DIT STUDENT AND LECTURERS PROTEST TO ED MINISTER TO RESTORE LECTURERS AND FACILITIES

by Angry Student Fri Oct 04, 2002 15:44

It's good to see the minister recieve a frosty reception whenever he visits 3rd level campuses.
Let's make every campus a FF minister free zone!!
how many were at the demo? what exactly where you demostrating about?

by NotoNice Fri Oct 04, 2002 15:45

VOTE NO TO FEES AND CUTS IN EDUCATION

VOTE NO TO NICE!!!

by meinhard Fri Oct 04, 2002 15:56

Please upload bigger images so we can see what it says on the signs.

To "Angry Student": See http://www.indymedia.ie/cgi-bin/newswire.cgi?id=13723 to read what it was roughly about.

Meinhard.

by iosaf mac diarmada - reclaim the streets! Fri Oct 04, 2002 17:51 barcelona

education policy effects all ages.
so why do ye have to wait till you´ve matriculated to get political?
don´t you feel unhappy with it all before that?
aren´t there debates and things in school these days oh I don´t know what you youngsters want always complaining...where´s your agenda?
ooops
that´s Ignatius the Indignant voice.
emm
well done students of Ireland.
Reclaim the streets!
use the photocopiers make yourselves some pamhlets and stickers.

by Pennyless student Fri Oct 04, 2002 18:37

unfortuanatly the photocpying service in my college has been privitised and is extremly expensive!!

by antrophe Sun Oct 06, 2002 16:21

The Nice Treaty sets out a program of ‘harmonisation’,i.e. that the policies of all E.U. states should be the same, in matters of ‘liberalisation’, which is the polite way of saying privatisation.

The E.U. is committed to the introduction of GATS, the General Agreement on Trade in Services, which is the long way of saying privatisation.

Under the World Trade Organisation’s GATS treaty, practices which ‘discriminate’ against foreign businesses in favour of native companies (including the state owned public sector) are outlawed, this can include, in the context of third level education, grants, free fees and any state subsidy to universities or colleges (if they are not equally applicable to all private education).

To privatise a public service, first of all it’s gotto be making a profit, to attract investment, so you have to have people paying for it.

Privatisation, in order to turn a profit, attract investment, and compete in the marketplace, makes for increased costs for the consumer (because the more money a company makes the more shares it can sell), and lower wages and worse working conditions for the worker.

It’s child is two tier services, with the capital of private investment being poured in to develop services that provide for whoever can pay for them while under-funded and over-crowded state owned service must provide for the rest.

The Big business lobby group behind the E.U. is the European RoundTable of Industrialists (E.R.T.) which includes among it’s select elite the bosses of Unilever, Carlsberg, Fiat, Vodafone, Volvo, Philips, Nokia, Renault, Pirelli, and Shell, as well as those of the aforementioned BP and the Smurfit group.

According to one of it’s number, Gerhard Cromme, of the ThyssenKrupp corporation, there is a “culture of laziness” in “the European education system” where
students “take liberties to pursue subjects not directly related to industry. Instead they are pursuing subjects which have no practical application.” .

The Nice Treaty excludes, for the moment, E.U. wide ‘harmonisation’ in the privatisation of education, however it makes the E.U., rather than individual governments, responsible for negoitiations with “international organisations” i.e. the W.T.O. . Thus individual governments can hold their hands up and claim that they are being forced into introducing the W.T.O.’s privatisation assault.

As such it is a step forward in the E.U.’s and the W.T.O.’s education privatisation programme, and that is their goal, the EU's chief negotiator for GATS, Robert Madelin, describes the education sector as "ripe for liberalisation".

This kind of liberalisation has already had a disasterous effect on education in countries like Spain and Italy. Instead of opening up the colleges, privatisation closes them further to the fast majority of society. Grants and subsidies to third level institutes have been slashed left, right and centre. Students are now forced to pay full tution fees regardless of background. The financial obstacles already in place become magnified as new ones are added to the benefit of business, further hindering access to education. Irish students recently fell victim to the governments attemps tp pave the way to liberalisation with a 'reintroduction of fees through the back door' disguised as an increase in registration costs. If the Skilbeck Report issued by the Higher Educational Authority is anything to go by, we can expect attempts to scale back the grant as well as more links with industry. While French Students spray-painted 'Nike University' over the entrance to the Sorbonne in protest against privatisation, students in UCD already graduate from the Smurfit School of Business and Tony O' Reilly Hall. There the Arts faculty was recently split in two to encourage a greater uptake of courses with a 'practical application' to business.

The liberalisation agenda, and resistance to it, has already hit the education systems across Europe. For instance, in May and June students across Germany went on strike, demonstrated, blocked roads and briefly occupied a TV station and the buildings of the ruling SPD party, in response to the introduction of fees for what was formerly free education. Likewise Spain has seen massive demonstrations, and the mass protests at E.U. Summits in Brussels (last December), and Seville (June) have had ‘student blocs’.

We don’t think that a vote will stop this, after all we saw how much that was worth when the first rejection of Nice was forgotten about.

The only way to get anything or stop something is the sort of mass direct action described above, however as a first step, as a protest against the policies of the E.U., the Irish government and the World Trade Organisation, vote no.