John Millington reports in the Morning Star:
Over 100,000 Irish working people turned out in freezing conditions in Dublin on Saturday to show their total opposition to the EU/IMF-led austerity measures.
No2EU - Yes to Democracy spokesman Brian Denny welcomed the demonstration, pointing out that the Irish government was hell-bent on "bailing out the finances and the banks at the expense of public services and their own economy.
"The whole point of the bailout is to institute massive structural adjustment. It's an example of monopoly finance capital effectively running the country," he said.
Labelling the EU a "bankocracy," he added: "The banks are ruling the state - all in line with EU rules and policies.
"Ireland is being sacrificed on the alter of the eurozone - it will not end with Ireland. The overarching objective of the EU is to hand over power from people to the finance capital."
How Tom Clarke, Arthur Griffith, James Connolly and Eamon De Valera must be turning in their graves.
Independent Ireland is no more- the country which fought so hard and so long for its freedom from Britain is now an EU/IMF colony. And what a great irony it is that it’s Fianna Fáil -the party of Eamon De Valera- formed from the anti-treaty faction, that has ended Ireland's independence.
2 comments:
The situation in Ireland is indeed a tragedy of neoliberalism.
But, and this is where I don't think people such as you and I who were born and brought up in a former great power that has always had comparative affluence are really qualified to judge, would we not have done the same had we lived for so long in the shadow of a great power, churchmouse poor at the very fringe of Europe? I don't blame the Irish people for wanting to grab some action in the 90s and 00s, I blame the fact that they grabbed it at a time when it had gone out of control and checks and balances had been thrown on the fire. A halfway house in which Ireland became more affluent in a way it wasn't in the 50s, 60s and 70s, but within a more regulated form of capitalism such as existed then, would have been better than anything that has ever actually existed.
The other important issue whenever the question of Ireland's pre-EU "independence" springs to mind, and it has been asked by a commenter here before, is this: what part of Ireland is the Vatican in? Part of the reason why Irish people embraced global capitalism so enthusiastically was to escape the power of a church which had a far more oppressive dominance than English people can begin to imagine from their own benign, backstage state church.
RPC (Irish family on father's side so should know)
The Irish situation shows why the Left needs to reach out to patriotic conservatives and moderate nationalists. Is there anything more destructive of national sovereignty than global capital?
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