The Social Forum movement will be in the news this Autumn: The second Irish Social Forum is planned for Dublin and Ken Livingstone and the GLC are about to invest at least ST£400,000 and a lot of time and effort supporting the European Social Forum the week after in London. Predictably neither event has avoided a generous helping of controversy on the side

On 15th - 17th October this year the European Social Forum will take place in London and between the Alexandar Palace and spaces booked in Camden and Bloomsbury up to 50,000 attendees can be catered for. There are plans underway to organise an Irish Social Forum the weekend before that, with a social evening, a thematic conference and a closing plenary switching between city centre locations and UCD. This will be the second ISF while the event in London, involving the Lord Mayor , the trade unions and the people behind the Stop the War campaign will be the third European Social Forum..

The Social Forums are difficult to pin down politically and in many ways that is their strength. Consistent with the Porto Allegre World Social Forum principles, the social forum doesn't make decisions or issue calls – this is left to the Assembly of Social Movements which have started to take place directly after the forum proper. The social movements in Florence two years ago called for the anti-war demonstrations on Feb 15th last year and in some ways could claim to be a voice for that 2nd superpower, civil society, that was spoken of at the time. By consciously challenging existing political forms and refusing to be a “locus of power” the Social Forum model has developed to provide a conference for the movement of movements.

I met the group of people who are organising the Irish Social Forum in Dublin a few weeks ago to discuss the upcoming event. The summer holidays deplete the numbers but the group has been meeting fairly consistently over the last year – forming a network that is now quite sizeable and can call on a certain infrastructural ability that you would normally associate with a much larger organisation. The range of participants was, as usual, impressive. Of course with a range like this there are going to be tensions and differences of emphasis – again, paradoxically part of the strength of the social forum.

UK Indymedia ESF Page
The Irish Social Forum Invite Individuals and Groups to get Involved
Wombles Critique of the ESF Process
Most Recent UK IMC Feature on the ESF
Open ESF Site
Official ESF Site
All the Backstage ESF Drama from the Weekly Worker

Two journalists from Indymedia went to meet Ray O'Reilly from the Independent Workers Union, along with a couple of IWU members who work in Dublin Bus. This article covers part of that interview, the discussion on the Irish Trade Union movement and its constituent parts.

"Your job is yours as a right." To read this in a trade union statement makes you feel like it must be labour history, not a letter drafted by the IWU to be sent to the Aer Lingus Workers about their current predicament. And yet Ireland's youngest union is the one that was smart enough to register the internet domain: union.ie and the letter is up on their website. They have overcome the main legal hurdle to establishing a viable trade union (a negotiating license) and have an evangelical belief in trade unionism that expresses itself in language that comes straight from the 19th century proletariat that gave birth to the movement. Ray talks of "...restoring the Trade Union movement as the organised arm and voice of working people."

There is another funny thing about the IWU - When asked why they are different from other unions they talk of their principles as if they were a creed that was in danger of being lost. Anybody who has been following the Irish trade Union movement's squabbles over the last few years, especially ILDA's struggle for representation, will see the reason for the particular list of principles. But from the outside it reads like an indictment of the labour movement that these have become principles that differentiate one union from the rest. Surely the right to free association, the openness and transparency of the unions, the primacy of members decision making are going to be part of any trade union's core principles? Article continues here . . .

Audio Clips of Interview

• arm and voice - 16 seconds - 250k • I believe - 1 min 16 seconds - 1.2mb • IWU and Congress - 59 seconds - 937kb • In their place - 1 m 12s - 1.1mb • Indentured Servants - 16 seconds 263kb • SIPTU - 1 m 36s 1.5mb

Related Articles on Indymedia

• IWU Charter • Organising home helps in Cork • Inaugural IWU Conference • IWU members victimised in Dublin Bus
Blind Alley of the IWU A response to the article by Liberty Hall Langer

Other Background Material

• IWU Website • SIPTU website • Labour History of Ireland Archive • Irish Labour History Society

Download the MP3 interview from radio.indymedia.org (click on the link to start the downloading process - the filesize is 7.3Mb)

For the last three months, the residents of the Montpelier Hill district in Dublin's north-west inner city have been organising sit-out pickets at two locations in their neighbourhood. The first is at the entrance to Montpelier Drive, which is a small secluded red-brick estate of around 50 houses. The other picket is at St Bricin's Park, near the end of Montpelier Hill and Arbour Hill prison. This action by the residents was prompted by the increase in men soliciting prostitutes in the area. Local residents say that kerb crawlers were approaching their children and offering money for sex, encouraging them to get in their cars.

The level of prostitution and related activity has increased in the last few years with the opening of the Collins Barracks Museum on Benburb Street. The women working on the streets moved away from the now well-lit area (further developed in recent months with the LUAS) onto Montpelier Hill, which is a quiet residential area, and poorly lit at night.

Jenny, one of the residents on the Montpelier Gardens sit-out, explains why they were there. "We're fighting this about eight years and nothing was happening. So we decided to take action ourselves, because one of our neighbours was attacked and mugged at half three in the afternoon. So then we decided if the Garda are not going to take any action then we're going to have to do it ourselves. People are of the opinion that we're just here since Lynette McKeown went missing. We've been out here before that, a long time before that happened. If it happened once its going to happen again." Article Continues at 'Feature Continued' link Below

Discussion on Legalisation of Prostitution from Melbourne Indymedia

Premiere Screening of Indymedia Ireland's latest two video productions documenting Bush's visit to Ireland in June 2004 and the protests against it.

On Friday, June 25th 2004 approximately 20,000 people turned out in Dublin to let George W. Bush know that he was not welcome in Ireland. Thousands also travelled from all over the country to Shannon Airport and the nearby Dromoland Castle (where W holed up while in the country). The Irish State deployed masses of police and military to hide Bush from the protestors while the Media deployed masses of cameras and journalists focused primarily on on grandees and dignitaries in an effort to play down the extent of the protests.

Indymedia Ireland has created two video compilations which focus on the opposition to the Bush visit that was largely ignored at the time by the propaganda machine that has the cheek to call itself the media.

Reclaiming Dignity by Rasta4i and Bush Weekend by indyvidhead include interviews and comments from people involved in the "Bikes Against Bush Critical Mass", the Shannon Peace Camp, the Dublin March, the Anti-War Ireland protest at Shannon, the IAWM protest at Dromoland and, most sensationally, the AmBush protest at Shannon which was confronted by massive ranks of riot police and armoured military vehicles. Despite being completely blanked by the mainstream media this protest managed to delay Bush's departure by two hours.

All of this has been documented by independent camera-people interviewing real people with real opinions, a scarce commodity in the compliant Irish media.

Indymedia Ireland will be holding a screening of these two documentaries about the Bush visit on Friday September 3rd in the Irish Film Institute in Temple Bar, starting at 7:30pm. There will be a 5 euro charge on the door and all funds will go towards sustaining and strengthening the Indymedia project. Come along and support our media - we are all the media.

On Tuesday October the 19th and Wednesday October the 20th a conference on ‘less lethal’ weapons is taking place in the Berkeley Court Hotel in Dublin. Organised by defence industry magazine Janes, the conference features representatives of the police, military, scientific and industrial sectors. This article from a regular Indymedia contributor is a backgrounder on the nature and function of ‘less lethal’ weapons.

Extract: ‘Less Lethal’ weapons allow the state the use of force in ‘public order’ situations, and thus make repression far more likely. This can be particularly seen in the United States where innumerable demonstrations are pepper sprayed, for such things as marching into the wrong street. The issue of state legitimacy is crucial to the development of ‘less lethal’ weapons, openly referred to in planning documents as the ‘CNN factor’ or in the Berkeley Court conference as ‘the social feel good factor’. To illustrate this consider how plastic and rubber baton rounds allowed elements of State forces in the North of Ireland to inflict ‘collective punishment’ on working class Catholic communities. “There was a riot, we fired plastic bullets” is a lot more sellable then the older version of collective punishment – house burnings.

Article continues at 'Feature continued on newswire' link below

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