This text was originally posted on Aotearoa IMC

I was one of the co ordinators of the Irish mobilisation to the Second European Social Forum which was held in Paris two years ago, to the day. We had over a hundred people come from Ireland, and it was my job to head over early and co-ordinate accomodation with the ESF organisers there, as well as get the lie of the land and find out where everything was happening...

Imagine the shock when most people coming to the ESF discovered that a lot of the sessions were happening thirty or forty kilometres out from what most of us consider Paris, that beautiful walled medieval city of the Commune, May 68 and the Revolution. I spent the first day going from Bobigny (end of the line) to St Denis, and the hidden Paris of the ghetto-suburbs blew me away. Looking back on it now, the French ESF organisers probably opened Europe's eyes to the hidden reality of 21st century Paris. At the time we thought it was stupid to spend half the day travelling, but now I think it might have been a stroke of genius...

Mile after mile of desolate estate- high rise ghettoes reaching out to the horizon. The train stations were all covered with New York style hip hop grafitti, and when I got off at the second last stop (St Denis-Porte de Paris) I got a real shock. It was Bastille Day, when France celebrates its revolution, and in the middle of this concrete urban bunker that doubled as the town's main square, a bunch of old (white) army veterans were holding up French Tricolour banners gilded in gold with the names of their legions and the battles they had fought inscribed on it. This did not look to me like a progressive bunch of Communards or Sans Culottes. Maybe some of these guys had seen action in Algeria with Le Pen's torturing paratroopers.

Walk five minutes from O’Connell St, Dublin’s main thoroughfare, or five minutes from Christ Church Cathedral, an important tourist attraction, and you will find yourself in a very different world from that depicted in the tourist brochures.

Pushers Out tells the story of how people living in the North Inner City and the South Inner City (and later the suburbs, and some small towns) organised to save their communities from heroin. Not relying on the state to solve their problems, they started to organise themselves. One such working class organisation is Coalition of Communities Against Drugs (COCAD).

The campaigns began with meetings in local area called by residents concerned about the open dealing of heroin and all that came with that - hallways and greens were littered with dirty syringes, and those who overdosed lay where they fell.

Indymedia Supports

Projector Benefit Gig 7.30pm Friday November 4th 2005, at the Lower Deck Pub, Portobello bridge

2 weeks ago, we announced an urgent appeal for funds in order to pay our bills.

We are happy to announce that a large number of people responded generously to our appeal. In fact, we received enough online donations within 12 hours of the appeal to cover our hosting costs and donations have continued to come in. The details of our fundraising to date are included below.

At our recent fundraising meeting, we decided to aim to raise €2000 to fund a number of projects over the next 6 months. The minutes of this fundraising meeting have been posted to the newswire and include details of the projects which we hope to fund and the amount of money which we have allocated to them.

As part of this fundraising drive, we are supporting the benefit for a projector for arts / political groups / bands etc, as featured in the box to the right.

A big collective thank you to everybody who has donated to this fundraising appeal and a reminder to everybody else that there's still plenty of reasons to donate a few quid to allow us to provide more and more free community services on the internet and in the real world.