OVER 150,000 people took part in nationwide protests last Saturday against the introduction of savage water charges throughout the Republic of Ireland.
Up to 100 separate demonstrations were staged in towns and cities on Saturday.
The austerity measure is a key part of the government’s plan to pay back the international bankers for their financial bailout of the state in 2010, after the six major banks in the Irish banking system collapsed under the colossal weight of their own debt.
In November 2010, the government intervened to save the bankers and the capitalist system in Ireland – at the expense of the rest of the population both rural and urban.
It had to seek a 67.5 billion euro ‘bailout’ from the EU, other European countries (via the European Financial Stability Facility fund and bilateral loans) and the IMF as part of an 85 billion euro ‘rescue programme’.
In April 2012, it was reported that the Irish government had paid one and a half billion euros to unsecured bank bondholders. An additional 1 billion euro payment was made in October of the same year. On 15 December 2013, Ireland successfully exited the bailout programme.
However, by then it was a completely different country. The more than generous treatment dished out to a handful of broken bankers was more than compensated by a savage assault on the working people and the youth of the country.
For a start, the youth of the country have simply been shipped off to Canada and Australia and anywhere else that could offer employment.
This new Ireland can now be directly compared to the Ireland after the devastation of the famine, and the forced emigration of the 1930s to 1960s.
It was not only an economic emigration, it was also completely political as the Irish ruling class sought to remove the most revolutionary section of the Irish population before the full savagery of the austerity programme got under way.
There have now been huge wage and benefit cuts for all those who have remained behind, as well as savage health cuts and closures, with a closure of hospitals and A&Es on a scale that was unimaginable before 2010.
Hundreds of towns have been gutted, with their high streets, shops and pubs closed down. They are now as quiet as cemeteries, springing to life only briefly when the very young return home from school, to homes which their older brothers and sisters have already left, looking for work overseas.
With this transformation of the country – from the Celtic Tiger, in reality a mirage floating on a sea of debt, into a rural backwater – the real role of the the trade union leadership has come out into the open.
It has held a few mass demonstrations, but has refused to mount any serious strike action, no mind the required general strike to bring down the capitalist government of the republic and bring in a workers government and socialism.
However, the situation in the Republic has now been transformed with the introduction of the water tax, in an island surrounded by thousands of miles of water, where rainfall is a constant feature of life, and where rivers and lakes abound!
The Water Tax is the last straw, and vast masses of people, workers youth and small farmers are now on the march.
They are not going to accept it and they are not going to pay it. In fact, they are now preparing for mass actions to bring down the government to go forward to carry out a socialist revolution.
At this time of a mass mobilisation the trade union bureaucracy has been forced to reveal its treachery fully.
Jack O’Connor the President of the SIPTU trade union and ex-president of the Irish TUC has refused to call for the water tax to be squashed.
He has taken his stand with the Labour section of the government and has merely called for the measure to be deferred and redrawn. Just at the moment when the trade unions must act to call a general strike and bring down the coalition, he announced that Siptu would not be taking part in the mass demonstrations.
There is no doubt that the Irish workers need a new and revolutionary leadership. Now is the time to build a section of the Fourth International in Ireland.