IRISH government plans to increase university fees from 1,500 euros to 2,500 euros led to Wednesday’s 40,000 strong students march in Dublin, and to clashes with the riot police guardians of Irish capitalism.
The slogan of the students was ‘Education not Emigration!’ The latter is the traditional bourgeois solution to the crises of Irish capitalism – exporting Ireland’s youth and working class all over the planet, at their own expense, so that those who remain at home can live off their remittances.
But this is neither the days of the potato famine, the hungry 1930s, nor the bleak post second world war decades. Today’s Irish working class and youth will not accept banishment for the good of the bosses and bankers – human trafficking on a massive scale – as the Irish students showed yesterday.
In fact, the only way to achieve ‘Education and not Emigration’, plus jobs for all, is through carrying out the Irish socialist revolution, to put an end to capitalism. The forces to do this job are now coming onto the scene in huge numbers.
There is no doubt that the students are leading the way for the whole of the working class.
More than 40,000 youth demonstrated on the streets of Dublin on Wednesday. Like the youth of Greece, France and the UK they have not the slightest intention of being turned into refugees or paupers to pay for the world crisis of capitalism.
Ahead is an unprecedented bourgeois assault. The Irish unemployment rate is currently 13.6 per cent, with over 450,000 unemployed. The total is set to grow in the new year as the savage cuts bite.
At the moment the Irish budget deficit is at British levels of around 12 per cent of GDP. The EU is demanding that it be slashed to three per cent by 2014, at the expense of the Irish people.
The Irish banks are being fed over 100 billion euros of taxpayers’ and EU cash, but remain just as crippled as they were at the start of the crash, in 2008.
Ireland has to cut 14bn euros by 2014, and yesterday the coalition’s Finance Minister, Brian Lenihan was set to announce six billion euros of budget cuts for the year 2011-12.
Welfare payments are to be cut, taxes will go up and public spending will go down, alongside savage attacks on every section of the working class, from youth to pensioners.
The student demonstration in Dublin is therefore the start of a general uprising of Irish workers and youth.
The main issue in this struggle is resolving the crisis of leadership that grips the Irish working class, and is holding it back.
The leadership of the Irish TUC is refusing to lead a fight against the savage bourgeois solution to the capitalist crisis, and is leaving the workers and the youth to be pushed out of the country.
Leading the struggle requires the Irish TUC to call a general strike, that will drive the coalition out of office, and bring in a workers’ and small farmers’ government, that will expropriate the bosses and the bankers and bring in socialism.
The Irish TUC has spent too many years helping the bourgeoisie run capitalism to even contemplate leading this struggle.
A revolutionary party, a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, must be built up in Ireland to build a new and revolutionary leadership in the trade unions, to put an end to the spectre of forced emigration, by calling a general strike and carrying out a socialist revolution.