Hundreds of students and school-children took to streets of Belfast and Derry on consecutive days this week during protests organised in opposition to proposed increases which could see university fees rise to £9,000 [€10,800] annually.

Rúnaí ginearálta Éirígí Breandán Mac Cionnaith has announced the launch of the socialist republican party’s Stormont Isn’t Working campaign, which will highlight the inability of the puppet body to solve the economic crisis.

That, on the day an ailing Margaret Thatcher was being treated in a private hospital, British Tory chancellor George Osborne was rising at Westminster to wield his ideological axe was highly ironic.

Last Wednesday [September 29], around 5,000 people participated in rallies in Belfast and Derry, organised by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions as part of a European day of action against austerity measures and attacks on public services.

In 1948, despite the massive debt amassed during the Second World War, the British government of the day introduced the Health Service Act, creating the NHS and laying the foundation for the ‘welfare state’ as we know it today. (Though, like the Education Act of the same period, it had to be introduced into the Six Counties