Sarah Cullen & John Smith To Speak At Éirígí Ard Fheis 2022 - Here's Who They Are.
Ard Fheis Éirígí 2022 is set to take place in The Teachers Club in Dublin on Saturday, February 26th, 2022. The afternoon session will see Sarah Cullen of the 18for0 campaign and the award-winning author John Smith address the meeting and participating in a discussion panel. Éirígí General Secretary, Mickey Moran. will make up the final member of the three person panel.
Below is some background information on both guest speakers and the topics that they will be talking about at An Ard Fheis. If you’re interested in attending An Ard Fheis to hear Sarah Cullen and John Smith speak, please email info@eirigi.org
Sarah Cullen of the 18for0 campaign
Sarah Cullen holds a bachelors degree in physics and a masters degree in energy systems engineering. She has also worked in both the solar and nuclear energy sectors in Ireland and Britain. This academic and professional background gives Sarah a particularly deep insight into the challenges that will have to be overcome for Ireland to produce all of its electricity from non-fossil fuel sources.
Sarah co-founded 18for0 with the objective of kick-starting a national conversation about how Ireland can get to the point that it is no longer burning any fossil fuels to generate electricity — a conversation which must answer where our electricity is going to come from when Ireland’s wind turbines stop turning when there is little or no wind.
Under the Dublin government’s current plans, carbon-generating gas power stations will roar into life to fill the energy ‘gap’ that will open up when wind and solar cannot produce enough electricity to meet demand - a gap that is estimated at 18% of our total future electricity requirement.
18for0 is asking people and government to consider nuclear power as a possible source of energy that could fill that 18% gap, while also keeping Ireland on track for net zero carbon.
Éirígí has not yet adopted any position in relation to nuclear power in Ireland. Inviting Sarah Cullen to speak at An Ard Fheis will give party members and supporters an opportunity to listen, to question and to consider the pro and cons of nuclear power before the party adopts a formal position on the issue in the future.
John Smith holding his award winning book, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century
John Smith is an award-winning English author who will be flying into Dublin to attend An Ard Fheis. While Smith holds a PHD and is currently working full time as an author and researcher, he has previously worked as a bus driver, an oil rig worker, a university lecturer and a telecommunications engineer. An ivory-tower academic he is not.
Smith’s 2012 book 'The GDP Illusion', highlighted how apparently neutral economic data systematically underestimated the wealth that was generated by low-paid workers in the global south and conversely overestimated the wealth generated by the corporations / countries of the global north that profited from the labour of those workers.
Smith's 2015 'Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis' received widespread praise for its ground-breaking research and analysis. In it Smith examines the relationship between the main capitalist economies and the rest of the world in a neoliberal globalisation.
The production processes for T-shirts, coffee and iPhones are all tracked and used to show how modern imperialism can control and exploit target countries through global finance and markets instead of the traditional means of invasion, conquest and occupation.