Book Launch – Spirit of ’68: Beyond the Barricades November 18, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish History.4 comments
Book Launch
Spirit of ’68: Beyond the Barricades
VOID, Patrick Street, Wednesday 25th November 2009 7.30 pm
Speaker: Peter Bunting, Assistant General Secretary, Irish Congress of Trade Unions
Supporting Artists: Poetry Chicks, with music by Connor Kelly
The 1960s was a period of rapid economic and social change characterised by the emergence of independence movements in many Third World countries and of new social movements and new forms of cultural and counter-cultural politics, civil unrest and civil disobedience in the more economically developed societies. The issues and struggles that these different movements represented formed the context for the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland and their influence on local politics and social action leading up to and following the 5 October 1968 Civil Rights March in Derry is here examined. But international forces are always mediated through the local context and mediation generates lacunas, contradictions and compromises. How for example did traditional social movements such as the trade unions deal with civil rights demands in a communally divided society? Where were the voices of women and of gay people in the local civil rights discourse? How did the Civil Rights struggle come to be perceived as a campaign for Catholic rights? How did the Protestant population understand and experience it? These issues and others are addressed in the book’s different chapters, as is the legacy of civil rights struggles for working class people today.
Chapter contributors include: Eamonn McCann, Dermie McClenaghan, Goretti Horgan, Emmett O’ Connor, Terry Robson, Bernadette McAliskey, Míchaél Kerrigan and Jeanette. The book is edited by Pauline McClenaghan with a foreword by Peter Bunting.
Return of the MOPE: Irish History according to Gerry Adams November 18, 2009
Posted by Garibaldy in Irish History, Sinn Féin.53 comments
Just read this report from the Madison Eagle (in New Jersey (thanks Eagle for pointing out the mistake) in the US) via Bobballs via Sluggerotoole.
I think it’s fairly safe to say that the journalist writing the report has a far from in-depth understanding of Irish history and politics, otherwise Adams’ “historical overview” would have met with the contempt and ridicule it deserves. In fairness to Gerry though, I expect that some of the factual errors are the fault of the reporter and not down to Gerry.
Providing a historical overview, Adams said the problems in Northern Ireland can be traced directly to British colonization of the Irish. Ultimately, the nation was partitioned in 1916 into the independent Republic of Ireland, and the six counties of Northern Ireland, which were under direct British rule.
Hard to know where to start deconstructing so many mistakes in a single paragraph made up of two sentences. So best to leave that there.
If Adams can be excused responsibility for that, what follows next is in quotation marks. And is, frankly, jaw-dropping, and reminiscent of Adams claiming during his first trip to the States on Larry King Live I think it was, that Catholics didn’t have the vote in NI.
Spurred on by the American civil rights movement, he became involved in a peaceful movement to end the subjugation of Catholics in Northern Ireland. But the peaceful campaign ended in January 1972 when the British Army opened fire during a march, killing 13 unarmed Catholic men in a day since known as “Bloody Sunday.”
“That was followed with years of increasing persecution, imprisonments without trial, violence by both sides and the largest foreign occupation of any nation since World War II.
“A friend I knew in South Africa said he had never seen such a military concentration as he saw on the streets of Belfast,” Adams said. “You (Catholics) could be arrested, property seized, you could be whipped and flogged with a cat-of-nine-tails.”
I’m not sure what is most outrageous. The bit about the largest foreign occupation of any nation since World War II or the idea that you could be flogged with a cat-of-nine-tails in the years after Bloody Sunday. There is also of course the writing out of the fact that the organisation Adams belonged to was active before Bloody Sunday.
But it seems he topped that, although this is only reported rather than directly quoted.
The British issued shoot-to-kill orders and colluded with the Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) in a campaign of violence against the IRA. Laws were put in place that were every bit as lethal as those that bolstered apartheid in South Africa, Adams said.
Now we all – or most of us anyway – know the quote from the South African minister for justice in April 1963 saying he would swap his security legislation for one clause of the NI Special Powers Act (See page three of this Campaign for Social Justice pamphlet from 1964). And we all know that comparisons are often made between South Africa and NI. But this is plain stupid, and diminishes the injustices suffered by the people of South Africa. A bit like how saying unionists were the same as nazis diminishes what happened there.
This is especially baffling when Adams included in his talk a sensible reflection of the current reality within NI, and what is in fact the dominant fact behind the strategy he has driven his organisation towards over the last two decades or so.
“Our most compelling challenge is to make peace with ourselves,” said Adams. “We must reflect our needs, our tolerance and our strength as a people with the unionists.”
I know that there must be a temptation to keep things simple for Irish-Americans, and to exaggerate to ensure their continued interest in NI and in giving money to Adams’ party. But when Adams – who has got where he is by dealing with realities of different sorts – comes out with this sort of guff, you do have to wonder. He must know too that this sort of stuff will be picked up back home, and used by unionists to create the kind of artificial row that keeps the politics of confrontation alive. Perhaps that is part of the point. But if we are to get beyond the divisions of the people of Ireland, then telling lies to our constituencies at home and abroad about the reality of life in NI before 1969 is hardly helpful. In a way, I admire the cheek and cynicism involved in this type of then. But on the other hand, I can’t help but find it utterly absurd.
There will be those though who will be pleased to see what Adams has been saying. Ed Moloney’s Secret History of the IRA credited Adams with almost superhuman powers, and argued that he had been planning the peace process since the late 1970s. The Long War, in other words, was in fact The Long Peace Process. The following quote from the article may be misrepresenting what Adams actually said. I think Adams is talking about the 1990s and not the 1970s, and the reporter has run the two together, but if not Moloney’s version has added credibility.
By 1976, the peace process had started, but it would not bear fruit for two more decades, largely because the British demanded the IRA give up its arms before talks could begin.
“The only thing we were sure of was that we needed a dialogue,” Adams said. “The demand that the IRA stop (collecting arms) before the British would start talks seemed ridiculous.”
His former comrades now in opposition to him have made much of Gerry’s rather shaky grasp of history. We know he has “misremembered” what he sang in Long Kesh, while the likes of Marian Price and Brendan Hughes have ridiculed his denials of membership of the Provisionals. More serious though has been the ongoing debate over whether Adams and co have been lying over negotiations with the British during the hunger strikes, and whether they could have called it off earlier but chose not to to facilitate their move into politics. They might take note of the following description of Cage 11, which is a far from accurate description.
Adams was imprisoned from 1973 to 1977 in the notorious “Cage 11” in Maze Prison. More than 600 prisoners were kept in cells the size of bathrooms “with nothing but their self-worth.”
A lot of this is of course nitpicking. But there’s a serious edge to it. Unless we can move beyond the need to spout nonsense about our past, the process of reconciliation will prove much more difficult than it needs to be.
An amendment to the Constitution November 18, 2009
Posted by Tomboktu in Blogging, Bunreacht na hÉireann, Ethics, Internet.1 comment so far
I am glad to see Fine Gael catching up with the blogosphere.
This proposal was posted on livejournal some months ago. (I do like the proposed short title in section 2(2).)
———————–
Twenty-seventh Amendment of the Constitution Bill, 2009
________
As initiated
________
________
TWENTY-SEVENTH AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION BILL,
2009
________
Mar a tionscnáodh
________
ARRANGEMENT OF SECTIONS
Section
1. Amendment of Article 35 of the Constitution.
2. Citation.
________
TWENTY-SEVENTH AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION BILL,
2009
________
BILL
entitled
AN ACT TO AMEND THE CONSTITUTION.
WHEREAS by virtue of Article 46 of the Constitution any provision of the Constitution may be amended in the manner provided by that Article:
AND WHEREAS it is proposed to amend Article 35 of the Constitution:
BE IT THEREFORE ENACTED BY THE OIREACHTAS AS FOLLOWS:
1–(1) Article 35 of the Constitution is hereby amended as follows:
(a) in the Irish text – [...],
(b) in the English text –
(i) the insertion of “except as provided for in section 6” after the word “office”, and
(ii) the insert of the following section after section 5–
“6 The remuneration of a judge may be reduced during her or his continuance in office only when and to the same extent that a reduction in pay is applied to a significant proportion of workers who remuneration is supplied from public funds.”.
2–(1) The amendment of the Constitution effected by this Act shall be called the Twenty-seventh Amendment of the Constitution.
(2) This Act may be cited as the Twenty-seventh Amendment of the Constitution (Putting Manners on the Judiciary) Act, 2009.
_______________________________________________
AN BILLE UM AN SEACHTÚ LEASÚ IS FICHE AR AN mBUNREACHT,
2009
TWENTY-SEVENTH AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION BILL, 2009
________
EXPLANATORY MEMORANDUM
________
Purpose of Bill
The Bill is designed to amend the Constitution in order to achieve the following purpose: To make it constitutional for the pay of members of the judiciary to be reduced provided that this is done in a way and at a time that is similar to any reduction that applies to other public sector workers.
What news from the economy? What indeed… November 17, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, Irish Politics.81 comments
Ms Quinlan [Chairman of ISME] said cuts were necessary in public-sector pay and numbers. “Partnership has driven up pay in this country through the benchmarking process, and it’s been very detrimental to small businesses.
“We’ve seen . . . where businesses have been cutting salaries right across the board, and yet we have to listen to David Begg coming out and saying no private-sector salaries have been cut. That’s just a joke. It’s just wrong.
Well, I doubt David Begg was so stupid as to say no private sector salaries have been cut, but since she’s not offering any evidence about salary cuts across the board – and to date the CSO does not support her contention perhaps the jokes on her. Indeed a partial survey – partial in the sense that it is limited and we don’t know what sectors were surveyed – by Watson Wyatt, a consultancy firm, released last week shows that of the 100 companies surveyed in Ireland by it:
Significantly, 26 per cent of Irish firms surveyed had introduced pay cuts, more than twice the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa)average. This also represented a 50 per cent increase on the number of Irish firms who reported salary cuts in a preliminary survey carried out by Watson Wyatt in May 2009.
It’s intriguing to note that WW only surveyed 700 firms in total so if Ireland comprises 1/7th of the total one wonders how that impacts on the numbers. And it also finds that Irish companies had…
…the highest rate of workforce reduction among EMEA nations, with close to 80 per cent of Irish respondents reporting changes to their organisational structure and 61 per cent reporting lay-offs. This compared to an EMEA average of 48 per cent reporting redundancies.
61 per cent seems very high. Again, how representative all this is is difficult to say. But the pay cuts figure is a long way from ‘across the board’. And:
The survey also found that pay freezes have been more prevalent among Irish employers than in those in other EMEA markets, and firms said they expected this trend to continue in to 2010. Some 75 per cent of surveyed Irish companies already had a pay freeze in effect and a further 14 per cent expected to implement one within the next 12 months.
The average pay increase predicted by respondent Irish companies for 2010 was zero.
Almost half of Irish respondents reported that they would pay out lower employee bonuses for this performance year, and up to 35 per cent claimed they would not be paying any bonuses for 2009.
So just under 2/3rds of Irish companies surveyed said they would be paying bonuses this year. Hmmm. Some 3/4′s were implementing pay freezes (albeit bonuses were still being paid, nice that given that bonuses tend to be for certain sectors inside employments)…
Meanwhile this news from Industrial Relations News, and published on the 11th of this month. Curiously, unlike reports from the ESRI on the very same topic, this hasn’t hit the Irish Times. Now why would that be? The heading is…
Public/private sector wage gap ‘prone to oversimplification’ – CSO
And in an accompanying report Colman Higgins notes that:
The latest of many recent studies of the private/public sector wage gap shows that when personal and protective services are excluded, the gap is significantly smaller.
The study – conducted by Patrick Foley and Fiona O’Callaghan of the Central Statistics Office – also found that when the size of the enterprise was included as a variable, the gap was significantly lower.
Do go on…
They argue that this highlights the issues around trying to establish a definitive figure for the public/private sector wage differential, pointing out that рany type of regression analysis that attempts to directly compare earnings across the public and private sector is prone to oversimplification. The estimates they found, using the Blinder-Oaxaca decompositionу method, varied from 11.5% using unweighted data, to 15.9% using weighted data.
So, what are the headline figures?
They calculated a public sector premium based on excluding personal and protective services because groups such as the Gardai, prison officers and military personnel have no real comparable occupation in the private sector.
The impact of doing so was to dramatically reduce the average public-private wage gap, which using the ordinary least squares (OLS) method reduced for males from 7.2% to 2.7% The size of this reduction was even greater when using weighted data.
2.7%? Reduced further when using weighted data?
Equivalent figures for females showed a reduction from 12.7% to 11.5% and for both male and female the reduction was from 10.0% to 7.1%. The larger gap for male seems to reflect the largely male workforce in the public sector personal protective services. It seems that overall, about three percentage points of the general public sector pay premium can be attributed to this factor.
I think the female figures are very very interesting. And I can think of a few reasons why that might manifest itself, none of which reflect well on the private sector.
But don’t stop there…
Also, when large firms in the private sector are compared with public sector employers (which are almost all large), the pay gap is significantly lower. This large firmу effect reduced the public sector pay premium by about the same five percentage points margin across a range of calculation methods and different weightings of data.
Public service unions have argued in the past that pay comparisons should be made on the basis of large private sector firms rather than all private sector companies. However, small business advocates would argue that all private sector companies support the public service through taxation, so the relevant pay gap is that which covers all companies.
I find the argument as to whether large or small is more reflective of the public sector a bit odd. It seems to evade the point that the PS is different, that’s it’s structured, organised and shaped to different ends than the private sector. None of this is immutable. But I find it also odd that people would try to compare PS employments with all private sector employments including smaller ones. Having worked with the former and in the latter and in larger private sector organisations my own sense is that culturally and in structure the PS in the main is more similar to the latter. How could it be otherwise?
Meanwhile…
Pay comparison surveys with top private sector posts п such as those undertaken by the Review Body on Higher Remuneration – have been the main method of determining pay for top public sector posts for some years, and without those, this discount would apply at a much lower level.
However, if the predicted pay cuts in the forthcoming report from the Review Body materialise, this situation is likely to change in the very near future.
Do they mean that PS wages will generally dip well below the private sector?
By the way, I have searched fruitlessly for the same high profile treatment in the Irish Times of this report as ESRI reports which have come to the opposite conclusion. You know, a front page of the website piece, main body of the paper article, etc… etc…
Irish Economy, to its credit, progressive-economy and Michael Taft have referenced it… but of our paper of record to date… Nothing I can find up to yesterday morning.
Here’s the thing. I don’t expect beyond certain terms the Government not to justify its own course of action (and that point was rightly made in a comment last week), that’s what Governments do, albeit it might be useful – as well as being accurate – for the Government to accept that there are other alternatives but that this is the one it has fixed upon. Then perhaps the alternatives might have some chance of being articulated so that the public, of which the Government is representative, might have some chance of coming to their own decision as to what is the best course forward. Chances are that that might well be a position supportive of the Government. That’s the way things go in democracies.
I do however expect that the media might give the same billing to the CSO Report that it – breathlessly – has to every ESRI Report that has been produced. It’s not that I think the CSO Report is the last word on this matter, but I do suspect that the continuing lack of an absolute read on the public sector private sector pay gap indicates that this is far from as cut and dried as some of the more enthusiastic proponents appear to believe. Indeed this tallies with my own experience that wages between both sectors vary depending on what and where. That it doesn’t appears to demonstrate that the media itself is complicit in shaping a very particular world view as this situation unfolds. Whatever our view on these matters that – surely – is problematic.
Scott Millar Interview and More Reviews November 16, 2009
Posted by Garibaldy in Irish History, Workers' Party.40 comments
Thanks to commentator Wilcox for the links to a very interesting, and revealing, interview about the writing of The Lost Revolution, which sheds further light on its origins, and on the authors’ own backgrounds. It covers a lot of interesting ground, including the supposed role of the Svengalis Johnston and Harris, The WP and women’s liberation, and the fall of the Wall amongst other things, and is well worth listening to. The interviewer, Michael Fitzgerald, is able to draw on his own experiences to add some interesting colour to the interview as well. Of course, I should add that The WP would disagree with a lot of the analysis offered.
Millar interview part one and part two.
I’m also putting a link to the Socialist Worker review, again provided by Wilcox, and a review talked about already in comments, from the Sindo. The Socialist Worker review concentrates on developments up to the early 1970s, and then characterises The WP’s position on the north as almost indistinguishable from the unionists. Which perhaps says more about the SWP’s stance of “critical support” for the Provisional campaign than it does about the book, or in fact the position of The WP.
Gilmore Backing Off? November 16, 2009
Posted by Garibaldy in Irish Labour Party.11 comments
More flesh on the bones of his plans from Eamon Gilmore yesterday, as reported in the Irish Independent. He seems to be backing off from the attitude reported previously.
But Mr Gilmore yesterday continued to stick to the line that his party wanted to reduce the €20bn public sector wage bill through changes in overtime, premium payments and changed work practices — rather than direct wage cuts.
“If you try to do it by unilaterally imposed cuts that are not negotiated with people, all you will end up with is industrial action, strife and conflict which is going to do even more damage to the country’s reputation,” he said.
Mr Gilmore also ruled out cutting or taxing child benefit payments. But he went on to outline other parts of his party’s cutbacks plan: a €750m cut in capital spending, a €1bn cut in tax reliefs for landlords and other groups, a third tax rate on individual incomes of over €100,000 and a carbon tax.
He told RTE’s ‘This Week’ that these measures were necessary because “Fianna Fail has had the country’s credit card for the past number of years and the bill has now come in for that credit card”.
The Left Archive: Is There a Third Way? New Political Strategies for the Millennium: A Discussion Paper Produced by the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union – 2000 November 16, 2009
Posted by irishonlineleftarchive in ATGWU, Irish Left Online Document Archive.3 comments
This is a different sort of addition to the Archive, and many thanks to Leveller on the Liffey for forwarding it. It consists of a discussion document produced by the ATGWU on a political strategy for the 2000s.
As it notes in the preamble…
Is There A Third Way? is a contribution to the debate [on what strategies can propel the Left and the Labour Party to a position of major political influence].
Given that it asks the question Is There A Third Way, it will hardly be a surprise that it provides an answer.
The solutions are not that surprising either, but interesting to see such a relatively comprehensive outline of strategy and a clear aversion to Fianna Fáil and a sort of disdain towards Fine Gael (The Main Opposition – But Not Much of One). And it is explicitly class based, noting that while Fianna Fáil introduced programmes of modernisation these ‘have one thing in common – to appeal to the widest base possible in the separate social groups. They pursued these programmes within a ‘national’ rather than a class framework. That is why when it comes to European comparisons, Fianna Fáil is unique, neither ‘Christian Democratic’, ‘Tory’ or Labour. But it is the closest we have had to a governing social democracy’.
That last is an interesting admission. Although it is possible to see Fianna Fáil as in some respects a precursor of post-Christian Democratic parties on the continent, albeit with that strongly nationalist tinge.
There’s also some good analysis on what subsequently would prove to be the roots of the fiscal crisis…
Despite ‘social partnership’ Ireland has an economy based on the Anglo-American model rather than the continental social market. We have some of the worst social infrastructure in the industrial world. We have massive under-investment in education, health, childcare, public transport and community supports…
And it’s not hard to wonder whether social partnership was the cleverest bait and switch pulled in Irish politics on the left. What is even more telling is the following…
If you’re trying to buy a house or travel into work in an urban area, need childcare or have to go to the public emergency ward, the benfits of economic growth are illusory.
A good decade later that that can be reiterated almost verbatim…
In some ways it seems a world away from where we are today, but with Labour now (2009) riding high in the polls there is considerable food for thought for leftists and progressives of all stripes and none.
Harris: I could have saved The WP November 15, 2009
Posted by Garibaldy in Workers' Party.15 comments
Having recently visited Planet Myers, and his version of The Workers’ Party’s relationship to the eastern European socialist states, we are today treated to free entrance to The Imaginarium of Eoghan Harris on the same topic. Harris begins by arguing that in the coverage of the fall of the Berlin wall, the Irish media has missed its only significant impact on Irish politics – its effect on The Workers’ Party. This has been , he entertainingly says, an exercise in airbrushing history that Stalin could have learned from (and perhaps inspired by Myers’ concern over a missing file in the Irish Times archive?).
However, we might question Harris’ grasp on history (and given this load of nonsense about where Dev got his ideas on religious toleration from, that of his most recent acolyte too). What was it that meant that while other Communist and workers’ parties faced collapse, The WP had its best ever election result in 1989, overtaking Labour as the second biggest party in Dublin? Eamon Smullen’s Department of Economic Affairs had injected some social democratic ideas that vaccinated it against the consequences of the collapsing eastern regimes. The fact that the wall fell five months later is somehow ignored in this account, although he does say that De Rossa’s Presidential speech that year helped protect The WP from any backlash against events in China. I suspect myself, however, that the amazing WP result in Dublin reflected the hard work put in on the ground over two decades and the unashamed commitment to representing the interests of working people against the interest groups that dominated state and society. The reality of The Workers’ Party in community groups, trade unions, local government, and the Dáil is what people voted on: why would events elsewhere change that?
However, The WP missed its chance to overtake the Labour Party once and for all. Why was this? All because Eoghan’s now hard-to-get The Necessity of Social Democracy (Eoghan mustn’t be a fan of the CLR) was suppressed by the Party, and Eamon Smullen disciplined for publishing it. We are then treated to the Harris account of how the “Garland Old Guard” (interesting that Goulding is not mentioned – obviously he remains on the list of iconclastic heroes) and the Student Princes aligned to force De Rossa off the path of social democracy mapped out by Smullen (recte Harris) at the 1990 Ard Fheis. Thereafter, all the fresh thinkers, idealistic and imaginative people were forced out. Yes that’s right. No-one who has stayed loyal to The WP all these years is in any way motivated by ideology and a vision of a better future.
Eamon Smullen was subjected to two days of diatribes, “disciplined” and driven from the Workers’ Party — the name was his — which he had transformed from a narrow nationalist sect into a successful progressive workers’ party.
I could have sworn I’ve read something like this before.
Twenty years on, those who behaved badly should stop brazening it out. Had they published the Necessity of Social Democracy in 1990, Ireland would now have a powerful non-nationalist party of social democracy. But they blew it, they know they blew it, and they should admit they blew it.
And here we have the rub. The mere act of publishing Eoghan’s pamphlet would have made the last two decades entirely different in Irish politics. Although given that Senator Harris has been singing the praises of the Ireland created in the last two decades, I wonder why he would want such a party to exist?
Gilmore warns Government against creating class conflict November 15, 2009
Posted by Garibaldy in Irish Labour Party, Irish Politics.33 comments
Times Change. Oh, and by the way, Eamon, it’s the very nature of the economic and social system itself that means the Republic is facing “a dark abyss of serious social division”. Serious social division is a fact of life in this country. It didn’t just emerge with the current crisis. Just ask the children and their parents living in poverty. Labour – the Party of Connolly and Larkin.
