Drogheda Anarchists

20/02/2019

TOWN MUST END ASSOCIATION WITH MURDEROUS TURKISH STATE

The Drogheda borough council is bringing shame to the town by continuing to do business with the Turkish State that is currently engaged in the occupation of the northern Syrian province of Afrin and the repression of minorities and all opposition on the home front.

Turkish President Erdoğan is a modern day Oliver Cromwell, yet last Saturday (as reported in this morning’s Drogheda Leader, below), he was given a grand tour of Drogheda by Mayor Frank Godfrey. Worse still, he has been invited to be guest of honour at this year’s St. Patrick’s day parade. Shame on those who are associating Drogheda with the Erdogan regime.

Up to 500 civilians were killed last year and between 150,000 and 300,000 were displaced last year when Turkey invaded Afrin province in the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. The federation was the product of the Rojava revolution that brought real democracy to the region, defeated ISIS and put in motion what has been called a women’s revolution as it has set about dismantling the patriarchal social relations that have existed there for millennia. The Turkish state wants to undo all of that.

At home Erdogen has engaged in censorship, suppression of opposition and banned LGBTQ cultural events and meetings and laws against “offenses to public morality” have lead to harassment of members of that community. There are no laws preventing discrimination on the basis of sexuality.

In 2016, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) attempted to introduce legislation which would have made a child r**e no longer punishable if the ra**st would offer to marry his victim; Only a major public outcry against "legitimising r**e and encouraging child marriage" forced the his right wing Islamist government to back down. There has also been a rise in crime against women in Turkey under Erdogan’s rule. Erdogan himself thinks women should have at least three children.

Given the right wing patriarchal nature of the Turkish regime, it is unsurprising that they would want to crush a revolution at their border that is bringing about women’s freedom and real decentralised democracy that flows from community assemblies. The regime has also been accused of allowing ISIS terrorists to cross the border as long as they were attacking the Kurds and other forces of democratic northern Syria.

It is a slap in the face to the people of northern Syria and opposition forces in Turkey that the state through its ambassador is being treated as an honoured guest in a town that once faced the terror that has been visited upon Afrin, in a land whose people struggled long and hard against an imperial oppressor. And it is an insult to the women of the town and the LGBT community in Drogheda to parade the representative of such an authoritarian regime around the town like some kind of hero.

Such an association is out of touch with the progressive views of the people of Drogheda who voted by large majorities in favour of marriage equality and abortion rights. The council should reflect these views by siding with the oppressed - like the Kurdish minority in Turkey, and the free Kurdish and Syrian people of the NSDF, the women who made a revolution to overthrow patriarchy and the LGBTQ community who yearn for freedom of expression.

We call on the town councilors to end the association with the Turkish state and on the St Patrick’s Day parade committee to withdraw its embarrassing invitation to the Turkish ambassador.

Turkey out of Afrin! Hands of Rojava!

26/06/2017

  1939 was a notable year for quite a few reasons, the most obvious being the outbreak of the second world war. After the solemn vows following the last war in Europe that such a conflict woul…

19/06/2017

"We’ve been this way before. No, I’m sure. Yes, of course it has changed a bit, it’s been over forty years. It’s definitely been spruced up since then. The people around here aren’t men in blue overalls anymore, but that’s progress for you. And gentrification. Look, there’s Owen Jones, lets stop and ask him. No, wait, he seems a bit lost, best not. We’ve been on this road for so long, I’m beginning to think we’ve been going the wrong way all this time. It’s been over a hundred years. Well over. I’m pretty sure we should have arrived by now.

Undoubtedly all those diversions and road closures didn’t help. Neil Kinnock was more concerned with getting the Trotskyists off the bus than he was was about running the Tories off the road. John Smith, just parked up in the hope the Tories would crash themselves, then Blair took over. Tony Blair, suave and smooth gave up pretending he was on the road to socialism and took the bus to Tory town and for a long time it looked like it would never leave. But after Ed Milliband’s ill advised stop at a motorway service station for a bacon sandwich, Jeremy Corbyn took the wheel and despite the Blairites at the back of the bus screaming that he was going the wrong way, things did start to look better.

Certainly where Labour is now looks a lot more appealing than it did at any time in the last forty years – in my lifetime in fact. They’ve taken up radical policies that are designed to benefit working people; The rhetoric is in the great tradition of British working class politics; Corbyn has energised the workers’ movement, and young people are being politicised and mobilised in numbers the UK hasn’t seen since the 80’s. This is all very positive, but we need to ask where this road goes. Has the labour route been the wrong road for socialism all along? Because, as great as it is to see left wing ideas returning to the mainstream, we have been here before, more than once."

We’ve been this way before. No, I’m sure. Yes, of course it has changed a bit, it’s been over forty years. It’s definitely been spruced up since then. The people around here…

28/03/2017

We support the Bus Éireann workers, without reservation. We understand that some of you are angry that services have been disrupted. You are right to be angry, but don't direct that anger at the workers who are defending their pay and conditions, direct it at the state, who are attempting to privatise what is left of our public transport system.

That's how they do it, by turning people against public services, making them seem inefficient, making the workers look greedy. But the truth is, public transport in Ireland is grossly underfunded. We have the lowest public transport subvention in Europe per head of GDP.

At the same time, the state is funding the privately run M50 toll bridge to the tune of €50 million per year. That's €50 million of your taxes taken from the public purse and put in private pockets and its ten times the value of cuts demanded of Bus Éireann.

Workers should not be expected to drop three to four thousand in wages per annum, they rely on those wages to pay mortgages, pay off loans and put kids through college.

We should not be expecting public services to make a profit. That is not their purpose. Their purpose is to provide a service that people need. They should no more be exploited for profit than health, education or social welfare.

So don't turn your anger against public service workers, turn it against the state, because we need our public services, and once they successfully destroy one they'll come for the rest.

An injury to one, is an injury to all.

16/11/2016

"Here in Ireland, women do not have reproductive rights. The state can and does force women to have C-Sections and undergo invasive medical procedures against their will. Abortion is effectively outlawed, despite the fact that the majority of voters would say yes in a referendum to repeal the 8th amendment that makes it so. But never mind what a majority of voters think. There is only one person who should get to make a decision about ending a pregnancy – the one who is pregnant. It took over twenty years to pass legislation to allow very limited access to abortion if she is at risk of dying, and it took the death of a woman in an Irish hospital for that to happen. Now as an unelected ‘citizen’s assembly’ of ninety nine randomly selected people deliberates on whether to advise the government to have a referendum on the 8th Amendment, you have to wonder, even if we get it, how long will it take to legislate on the outcome? Meanwhile women will continue to travel to England for abortions, order the abortion pill online, or not and go through the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy, or die because she is not deemed ill enough. Is this what democracy looks like? It’s not enough."

There’ll soon be a white supremacist in the white house. He’ll be advised by an actual Neo-Nazi, while his Chief of Staff provides a connection with the old conservative establishment. …

13/11/2016

"There is no ‘if only’ that can give us comfort. The people who are on the streets protesting and rioting against the Trump presidency can not wait four more years for Kanye 2020 or Springsteen 2020 or whoever the left Dems, the labour movement and the nominally Trotskyist left think will win over the rust belt. We have a white supremacist climate change denier sexual predator commanding the biggest army in the world, putting the breaks on the very modest and wholly insufficient moves towards slowing down climate change, opening the floodgates of racism, misogyny and homophobia and a guy who blows up regularly on twitter with access to nuclear codes."

Bernie Sanders could not have won. Yes, some of the polls said he would have beaten Trump (a whole three polls in fact); But he couldn’t have won because despite his mild social democratic po…

09/05/2016

A new day, a new government.

"To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue. … To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." (P.J. Proudhon)

18/04/2016

"Militiaisiation on the other hand, comprises the attempts of various states, in the interests of capital to create a labour force on permanent standby to take up whatever work is necessary (in the pursuit of profit and economic growth), to be instantly available to be re-purposed via state and private training agencies for whatever purposes the economy requires, like a rapid deployment force of workers. In some cases, like the Jobbridge scheme in Ireland, they are presented as voluntary, though lack of entry level positions in many industries ensures that anyone who wishes to start a career in that area must work for free (on social welfare payment) to get the necessary experience. Even then they may find themselves unable to find paying work in their chosen sector and have to retrain, intern again and hope for different results. Other programmes, are mandatory and people who have been out of work long term can be assigned to employment, regardless of their preferences, education, or abilities"

I first introduced the concept of the militiaisation of labour in Not Waving but Drowning: Precarity and the working class in issue six of the Irish Anarchist Review (IAR) in 2012, to describe the …

17/04/2016

The following text is based on my contribution to the debate on Basic Income at the Dublin Anarchist Bookfair on Saturday 16th of April 2016. I will add a link to the audio of the whole debate when…

06/04/2016

Chaos grips the streets of Dublin; There is a car on fire in the middle of George’s street and the shattered remains of shop windows litter the pavement. Looted shelves of supermarkets and department stores lie empty, even the coffee sweets have been eaten from the boxes of roses and quality street that were left over from Christmas.



"Down the country, it is worse; The cows have stopped giving milk and men from various townlands have discarded their clothing to fight naked battles on what once were GAA pitches using pitch forks and rocks in socks. The women folk hide indoors saying rosaries in the hope that a government of champions can bring stability back to the country.

If you read the Irish Times and Irish Independent or followed any of the pre-election coverage from the state broadcaster, RTÉ, and believed it, you would be forgiven for expecting such chaos scenarios to arise. Stability was the buzz word and when the election results rolled in, commentators were panic stricken, wondering where that would come from."

Henry Street, Dublin, after the 1916 Rising. The shell of the GPO is on the right. Miller, James Martin & H.S. Canfield. – “The People’s War Book and Pictorial Atlas of the Wo…

27/03/2016

(Capitalism) will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which breaks through, reshaping the economy around new values, beha…

13/02/2016

“Tomorrow at 2pm I'm broadcasting live on with an view of same handle there, it's ”