Waiting for Democracy

The Dublin City campaign organises to protect the bin service

The Indymedia newswire has seen reports from anti-bin tax actions in Drimnagh, Finglas and Ringsend and next Monday evening the first city wide protest of 2006 has been called at City Hall. The councillors will be voting on an emergency motion regarding the non-collection of bins, announced by the city manager three weeks ago, against the vote of the council. Across the city as the council starts to leave rubbish behind, groups are being organised to clear this up in the cold January weather. GAA and Labour clubs, pubs and even the cold streets are seeing meetings taking place as lists of bin collections are drawn up and the Dublin City Anti Bin tax campaign starts to act.

At the end of this year the Grassroots Gatherings will have been on going for half a decade. These are left-libertarian get-togethers involving anything between 100 and 250 people, they take place usually three times a year, with the location and organising team switching location each time, to avoid Dublin-centrism. Grassroots Gatherings have taken place in the west on three occasions (Limerick, Galway, and Mayo), in Dublin three times , and in Belfast and Cork twice.

Related Links: The Old Grassroots Gathering Website | Report from the Tenth Grassroots Gathering | Grassroots Gathering Five: A step forward for the movement | Photo Report of Sixth Grassroots Gathering | Grassroots Gathering Eight | The First Grassroots Gathering | The Second Grassroots Gathering | Robert Allen Interview with Laurence Cox on the Origins of the Grassroots Gatherings

Indymedia Ireland Launches Oscailt 3.0 Platform As well as Indymedia Ireland's constant efforts to produce and distribute information in an open and democratic manner, we put a similar effort into creating and disseminating free software to allow others to do the same. Today, after more than 18 months of development, we finally launch version 3.0 of our Oscailt content management system.

New Features

Oscailt 3.0 has literally hundreds of new features which will progressively appear on the Irish site over the next few months. Some of the most important ones for users are the following:

1. Images Made Easy - Oscailt now automatically resizes all images for web-viewing - this means that you can now upload much bigger images than before.
2. Friendly URL's Indymedia URL's are now short and meaningful without any of the messy variables. http://www.indymedia.ie/features/dublin/anticapitalism is a new style URL - this means that search engines should give Indymedia articles an even higher ranking than now.
3. Lots of New Feeds: Podcasts, Comment Feeds, Atom Feeds, RSS 2.0 or RSS 1.0 ../feeds.more information
4. Lots of anti-spam / anti-troll measures Users can report any post on the site by clicking on the report post icon beside it. The ../editorial dalek has also been given some major new powers - it's hungrier than ever to exterminate those annoying trolls.
5. Context Sensitive headlines - every article is now accompanied by a list of headlines from the same author and with the same category - making it much easier to follow threads through our coverage of issues.
6. Lots of new ways to get involved - Oscailt 3 allows lots of different ways for people to get involved in indymedia Ireland - from reporting posts to managing a whole section of the site, there are more ways than ever to get involved in indymedia and help us to carry the voices of the excluded around the world!
7. New Multi-lingual Features Oscailt 3 allows us to manage the translation of the site into several languages easily - we will be starting to translate as much of the site as we can into Irish in the near future
8. A new look to the site - take a look around our newly designed site and let us know what you think!

Last evening (25/01/06) saw an important step in the Corrib Gas dispute. The day was set aside for an executive team from the oil company Shell to meet with various groups involved in the controversial project. All meetings were behind closed doors and by invitation only, as a group of concerned locals found out when attempting to meet with the team in Belmullet.

It became known that a further meeting was to take place in the community centre in Greannaí, a short distance from Rossport, to discuss with locals the problems to date. An impromptu group of people, residents directly affected by the proposed refinery and associated pipeline, converged on the venue to take part in the event.

On arrival they were informed this was yet another private meeting, and were refused entry. This reflected an earlier statement from Shell that the team were seeking to meet with non-opposing landowners only. Clearly an unacceptable situation, the people asserted their right to be involved in any debate on something which affected their community so seriously, and in what was supposed to be their own community centre! The Gardaí present (as part of the security laid on for Shell) wisely used their discretion and allowed access to the gathering group.

Chomsky, Southside Prats, Primetime And The Irish Times.

Sometime recently, at least in my perception, it has apparently become unacceptable to criticize something without having an fully explored alternative, and even then your alternative must exist within the exact same framework as the object of criticsm, and perferably be as close to it so as to make no difference.

What am I talking about you may ask? Well two recent miniscule media related events have stuck in my mind, perhaps for no other reason than my cantankerous grumpy nature fixating upon them, but nonetheless I feel it’s a mildly important issue which while it may be nothing new, certainly bears a hearing.

The first issue to get my goat was one of the posters which formed part of the recent idiotic advertising campaign by the Irish Times. You may have seen the campaign’s scrawlings around Dublin festooning our walls with its inane message of “We look at life, you live it”, which is funny given that the last time I read the Times it seemed more apparent that they were looking up their own arses rather than at my life. Well one such poster caught my eye one morning on my way to work, It protrays activism as seen through the eyes of the media with a poster being held high saying “Replace capitalism with something nicer” followed below by the Irish Times witty reply “Any suggestions?”. Now I must admit I chuckled momentarily before getting pissed off at yet another portrayal of activists as moaners with no practical solution and therefore worthy of derision.