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Edenderry a Symptom of a Bigger Problem

20/08/08

“Danish door and window manufacturer Rationel is to close its plant in Co Offaly, with the loss of 71 jobs.
“The Edenderry operation will close in November.
“However Rationel says it will maintain its sales and service division, which employs 50 people.”

The above was the entire RTÉ report on the devastating loss for Edenderry on August 8.

No comment was sought from the 71 soon-to-be unemployed workers, no speculation was entered into about their prospects of finding new jobs or what amount of unemployment benefit they would be forced to survive on.

Likewise, the Rationel Company was allowed to trot out its line unhindered, no challenge was presented as to why exactly so many people are facing the imminent prospect of becoming ex-employees.

Presumably, the national broadcaster was much too busy to give a more in depth account of the who, what, where, when and, crucially, the why of the mass lay-off.

This matter-of-fact reportage is a symptom of a wider problem that surrounds what is known as the global credit crunch and the economic calamity that dare not speak its name – recession.

Those who are in control of the most important aspects of our society have developed a mantra and a line of thinking that dictates that periodic unemployment is a fact of life and, in hard times, rising unemployment is an unavoidable reality. So, in the really hard times, work places will close, or be downsized, jobs will be lost, homes will be repossessed and belts will have to be tightened – by some.

As a result, the media can report, “The latest figures show that employment in the construction industry had an annual drop of 15% in June,” with a definitive full stop at the end. No need to elaborate or question because such is the way of the world, the law of the market reigns supreme.

Only, that’s not exactly what we were told until very recently. Last year, British prime minister Gordon Brown was promising no return to “boom and bust economics”. Yet citizens in the Six Counties have suffered job losses and spiraling increases in the cost of living like the rest of the country.

Gordon Brown was right about the very real possibility of consigning boom and bust economics to the past; it was the right-wing policies he consciously chose to follow that made such an outcome utterly impossible.

The first thing that must happen is the rejection of the notion that we are powerless in the face of the all-powerful laws of the “market”. It was working people who created the wealth recently enjoyed in Ireland and other parts of Europe and the world.

The idea that, once created, this wealth takes on a life of its own is propagated by those who get rich off it and never feel the pinch of hunger when times are not so good.

The wealth that is created in factories, banks, call centres and everywhere else by the same class of people – the working class – is there to be used for the common good and in the interests of economic stability if only the will to take control of it was there.

Such control isn’t a pipe dream; it is a real possibility that is being piloted in parts of the world far worse off than Ireland.

In Venezuela, the nationalisation of the cement industry is continuing in an effort to counter-act the inability of the private sector to build enough new homes for the country’s population.

In Bolivia, the socialist president Evo Morales has resoundingly won a referendum that allows him to continue the process of redistributing the Latin American country’s wealth to the impoverished indigenous population.

It’s time that people in Ireland started looking at harnessing their own resources in order to make human disasters like the one in Edenderry a thing of the past.

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