It’s What We Put On Our Walls That Matters

08/08/08

Nelson Mandela once said that it’s not what we read in the newspapers, watch on our television screens or hear on the radio, but what’s written on the walls that is the accurate pulse of a people.

That behind all the state censorship, deliberate misinformation and corporate control, the rights and wrongs of those not in power is the only thing that really matters.

Accordingly, the walls of west Belfast are currently highlighting two issues that go to the very heart of what is wrong with modern Ireland, vis. the fact that 20 per cent of the population control 80 per cent of the wealth in this country and the ongoing military occupation of the North by 5,000 British troops.

The cynics and critics might find it laughable that a relatively new group such as éirígí is capable of reflecting what working people in Ireland think and feel, but they would only be allowing their hatred for an organised manifestation of an idea get in the way of understanding what that idea is actually saying.

Firstly, it is an independently verified fact that less than a quarter of Irish people control the vast majority of the country’s wealth. While only the misinformed could disagree with the statistic, only the most fervent advocates of free market economics could agree with the same statistic’s lack of ethics.

As the capitalist recession begins to hit hard, this fact is beginning to impact harshly on people who work in all sorts of occupations.

It is the reason why we witnessed the recent public sector strike in the Six Counties.

It is the reason why trade unions in the Twenty-Six Counties have been expressing serious reservations about the ‘social partnership’ arrangements in the southern state.

And it’s the reason why thousands of classroom assistants in the North had to bear the brunt of vitriol from politicians and other trade unions when they went out onto the picket line.

The unequal way in which wealth is distributed in Ireland is the reason why all these workers, and hundreds of thousands more, face a constant struggle to earn a living wage.

On Wednesday, it was announced that 180 manufacturing workers in Cork are to be laid off by the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Another 180 people who will have to fall back on the measly benefits paid out by the state while others get rich on the wealth that they produced.

Meanwhile, the normalisation campaign of the British government continues to go hand-in-hand with their many tools of repression.

As nationalists across the country prepare to mark the 37th anniversary of the most infamous bout of internment without trial in Irish history, the British government is putting the final touches on its plans to interrogate people for 42-days without charge or trial.

Britain’s paramilitary police force remains routinely armed and is planning to mount ‘in your face’ operations in working class nationalist areas in an effort to destroy community cohesion.

Fresh from doing Whitehall’s dirty work in Afghanistan, Britain’s Irish mercenaries, in the form of the Royal Irish Regiment, are planning triumphalist military parades in towns across the Six Counties at a time when we are told that Irish proponents of British rule no longer want to vent their spleen at Irish nationalists.

And if anyone manages to mount a strong enough resistance to this denial of democracy, Britain’s garrison will return to terrorise Irish streets.

These issues are not irrelevant, obscure or items of the past. They are the contemporary barriers to a better life for the vast majority of Irish citizens.

This was understood by the RUC-PSNI, who had the good sense to send several armoured jeeps into west Belfast to purse the éirígí activists engaged in stencilling.

Of course, everybody that’s affected knows what’s wrong with Irish society. It’s the fact that éirígí is proposing to do something about it that makes it dangerous.