The cuts introduced in the recent budget are, most certainly, the biggest attack on education in over 20 years and, very probably, the most savage since the foundation of the state.
Over 2,000 teachers will be taken out of the system, increasing class sizes and ensuring children will be sent home, come January, where “substitute teachers “ are withdrawn. It is simply unacceptable that schoolchildren will now be made to pay for the collapse of Ireland’s residential property, gold-rush economy. The education cuts MUST be stopped – and stopped NOW.
Ireland’s pensioners showed how people power can force an unpopular government to back down. Your own children’s, and grandchildren’s, futures dictate that the government’s vicious education cuts are reversed. Already, tens of thousands of ordinary people have taken to the streets in places like Dublin, Tullamore and Galway. This campaign of popular protest must be stepped up. Teachers, trade unions, parents and students must follow the lead of our senior citizens and continue to build a campaign of resistance, turning up the pressure until the government reverses its position on the education cuts .
Five hundred million euro is already earmarked by the Fianna Fail – Green Party – Harney coalition government to to set up a new Local Authority lending (Scam) Scheme to hand out loans of up to 285,000 euro to the public to buy “new-build” houses, so as to keep them priced at over twice their real value, and in the process continue a policy of lining the pockets of their friends and benefactors in the country’s residential property and development lobby. Small wonder that this cohort, more than any other, filled the coffers of Fianna Fail and bribed their way above, beyond and around every one of the country’s planning laws.
The brass-neck double stndards of Ireland’s corruption-ridden, political and business ”elite” comfortably puts every one of them in the very same league as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. A stepping up of public protests in the New Year will have to be considered, not just on issues like education cuts but also in relation to the country’s continuing health service shambles and the now chronic unemployment problem. If the country’s trade union leadership is to retain, even a shred of public credibility, then national work stoppages MUST be firmly on their agenda, come 2009.
