For the last three days, several activists from the recently formed campaigning group IFPAL (Irish Friends of Palestine Against Lisbon) manned a stall at the top of Dublin's Grafton St, conspicuously decorated with Palestinian flags billowing freely in the breezy, showery weather.

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Green Party U-Turn on a Democratic EU | The Lisbon Treaty and the Triumph of Technocracy | Debut of Irish Friends of Palestine Against Lisbon outside Dublin EU Parliament Offices | 13 Things the Lisbon Treaty Would Do | The Legal guarantees on Lisbon Treaty will not change treaty - a propaganda stunt to mislead voters | Dáil shouldn't have inferior Lisbon Treaty powers to German Parliament, controlling ministers | The Lisbon Treaty, Alan Shatter and the guys in hoods! | Lisbon Treaty News: German Constitutional Court delays Germany’s ratification of the Lisbon Treaty | The Gurantees: Comment by Jens-Peter Bonde | Spoofing the Irish media and public with Lisbon “guarantees” that guarantee nothing | Supposed ‘hard fight’ to secure guarantees on Lisbon Treaty: a clever tactic to mislead says McKenna | Lisbon: Round Two - A bosses charter, with or without 'guarantees' | The Lisbon Assurances - A Closer Look

Irish Friends of Palestine Against Lisbon Website - www.ifpal.ie

The Minister for the Environment, John Gormley, is currently conducting two separate public consultations, allegedly to protect Tara. There is the proposed Tara Skryne Landscape Conservation Area and the proposed Tara UNESCO World Heritage Site. But the Minister has not produced one single map showing the proposed areas, and has refused to answer Parliamentary Questions on the issue.

Related Links:
Hill of Tara - www.hilloftara.info
Follow TaraWatch on Twitter
Save Tara, from Causes.com

“The Minister must stop hiding the ball and define Tara if there is to be effective public consultation for these so-called protective measures. We have two expensive and elaborate public consultations taking place separately, for the same approximate area, but we don’t have one single map defining that area. The Minister’s measures appear to be a smoke screen, with illusory promises of protection, which will not have any legislative basis. The Minister could easily give Tara real statutory protection, by broadening the boundary of the national monument in the National Monuments Bill 2009 he just announced." - Vincent Salafia, TaraWatch

Here Joe Higgins, the Socialist Party MEP for Dublin, talks about the recent electricians´ strike, the disgusting attacks on it by the bosses and media, and how we can all learn from the success of the electricians.

You would think from reading some newspaper articles and editorials that workers go on strike to deliberately wreak havoc on whichever sector they work in, or on society in general.

Take the 10,500 strong electricians strike last week. "Strike flies in the face of reason" pompously declared an editorial in a daily newspaper. An economic commentator went one better, calling the strike "insane and delusional". Former Minister of State and current Chief Executive of the Construction Industry Federation, Tom Parlon outshouted them all when he said that "we cannot let the lunatics be in charge."

Related Links:
Joe Higgins's Website | Socialist Party Website

Supporting the Electricians' Strike | Shocking Preliminary Results from NECI Survey | Electricians' Victory | TEEU - Striking Back Against Pay Cuts

Steve McGiffen is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the American Graduate School of International Relations and Diplomacy in Paris. He is editor of the radical left website Spectre [www.spectrezine.org] and, with Kartika Liotard, MEP, the author of Poisoned Spring: The EU and Water Privatisation (Pluto Press, 2009). Steve can be contacted at spmcgiffen [@] yahoo.co.uk

The Lisbon Treaty is the latest step in a process which, though its conception can arguably be traced to the Treaty of Rome itself, was born at Maastricht. This process is one of removing what is truly of fundamental importance to capitalism – principally, the way in which it manages its economy – from the realm of an at least partially democratised politics.

This is, moreover, not an exclusively European process, but one which is global. As parliamentary institutions have spread following the collapse of authoritarian systems of 'left' and right, they have simultaneously been deprived of a range of powers once considered proper to them.

The nationalist right makes much of the transfer of powers from national to transnational institutions, from Dublin or London to Brussels, for example. Not sharing their 'patriotic' fantasies, I am far more concerned by the transfer of powers from institutions whose nature makes them responsive to popular sentiment, to those essentially immune to such pressures. Not only the European Union, but other regional bodies such as the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, and international institutions like the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund, have now narrowed policy choices available to national governments and parliaments to such an extent that 'legitimate' democratic pressure can no longer be brought to bear on the most important areas of policy.

The Ryan report into the abuse that occurred in the industrial and reformatory schools – which were run by the religious orders and supposedly under the supervision of the state – has recently been released. At this system’s height there were 7,998 children in the care of the state. Since the release of the report we have heard politicians rushing to condemn this system and saying how shocking it was. I find it incredible to hear the politicians pandering to the press in their condemnation of the old industrial school system when they know that children under their care in 2009 are being neglected still.

Related Links:
Closing the Book on Institutional Abuse | Time To End Church Control of Schools, Hospitals and Social Services | Child Abuse Commission | Residential Institutions Redress Board |

Considering the gravity of the Ryan Report it would be natural to assume that the government is now doing everything in its power to prevent the abuse of children in state care. You would like to think that considering how wrong the government got it in the past, they would be doing their utmost to protect the children in their care. However that is not the case.