Resistance, No. 11

The Archive’s collection of Resistance from the ISN has grown over the past number of years and there’s more issues of Resistance to be posted up in the near future. This edition from Spring 2010 is typical of the publication with the A2 folded in four format. A wide range of issues addressed – the first article is from Kevin Quinn and addresses The Southern Bank Robbery. This concerns the early years of the bailout of the financial system during the crisis.

For the last few months, there’s been a deafening clamour from the media and our political elite, telling us chat we need to restore the public finances by slashing public-sector pay, unemployment benefit and other forms fo state spending. In the meantime, we’re supposed to forget all about the main reasons why we find ourselves in this mess: the collapse of the property bubble, the meltdown of Ireland’s banking system, and the corrupt, back-scratching response of the Fianna Fail-led government to the crisis. If we remember how we got into this crisis, it soon becomes dear chat government cutbacks arc nor a “grim necessity” if the economy is going to recover – they are ,he price we must pay for Fianna Fail’s determinaton to bail out its cronies.

And Quinn contextualises the staggering sums involved:

To date its re-capitalisation programme has seen the stare pouring €7 billion into the vaults of the privately owned AIB and Bank of lreland. A further €4 billion was pumped into the insolvent Anglo Irish Bank. This latter sum is equivalent to the amount ‘saved’ in the savage December budget, when cuts were made to social welfare payments, child benefit and public service pay.

Fergus O’Connor addresses the end fo social partnership:

This sorry state of affairs is the greatest failure of the union leadership under partnership. lt is already having malign consequences. With the state sector heavily unionised and a tiny union presence in the private sector it leaves the union movement vulnerable to the charge of being a selfish interest group. The harmonic co-operators of partnership, devotees of the easy deal, have given the enemies of organised labour a stick with which to beat them. We can be sure they will lay it on with a will.

Stephen Morris looks at attacks by the Government on community projects and notes that ‘Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Greens and the Labour Party [all] support the cuts to the Community sector; it’s just how they are implemented that divides them’ and Ed Walsh notes that at the time the Labour Party had seen a ‘big rise in its support’ and notes that ‘the current Labour leadership is clearly very comfortable with the prospect of entering a government with Enda Kenny as Taoiseach’.

Colm Breathnach reviews The Lost Revolution by Brian Hanley and Scott Millar. This notes that ‘Underlying the detailed nature of this book is the remarkable achievement of getting such a disparate range of members and former members of the WP/OIRA to give their side of the story.

Other pieces include one on the then Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change held by the UN by Michael Lowry which is deeply pessimistic and another piece by David Landy on Israel/Palestine and the Obama administration.

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