IRELAND this week has erupted in a confrontation between workers and the Irish government over soaring diesel and petrol prices resulting from the US-Israeli war against Iran and the subsequent closing of the Strait of Hormuz.
The impact of the closure of the Strait, choking off around 20% of the world’s oil and gas supplies, has caused massive increases in the cost of fuel particularly hitting countries like Ireland and the UK which rank as the biggest importers of these vital energy sources.
Fuel prices in Ireland have shot up, with petrol rising by 15% and diesel costing nearly 30% more than in mid-February.
Home heating oil has surged in price by almost 70% in a country where most of the population rely on oil to provide heating for their homes.
With taxes making up almost 60% of fuel costs, Irish workers responded with fury taking action to demand that the government slash these levies to ease pressure on farmers, road hauliers and workers.
Last month, the Irish government announced a very minor cut in fuel taxes that the opposition party Sinn Fein called ‘a pathetic token gesture that doesn’t even come close to what is needed’.
The fuel crisis boiled over into widespread action, with social media used to mobilise farmers and hauliers, with the support of workers in cities and towns, to blockade Dublin city centre on Tuesday.
Key motorways have been brought to a standstill by slow moving convoys of trucks and agricultural vehicles while demonstrators have blocked ports in Galway and Limerick.
Also blocked is Ireland’s only refinery at Whitegate, near Cork, which processes imported oil that provides 40% of the country’s fuel demand.
On Thursday, Sonny Bord, a truck driver and protest organiser, told the Telegraph: ‘This is our third day now, and it’s going to keep continuing and escalating, because the rest of the country wants to get involved’, adding: ‘There are more and more towns and counties that want to have protests. The level of support we’re getting is unbelievable.’
In the face of the country effectively facing total shut down, the Irish government has turned to the armed forces of the state to crush a rapidly developing revolutionary situation.
The army has been instructed to support the police in physically removing vehicles blocking ports and the oil refinery, with defence minister Helen McEntee claiming the escalating disruption had now ‘crossed into criminal behaviour’.
Irish workers are condemned as ‘criminals’ and threatened with the full force of the capitalist state for the crime of fighting for their lives against crippling price increases inflicted on them by an imperialist war in the Middle East.
Prices that will continue to surge into the foreseeable future despite the ‘conditional reopening’ of the Strait of Hormuz following all the damage to gas and oil infrastructure throughout the region.
With the close connections between the working class in Ireland and Britain, a revolutionary confrontation between Irish workers and youth with the armed wing of the capitalist state will have a profound effect in Britain.
The UK working class faces the same attempt by the Labour government to impose the capitalist crisis, accelerated by imperialist war, on the backs of workers and their families.
The demand today must be for the Irish and British working class to unite against their common enemy – a capitalist system that can only survive through turning to a police/military dictatorship in order to drive the working class back to the poverty era of the 1930s Great Depression.
The working class has the strength to put an end to capitalist wars at home and abroad.
The time has come for the working class in Ireland and the UK to force their trade unions to immediately call a general strike to bring down their governments and replace them with workers governments and a socialist planned economy.
Workers governments that will expropriate the banks and major industries like the giant oil companies, placing them under the control of the working class, building a society based on the needs of workers and not the profit of a handful of capitalists.
Forward to the victory of the Irish and British socialist revolution!
