BOYNE BOOKS – a real surprise

Boyne Books, the new bookshop  on Narrow West Street, is very fast aquiring the reputation of being Drogheda’s  latest and very best “cultural” venue .

Although only open since May of this year, Boyne Books has very quickly become the favourite bookshop of serious readers and of the local Creative Writers Group, not to mention Drogheda’s arts fraternity.

What seemingly sets Boyne Books well above and apart from the bigger book outlets in town is the sheer quality of its range of books, prints as well as old and rare photographs. Another feature of Boyne Books  is that it is a very inexpensive shop with something to suit every interest and budget. You  simply can’t fail  to get the feeling that the proprietors have taken a deliberate policy decision to completely bypass the ”trashy” end of the  book market, and concentrate solely on quality rather than quantity.

The other ingredient in the popularity of Boyne Books is that it is more than just another bookstore. It ’s also a venue, that hosts regular events – everything from exhibitions to poetry and book reading reading evenings to “open mic” nights, and has also already been the venue for one or two very  successful book launches.   A ”cafe-style” atmosphere (tea/coffee/snacks always available), tourist and visitor information readily on hand all  combine neatly with the books and the venue’s events to give the town it’s very first  (and very  real)  high street ”heritage centre”.

Check out  Boyne Books for yourself – you’ll be very pleasantly surprised.

WATER CHARGES – Press Statement

Issued by the following Socialist Party Councillors on Monday, July 27th 2009:

Cllr. Mick Barry (Cork City Council), Cllr. Ruth Coppinger (Fingal County Council), Cllr. Clare Daly (Fingal County Council), Cllr. Frank Gallagher (Drogheda Borough Council), Cllr. Tterry Kelleher (Balbriggan Town Council).

There are widespread media reports today that the government will attempt to impose water charges on households in the report of the Commission on Taxation.

This would be another intolerable imposition on the incomes of hard-pressed working people arising from the chronic crisis in Irish capitalism. 

We give notice to the government that any attempt to re-introduce a water tax will be met with a mass campaign of opposition including a mass boycott by householders. We would remind the government of the huge opposition to water charges throughout the country, and in particular in the greater Dublin area, in 1994, 1995 and 1996 led by the Federation of Dublin Anti-Water Charges Campaigns, which forced the abolition of this hated tax in December 1996.

Water conservation: The Green Party in government may try to justify water charges by saying that they would assist water conservation. This would be a patent hypocrisy. The fact is that almost half the national housing stock has been built in the last 13 years and extensive water conservation measures which would have dramatically improved the levels of conservation could have been insisted on. Despite consistent calls by the Socialist Party, these measures were not implemented.

BACON – a selfish “ham”

Economist Peter Bacon’s call for the statutory minimum wage to be cut reveals his  inhuman and viciously callous attitude towards  the poorest of the poor of the country’s workforce.

The self-styled “respected economic expert” never has a difficulty himself, charging obscene fees for his services of economic forecasting, writing and compiling various economic development plans and reports and doling out “expert” economic analysis and advice (much of it for local and national government) that guarantees him easy money from public purse. 

Like Colm McCarthy the other freeloaders and parasites that comprise An Bord Snip Nua and called for dole payments to be cut, all these individuals truly have necks as hard as the proverbial “jockey’s bollocks”. They belong to a class that has absolutely no problem living the “high life” funded by the State (i.e. the taxpayer) from the various economic quangos they routinely manage to get themselves co-opted onto.

Where was Bacon and his ilk when the residential property lobby (the land speculators, developers, the banks and the auctioneering fraternity) were racketeering and profiteering the national pension reserve fund out of existance? No calls for cuts to the profiteering or a stop to the racketeering there. In fact Bacon was publicly and brazenly dismissing the handful of genuinely respectable individuals who DID, forewarn of the consequenses of the so-called property boom. 

The damage done to the lives of ordinary working people (and Irish society generally) by those who inflated the residential property bubble, and those complicit in it’s inflation through their deafening silence, will be deeper and more widespread than the misery inflicted on the country and society by the drug barons and organised crime gangs.

Some “respected” economist, indeed, is Mr Bacon! – more like a free-loading, parasitic and selfish HAM.

THANK YOU DROGHEDA NORTH

I’m very proud and priviliged to have been the subject of local and national political history by becoming the Socialist Party’s first ever elected representative  to the  Drogheda Borough Council, and the Socialist Party’s first ever elected public representative in provincial Ireland (outside of Dublin and Cork).