most of the marchers were from the public service and left-wing groups. Except for a few high-profile groups with specific issues like the Waterford workers and the Dublin bus-workers, the private sector was largely absent.
I would fear that far from this being the precurser of a general strike, this was merely a token gesture by working people who have accepted in their hearts that cuts and job-losses are inevitable. The private workers stayed at home and probably have no appetite for a fight. They are keeping their heads down, accepting pay-cuts, and just trying to keep their jobs and body and soul together. The public sector workers are even less likely material for any prolonged action. Most of them are locked into mortgages, and history tells us that servicing their ticket to middle-class house-ownership comes much higher on their list of priorities than protest.
Over the weekend a new worry began to be voiced privately by the better off public servants and their union representatives. They fear that the government might take the unions at their word and offer a rebalancing of the levy to take most of the workers earning less than €30K out of the net. The corrollary is that the middle and higher-ranking administrators, teachers, doctors, and other public-service professionals would have to make up the shortfall.
Had this melt-down happened prior to 1989 it might have gone somewhere. Unfortunately the credibility of left-wing solutions died with the Soviet Union. None but the highly committed minority already involved in radical politics really sees socialism as a solution to the crisis. Most believe that it would only make matters worse by causing a flight of capital (the small bit the bankers didn't blow) and enterprise.
The more real (but equally slight), and more frightening possibility is a lapse into a period of right-wing authoritianism on the South American model as the middle-classes in both public and private sectors, faced with fiscal collapse and hyper-inflation, see "strong" government as their best hope for preserving their assets and privileges.
We live in interesting times.
It might be easier for people to use www.contact.ie to email all TDs than copying and pasting from the Impact list.
Regards,
Mark Conroy
keeping a website record of TDs voting records? A user-friendly website where we could see who is voting for what in the Dail might go some way to helping people make the connection between voting for gobshites and the gobshitery they inevitably get up to afterwards.
Goerge Monbiot was able to make mince of a UK politician recently by referring to a UK website like this called TheyWorkForYou.com:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/10/haz...nbiot
TheyWorkForYou.com is a great website and certainly one that Irish activist should look towards developing. It would take a lot of dedicated work to pull off though.
It was actually part of the inspiration for my site Contact.ie.
Mark.