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Eschatological ruminations
Eschatology, or the study of the end of times, is at least as old as the written word. The concept spans many of the world’s major religions, usually referring to some future day of judgement or reckoning. Beyond the realms of theology, eschatology as a concept is currently undergoing something of a renaissance, especially after the tempestuous and chaotic first twelve months of the Trump regime. In this time, almost everything we once took for granted about inherent stability, even inevitability, of western democracies and the robustness of our institutions has been shaken profoundly. As if to add to the sense of impending calamity, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved their famous Doomsday Clock for 2018 forward in late January– to two minutes to midnight. This is the closest it has ever been to the witching hour. The authors of the Bulletin excoriated the US government’s reckless nuclear brinksmanship, but poured special scorn on its efforts to derail international climate diplomacy. “Avowed climate denialists have been installed in top positions at the EPA and other agencies, and the administration has announced its plan to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. In its rush to dismantle rational climate and energy policy, it has ignored scientific fact and well-founded economic analyses”. The Bulletin was particularly scathing of the role played by climate deniers in stymieing action. “Despite the sophisticated disinformation campaign run by climate denialists, the unfolding consequences of an altered climate are a harrowing testament to an undeniable reality: The science linking climate change to human activity is sound. The world continues to warm as costly impacts mount, and there is evidence that overall rates of sea level-rise are accelerating – regardless of protestations to the contrary”. The toxic wave of US science denialism has swept right across the Atlantic. As previously reported in Village, last May saw the first meeting in Dublin of the self-styled Irish Climate Science Forum (ICSF) a denialist group with opaque membership and funding sources. February sees it host its fifth meeting in just 10 months, featuring a fringe Italian academic with strong ties to US neoliberal think tanks, the latest in a procession of climate contrarians to present new (thoroughly debunked) ‘findings’ to an eager audience mostly of Irish contrarians and deniers. Their agenda appears to be to hobble effective Irish government response to the existential threats posed by climate change. Their standard operating method is to cherry-pick data, float red herrings and exaggerate uncertainties in the scientific consensus often as political cover on behalf of special-interest groups, for continued inaction. Above all, groups like the ICSF are engaging in ‘post-truth’ assaults on reason itself. A recent edition of New Scientist magazine stated baldly: “There are disturbing hints that western civilization is starting to crumble”. The article quotes intriguing research from Yale university, which examined the two broad modes of human thought: 1) fast, automatic and inflexible, and 2) slower, more analytical and flexible thinking. As flexible thinkers within society solve our various problems, from transport to energy, with complex technologies, this relieves the great bulk of the population from even being aware of these problems, and so inflexible, automatic thinking ensues as the population, in a sense, dumbs down, since technologies can create the beguiling illusion that life is magically simple. One of the psychologists who developed this theory, Jonathan Cohen, suggests this may help solve one of the great puzzles regarding societies heading for catastrophe: why do they persist with their self-destructive behaviour, in the face of overwhelming evidence of future harms? “The train had left the station”, according to Cohen, and the forward-thinking, analytical types were no longer at the controls. Separately, computer modelling carried out at the University of Maryland in 2014 examining the mechanisms that can lead to local or even global system collapse, identified two key elements. The first, unsurprisingly, is ecological strain. The panoply of chronic environmental stressors, including resource depletion, widespread pollution, ocean acidification and sea-level rise are generally well understood, at least in expert circles. What was less widely known was the systemic risk posed by economic stratification or, in plain language, the rich getting richer at everyone else’s expense. In the scenario modelled, “elites push society toward instability and eventual collapse by hoarding huge quantities of wealth and resources, and leaving little or none for commoners who vastly outnumber them yet support them with labour”, according to author Rachel Nuwer. Eventually, she argues, “the working population crashes because the portion of wealth allocated to them is not enough, followed by collapse of the elites due to the absence of labour. The inequalities we see today both within and between countries already point to such disparities”. She notes that the top 10% of global income earners are responsible for almost as much total greenhouse gas emissions as the bottom 90% combined. Here, extreme inequality and ecological stresses converge to form a toxic cocktail capable of crashing our civilisation into the dust. US academic Thomas Homer-Dixon published the influential book: ‘The Upside of Down’ in 2005. It presciently anticipated the global economic crash that occurred some three years later. The financial crisis was, he wrote, one of “five tectonic stresses which are accumulating deep beneath the surfaces of our societies”. Others include population, energy, pollution and resource exhaustion; and climate system stress. The 2008 economic crisis, along with more recent shocks, such as Brexit and the Trump election in 2016 can, according to Homer-Dixon, be seen as a series of non-linearities, or sudden and unexpected jolts to the assumed world order. These may be viewed as a random pattern of tremors presaging a truly global catastrophe, a word that derives from the Greek, meaning ‘to overturn’. To view catastrophe as imminent rather than already occurring requires a deeply anthropocentric perspective. The sequestration, plunder and simplification of the entire biosphere by a single species is without parallel in a billion years of Earth, let alone human, history. Irrespective of our own narrow fate, the human stain will be etched
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The nineteenth Six Nations tournament begins on February 3 but one man who won’t feature is Simon Zebo. It was announced in October that Zebo will be leaving Munster at the end of this season and moving to Paris to play for Racing 92 in the French Top 14 league. The announcement of his planned move abroad resulted in Zebo being excluded from the November Tests series, and now his exclusion from the Six Nations Squad. Joe Schmidt claimed at the official launch of this year’s championship that Zebo has been left out of the squad due to his form rather than the fact that he is about to leave the country, with prodigious Leinster young gun Jordan Larmour his preferred option as reserve. Larmour could well be a fullback great, but Zebo still has plenty to offer his national team as he is only 27 years old and in his prime. The IRFU has a policy, which the current Irish management helped to devise, of only selecting home-based players. This is in part to safeguard provincial rugby and as a way of preventing the top players accepting lucrative contracts with foreign teams. This policy has only come into play in recent years, in part due to the struggles Ireland had with Johnny Sexton during the 2014 and 2015 Six Nations Campaigns when he played for Racing 92 – Zebo’s home from June 2018. Sexton missed vital training sessions as he had to report back to Paris for the two rest-week periods during the Six Nations and to play club games in France: not ideal preparation despite the fact that Ireland was victorious in both of these campaigns. It is something Schmidt is wary of ever repeating. Zebo is Munster’s all-time leading try-scorer, and has become an established member of the Irish squad in recent years, scoring 9 tries in his 35 caps for Ireland. He played all but 5 minutes of the 2017 Six Nations Championship. There has been a clamour for Zebo to be brought back into the squad for the Six Nations but Joe Schmidt and the IRFU have stuck firm. There are a number of other players who ply their trade abroad who could easily be picked for the squad if the policy were to be scrapped, such as Donnacha Ryan at Racing 92, Tadhg Beirne at the Scarlets, Ian Madigan at Bristol and Marty Moore at Wasps. The policy appears to breach the legal requirement of Freedom of Movement and Residence for persons in the EU or, at the very least, its spirit. Freedom of movement and residence for persons in the EU is the cornerstone of the internal market and indeed of European Union citizenship, which originated in the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992. Today, the provisions governing the free movement of persons are laid down in Directive 2004/38/EC on the right of EU citizens and their family members to move and reside freely within the territory of the Member States. Restrictions are only permitted if they are a proportionate response to an inherent need in a sport. One need only look to how ludicrous it would be to impose the same restriction on soccer players to detect a lack of proportion. Zebo, and all the other players who could theoretically be picked by Ireland if the IRFU’s policy were to be changed, are being blocked from significant earning potential. While many people might not have too much sympathy for the players considering they are highly paid and get to enjoy sport for a living, it is worth noting that the Irish players will not receive match or training fees from the IRFU, but a Grand Slam win would see each of them receive a bonus of over €70,000. By excluding Zebo from the team due to his move to France, the IRFU are directly affecting his earning potential from winning, and also from additional sponsorship opportunities that come with being included in the national team. Remarkably, English players get a much better deal: they will earn £22,000 per game from match fees, training fees and image rights. This means that for any team member who appears in all five games will be guaranteed to be paid £110,000 each. The result is that Zebo has been ruled out of international consideration and has now sacrificed any dreams he may have had to represent Ireland in the 2019 World Cup in Japan. Ireland kick off this campaign against the French in Paris – a fixture we have only won three times in 46 years. A player of Zebo’s quality and skills could have been the key to unlocking the French defence. In fact we can expect a fourth win to be added come 3 February – due to the current state of the French team. In the long run the IRFU policy seems to serve Irish rugby well, irrespective of the EU Spirit. The top players are incentivised to stay in Ireland, their game time gets managed punctiliously and they are always made available by their clubs for training camps, no matter what time of year. Another benefit for Irish rugby is the Prodigal Son pardon that is bestowed upon anyone who returns to an Irish provincial team – they can be immediately included for the national side. This can act as a major incentive as there are examples where individuals came back to Irish teams much improved from the time spent away from home in a different environment learning from new coaches and strategies. Tommy Bowe developed immensely from his time in Wales, and look out for Tadhg Beirne once he leaves Scarlets for Munster next season. He appears to have slipped through the cracks for Leinster, he has been nominated for European Player of the Year and has dramatically enhanced his performance level due to the freedom he is allowed in the Scarlets team. Ireland look set to be the best placed team to push favourites England all the way in this year’s
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Listen up around what they’re at Villager likes nothing more than a shafted preposition. Most of the articles that come in to this magazine are from academics writing ‘around’ their subjects. They go into Village’s file of death along with cover letters for CVs that sign off cheers. So he was thrilled to see the Irish Times say of Nama that is lending €384m to allow developers to “build out projects”. Zagantagonism It’s been a bad month for Rugby schools. Paddy Jackson, the Kiely’s set-to, the illicit publication of the letter from Eunan O’Carroll. And now Frank Armstrong. The editor and half the Champagne socialists/ environmentalists whose whimsies fill the pages of Village have been taken aback by young Armstrong and his piece in the current edition ripping apart Gonzaga College, alma mater to non-conformist and unbulliable egos of all sorts, from Ranelagh right as far as Bray. Hypocrisy on Equality Talking of which it was amusing to see Michael McDowell bemoaning inequality – “the rich getting far richer” in the Sunday Business Post where he ties down an, unpaid, column. When he had power he was largely an agent for liberalism – and inequality, even claiming the economy “demands inequality in some respects”. In 2004 he told the Eonomist Survey of Ireland that he “sees inequality as an inevitable part of the society of incentives that Ireland has, thankfully, become”. He was quoted by The Economist magazine as offering a robust defence of the gap between rich and poor in Ireland. And he told the Irish Catholic that “a dynamic liberal economy like ours demands flexibility and inequality in some respects to function”. It was such inequality “which provides incentives”. He said: “As far as I am concerned liberal politics and liberal economics go together. In a liberal society, equality of opportunity is an equal opportunity to become unequal. A society which legislates and controls in every way to create some sort of mathematical equality just doesn’t work”. In his pomp he believed: “Driven to a complete extreme, the current rights’ culture and equality notion would create a feudal society”. McDowell sat at the Cabinet table for a decade while the country was run – to disastrous long-term effect – in the interests of elites and cartels, including the legal one he still feeds off. McDowell pulled the plug on the Citizen Traveller campaign when it dared to be controversial. He delayed and censored the reports of his department’s own inspector of prisons, Judge Dermot Kinlan. Dodgy Donegal There is still no sign of a date for the High Court case being taken by Michael McLoone, former County Manager in Donegal, represented by barrister Michael McDowell, over a 2014 Village article titled ‘Dodgy Donegal Planning’, alleging improper behaviour in Donegal County Council’s treatment of planning matters. Nor is there any sign of the Department of the Environment’s report into the activities detailed in the impugned Village article, though it has been promised for years. Loughinisland threats Village has received correspondence from the Hawthorns, Ronnie and Hilary saying they will take legal action over the naming, in these pages, of Ronnie as chief suspect for the Loughinisland massacre in 1994 when six Catholics watching a world cup match were gunned down in a pub. The Hawthorns’ concern vacillates between defamation and privacy. But they seem to be having trouble getting anything beyond a few emails together. Colgan threats And Michael Colgan has apparently initiated proceedings against Village for “defamation of character”, though Village hasn’t been served with anything so we’re not really sure. Colgan alleges a recent editorial implied he was guilty of serious crimes and rape. Village claims it was accusing him of harassment. Unthreatening After all that hassle Villager often wonders if it isn’t better to just say nothing. Then you can become as popular as William and Kate, Royal heirs in waiting, who have literally never saidanything anyone can remember. Kith and Quinn Villager never gets cross, never raises his voice. But he hates those Quinns. Complaints by Sean Quinn jnr and his wife Karen Woods about a recent failure to pay some of their €100,000 annual living expenses should be seen in the context of a “scheme of misappropriation on a grand scale”, the High Court has been told. Some €10m has been extracted from a company in India “and we don’t know where that has gone”, Barry O’Donnell SC, for the special liquidators of Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, said. Documentation from India and Hong Kong showed “a scheme of misappropriation” was executed, over time and especially in 2010, at the instigation, and for the benefit, of members of the Quinn family. The transactions at issue “have never been explained” and while the family maintain they had no idea what was going on, that is “wholly implausible”, he said. This, and the fact Quinn and his wife are receiving close to €100,000 annually in living expenses, was of concern to the bank and it was “imperative” the matters were addressed. Villager absolutely begrudges them their 100k. If he had his way the radical left would have picketed the likes of the Quinns instead of faffing around harassing water-meter installers. And he wants to know where Peter Darragh Quinn, a nephew of the bankrupt former billionaire, on the run five years after an arrest warrant was issued for him, is. Ireland biggest environmental mess by a landslide In July 2008, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that Ireland had failed to carry out a proper assessment for the 70 turbine Derrybrien wind farm which was built in the early 2000s. The Government has yet to carry out the assessment on the site. The construction work on the wind farm led to a 2km landslide in October 2003, which the Commission itself has called “environmentally devastating”. The incident caused 450,000 cubic meters of peat to slide down the mountainside, which was washed into the local river systems. The European Commission has now requested that the
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Food Insecurity
Like most people in Ireland, I grow almost none of my own food. Unfortunately living in the city, and not having a garden I am somewhat restricted. Every now and again I get a pang of anxiety when I see supermarket shelves empty on a Sunday night, before the delivery lorries have arrived. This is a reminder that our plentiful food supply is not a given, and is dependent on many factors, such as the supply of fossil fuels to transport the food, the viability of food producers, processors and supermarkets, as well as the availability of money to afford a nutritious and balanced diet. Without one or some of these factors, I, and many others, would struggle to eat properly. In 2000, a major truck-driver strike in the UK brought the country to the brink, with severe fuel shortages and dwindling of food on supermarket shelves. It is said that modern civilisation is three meals deep. If the delivery lorries suddenly stopped, if the fridges couldn’t be powered, or if the value of currency collapsed, food shortages would be a very real prospect. While something quite as dramatic as this suddenly happening is unlikely, the fact that it could happen at all should be enough to make us consider the security of our food supply. Food security isn’t something that many of us think about very often. According to the Global Food Security Index of 2017, Ireland is the most food-secure nation on the planet, so why would we worry ourselves unnecessarily? In 2008, food security became a prominent global issue again. The rising price of oil, coupled with pressure on food supplies from extreme weather events and the increased use of land for biofuels, led to the doubling of food prices in many countries, as well as the disruption of the food chain as many small food businesses couldn’t cope with the extra prices. Shelves emptied in several developing nations, leading to food riots and civil unrest. Closer to home, Ireland and the UK saw a dramatic rise in the number of people relying on food banks during the worst of the recession. Obesity and diabetes rates are on the rise. Ireland will become the most obese country in Europe, with the UK, within a decade, according to a study published in The Lancet. Irish men already have the highest body mass index (BMI) – a key measure of overweight – in Europe, while Irish women rank third, the study shows. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the profit-driven agri-business sector, it is often the unhealthiest food which is the most heavily marketed and affordable. Sadly, our profit-driven food system is not fit for social or environmental purposes. In what is often a race to the bottom, supermarket price wars ensure many fruit and vegetables are sold at below cost. Consumers vote with their purses and it is the cheapest food, usually imported from large commercial farms, with economies of scale, which win out over smaller producers, many of whom have been producing food for generations. As a result many of our smaller farmers, especially crop producers are struggling to stay in business. The production of crops generally in Ireland has declined, as has the overall number of farms and farmers. Overall production of the three main cereals (wheat, oats and barley) decreased by 12.3% in 2016. The total area under cereals decreased by 11,200 hectares (-3.8%) and overall cereal yield decreased by 8.7% to 8.2 tonnes per hectare. The yield of potatoes decreased by 7.9% from 42.3 tonnes per hectare in 2015 to 38.9 tonnes per hectare in 2016 while the area under potatoes increased by 6.1%. In 1915 there were 359,700 farms over one acre in Ireland and by 2010 this had declined to 139,860 farms over one hectare. Sadly we are becoming an agricultural one-trick pony, with beef and dairy being the hot-ticket items. This reduces the diversity of food we produce in Ireland and is leaving us more dependent on food imports. It is a bizarre reality of a neoliberal food economy that the most food-secure nation on the planet is a net importer of food. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, data from 1960 to 2011 (the most recently available data) reveal that while Ireland was a net importer of calories until the mid-1970s, it then became a net exporter until 2000. Since then, however, the value of this country’s foodenergy net imports in calories has at times exceeded the equivalent of the calorie intake of 2.5 million people. This leaves Ireland very vulnerable to disruptions in the food supply-chain. We received a taste of this earlier in the year when supermarket shelves became short of vegetables such as broccoli and lettuce. Being so heavily dependent on imported food is taking a major gamble with our long term ability to feed ourselves, as we head into a future of huge uncertainty regarding the supply of fossil fuels. De-carbonising our food system From artificial fertilisers, to pesticides, farm machinery, processing, packaging, shipping and refrigeration, fossil fuels play a major role in getting food from farm to fork. On average, up to 10 calories of fossil fuel input is required to produce just one calorie of food. Richard Heinberg, a fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute believes that we need to decarbonise our agricultural system by making a number of changes to how we produce food. First, we need to become less dependent on fossil-fuel-derived artificial fertilisers. Second, we need to shorten our food supply chains and once again produce more food close to where it is consumed. This will mean more people involved in producing food. Third, along with shortening the supply chain, we will need to become less dependent on heavily-oil-dependent machinery, which, again, will mean more people working the land on smaller plots of land. This isn’t as pie in the sky as it might sound. Already in Ireland, there is a growing interest in
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Brexit: Dunkirk or D-Day?
Standing beside Britain’s much-maligned Prime Minister, Theresa May, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on the morning of the 8 of December announced that “sufficient progress” has been made on Phase I of the Brexit talks to move onto Phase II, and the integral future trading relationship between the United Kingdom and European Union. Brought to the point of parliamentary collapse by the steadfast border standoff between Leo Varadkar and her own supply and confidence partner in Arlene Foster, Theresa May had no choice but to accept an agreement that posits that if there is a failure of the parties to reach a suitable solution to the problem of the Irish border, Northern Ireland and therefore the entire UK would in essence maintain regulatory alignment with the European single market and customs union. The final text, comprising paragraph 45 of the agreement, read: “In the absence of agreed solutions, the United Kingdom will maintain full alignment with those trade rules of the internal market and customs union which, now or in the future, support North-South cooperation, the all-island economy and the protection of the 1998 Agreement”. [The italicised portion of this sentence was originally omitted for simplicity’s sake, and because it tends only to reinforce the editorial allegation that the UK/Tories are getting a better deal than is being reported in other media. See in particular, Editorial in current edition which explicates the issue.] It will probably be, in a word, the softest of soft Brexits. President of the European Council Donald Tusk pushed even further on the back of the agreement, proposing “that during [the transition] period the UK will respect the whole of EU law, including new law” and would “respect judicial oversight”. In the round of back-slapping congratulations that followed in the halls of power in Brussels and Dublin (and the dejected, glassy-eyed resignation that descended like a pall over Westminster that same day), the narrative remained fixed on the upshot for Ireland and the EU as a whole that the British surrender was seen as representing. After months of negotiating, Britain has been brought to terms on an agreement – that has since been declared as binding – that would tie their hands on trade alignment with Europe. So complete was the Tory rout, on the surface, that nobody took a second to question where this left the rest of Europe’s initiatives. The precise wording of the agreement neglects to broach any of the EU’s areas of responsibility outside the trade regulations necessary to ensure the all-Ireland economy is not dissected by a north-south border postBrexit. In essence, in omitting mention of other EU regulations such as those governing social, labour, environmental and consumer rights, the wording of the current agreement leaves the door open for the UK and Northern Ireland to undercut European single market members on all those issues, while retaining the right to export into the EU and take advantage of its market supply chains. Neale Richmond, a Fine Gael Senator and its Seanad Spokesperson on European Affairs, argues that this outlook is purely “hypothetical”. “The deal secured, to be ratified shortly, is a base of ground-rules” he says, “the agreement of which will allow the second phase of negotiations to take place”. In other words, “Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”. There is, Richmond states, “no practical difference” between the phrases “regulatory alignment” and “avoidance of regulatory divergence” bandied about by all sides during the negotiations. “It is a use of language”, he said, designed to win the support of the DUP for an agreement to maintain standards between the Republic and Northern Ireland. But those standards remain vested in economic issues. “The final agreement”, Richmond promises, “will tie together all working parts”. Should Westminster become alerted to the inadvertent outmanoeuvring of Ireland and Europe afforded them by the wording of the current agreement, however, they are under no obligation to concede alignment on social and environmental matters which would probably require oversight by the European Court of Justice anyway. The Phase I agreement has passed muster in good faith on both sides without reference to areas of regulatory responsibility outside trade and the economy. Through Phase II negotiations, therefore, London is under no obligation to subscribe to the Social Chapter of the European Union, an agenda successive Tory governments have derided since the 1990s. Whether a future Labour government under the radical Jeremy Corbyn might prove more amenable on these issues, Senator Richmond was not inclined to opine on. “We are negotiating as part of the European side in good faith with the current British government”, he said, adding that the government “cannot entertain” speculation as to the motives of any hypothetical future Labour party. As Village goes to press, the media on both sides of the Irish Sea remain silent as to the possibility of an opportunity opening up for the UK post-Brexit. It remains to be seen what role the Social Chapter and other noneconomic regulatory concerns will play in Phase II of negotiations, when they begin next March.
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Ireland and the EU have been outmanoeuvred by the UK into a deal that gives NI and perhaps ultimately the whole UK a competitive advantage trading into Ireland and the EU, by allowing a retreat for NI and the UK from EU environmental, social and other typically non-economic standards.
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It is almost a decade since the beginning of the financial crisis which brought capitalism to the point of collapse. In the intervening years, working-class people have been forced to carry the cost of bailing out the system through various, vicious austerity programmes. Establishment political parties across Europe and the world have been greatly reduced, or almost wiped out, for implementing these measures. Now, as we enter 2018, the ‘line’ from the establishment and media is that we have entered a period of stability and recovery. However, for working-class people the key signifiers of the ‘recovery’ are precisely the issues which show that capitalism cannot deliver a decent standard of living for all and provide the space for movements and a socialist Left to grow. Politically, in Ireland, recent opinion polls have been heralded by right-wing commentators as a sign that everything’s ‘back to normal’. But it is a new ‘normal’, with the combined vote of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael at best only hitting 60% but averaging out in the mid-50s, only slightly up on its historic low. Meanwhile, the Labour Party is stuck in the margin of error. The ‘centre’ isn’t as strong as it tells itself it is, and through movements on the streets can be forced into giving some concessions, solving the problems facing people we need a fundamental change of the system. Housing The key crisis facing working-class people is housing. At the last count in October, 5298 adults and 3194 children were homeless and in emergency accommodation. 184 homeless people are forced into sleeping on the streets. Rents have rocketed and are expected to continue skywards for the next two years at least. Over 100,000 people and families are waiting on housing. 500,000 young adults are forced to live at home because they cannot afford to move out, twice the number in 2006. At least 29 housing policies have been launched by this government and its predecessor, but the problem gets worse. All of these policies have relied on the private sector to solve the housing crisis. This reliance on the private sector has resulted in massive wealth being gathered in the hands of a parasitic elite of developers, vulture funds and landlords. While huge misery is inflicted on the majority. In Dublin West, for instance, despite the area being a homeless blackspot only 10 new social homes were directly built by the Council. Solidarity’s recent proposal to build 1100 social and affordable homes in Damastown has received widespread public support and is an example of the approach which is required. This proposal is for 550 social homes to be built for rent from Fingal County Council. Another 550 affordable homes are to be built and made available to buy through affordable mortgages. The mortgages would be provided by the Housing Finance Agency, and paid back over 25 years. Monthly mortgage repayments will be from €478 per month for a one-bed home, to under €800 for a four-bed home. This is the type of radical approach on housing which is needed but the government will need to be forced into it by pressure from the streets. Repeal A whole generation of young people have been drawn into a battle to win abortion rights over the last number of years. This year saw the largest ever March for Choice, and big turnouts on International Women’s Day for Strike4Repeal and other marches and events. This has been accompanied by a deep politicisation of issues of oppression and equality. The #metoo campaign has encouraged women to speak out against sexual assault, genderbased violence and sexism. Demands for the separation of church and state and trans rights are now more common and loud than ever before. The vote on the Oireachtas Committee on the 8th Amendment to support abortion up to 12 weeks on request is a testament to the work and pressure applied by activists over a number of years. In particular, credit is due to the courage of those who highlighted the abortion pill, campaigning across the country to raise awareness and assist women and pregnant people with a crisis pregnancy. The pressure from the movement forced and dragged conservative politicians into voting for these recommendations. However, legislation must still be produced and passed by the Oireachtas. The Dáil is still deeply conservative and may attempt to water down any legislation. We need to continue to exert pressure on the Dáil to make sure there is no backsliding on the proposals. Precarious employment While unemployment may be decreasing, many people returning to work are finding themselves in worse conditions. The government, the capitalist class and big business have used the crisis to hammer employment terms by creating a slew of temporary and contract jobs. The phenomenal growth of the so-called ‘precariat’ signals the success they have had with this policy. So called ‘if and when’ and ‘banded hours’ contracts have become the norm across whole industries. The effect of this row-back in employment conditions especially affects ‘would’ workers. They are expected to be at the beck and call of employers. They have no guarantee of hours and therefore have no guarantee of income. The Tesco strike this year exposed for everyone the reality of ‘banded hours’ contracts which can see a worker’s hours and income fluctuate anywhere from 16 to 40 hours a week – often determined at the discretion of a manager, and often as a weapon to punish workers. The decision of Ryanair pilots in Ireland and across Europe to take industrial action can be a decisive battle. If a major anti-union, anti-worker employer like Michael O’Leary can be given a bloody nose it will be a major victory for all workers. It will demonstrate to workers, especially those employed in multinationals, that international action against bosses is possible and can deliver victories. The government have played a part in undermining working conditions too. As part of public-sector pay deals, they have created an age apartheid between young and older
