Ireland
Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams: 'We can bring about a democratic revolution'
Follow Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams TD as he casts his vote for the first time in an Irish Dail election to topping the poll with 15,072 first preference votes and becoming a Sinn Fein TD for Louth/East Meath.
By Gerry Adams
March 1, 2011 -- The [Irish] election is now finally and positively and definitively over! The last counts in Wicklow and Laois Offaly and Galway West have been completed and the shape of the next Dáil is now known.
Acres of newsprint have been used to analyse the results and hours of television and radio, of tweets and blogs have reported on every twist and turn of what was a hugely important election.
Fianna Fáil and the Green Party have been punished for the bad decisions they took in government. Fine Gael and Labour benefited from the public anger. They did so despite having said they will implement Fianna Fail’s policy of adding private banking debt to the sovereign debt, and of implementing a succession of punitive austerity budgets over the next three years at least.
There are a plethora of independents from the left to the right and many in between.
Ireland: Electoral revolt against austerity, left makes big gains
Election night report of the count in Dun Laoghaire.
Ireland: Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams -- `The people know the system doesn’t serve them'
Gerry Adams launches Sinn Fein's general election campaign.
February 7, 2011 -- Irish Republican News -- Sinn Fein opened its election campaign on February 6 with a strong attack by party president Gerry Adams on corruption in the political system in the 26 Counties. Adams pointed to deep-seated anger among voters about the outgoing government and the other establishment parties, who he said were part of a deeply corrupt ruling elite.“The economy is in crisis because of political choices being made by a deeply corrupt political elite operating within a flawed political system. And the political choices that they made were bad political choices”, Adams said. “There is deep distress out there. The people know the system doesn’t serve them, and that makes it a corrupt system.”
Ireland: More left support for the United Left Alliance
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Statement from Ireland’s Socialist Democracy on the February 25 general election.
Ireland: Radio debate on United Left Alliance and left unity
The future of the left in Irish politics
January 20, 2011 -- RTE, Today with Pat Kenny -- A new political alliance was born in Ireland just before Christmas. It is the United Left Alliance. It’s an umbrella group of left-wing parties and individuals who have joined forces to fight the March 11, 2011, general election.
The grouping consists of three existing political parties: the Socialist Party, the People Before Profit Alliance and the Workers and Unemployed Action Group. However the Labour Party and Sinn Fein are not members.
Irish crisis: A complete failure for neoliberalism
By Eric Toussaint, translated by Christine Pagnoulle in collaboration with Judith Harris
January 3, 2011 -- CADTM -- For a decade, Ireland was heralded by the most ardent partisans of neoliberal capitalism as a model to be imitated. The "Celtic Tiger" had a higher growth rate than the European average. Tax rates on companies had been reduced to 12.5% |1| and the rate actually paid by the transnational corporations that had set up business there was between 3 and 4% -- a CEO’s dream!
The United Left Alliance in Ireland: Is this the left unity we were hoping for?
Richard Boyd Barrett from the People Before Profit Alliance and Joe Higgins MEP fr
November 23, 2010 -- Irish Republican News -- The public finances of the 26-county state [Ireland] will, for the next three years at least, be subject to “regular reviews” by external monitors working on behalf of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Union (EU) and the British and Swedish governments.
On November 21, the Taoiseach [Prime Minister] Brian Cowen and minister for finance Brian Lenihan, after a week of shocking lies and deceit, said they were accepting the IMF/EU bailout. It later emerged that the G7, comprising the seven most powerful countries in the world, had met to give its approval to the deal.
