Community Awakening

By AM Saturday, July 21, 2012

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Guest writer Sean Doyle of the IWU and Clann Eirigi County Wicklow writing on exploitation and social inequality.

People are reluctant to accept they have been sacrificed and discarded by their chosen elected representatives without any obligation of care or understanding of the hardship endured by their cutbacks.

Decimating whole communities and breaking up and destroying families. We are thrown to the wolves without hesitation by our elected to continue paying the gambling debts of banks, bondholders and speculators at home and abroad.

We in our communities have been too passive and trusting. Some born of a mindset over years engraved in their brain through years of class distinction that somehow our lives, that of our children and community are secondary to the aspirations and greed of the monetary class.

What would you know mentality? Leave those decisions to your betters. Our contribution in this society as perceived by the master class, don’t ask, don’t complain. Take what you are given and be grateful. Don’t protest! Stay at home poking the ashes until we send for you to vote for your betters.

Reality is cold and stark. The facts are human values are in extreme decline. Reckless greed is rampant and their losses are borne by us, our children and our grandchildren. Their inheritance, what is left of our natural resources after successive governments steals and gives away, is being robbed, and our semi state companies sold to continue propping up a failed corporate monetary union.

They are merciless in pursuit of their salvation raising taxes not on the rich but on the ordinary communities, household, water and septic tank tax hastening their ability to collect these taxes from already impoverished communities. They, our elected, passed a totally unjust law specifying every household to register by March 31st and pay another tax of 100 euro for the privilege of compliance which will enable them to introduce household and water tax hastily inevitably taking the food out of our children’s mouths and depriving them of the clothes on their backs.

I came across a poem by Padraig Pearse titled “The Rebel”. I include one verse.

And I say to the master of my people.

Beware of the thing that is coming. 

Beware of the risen people who shall take what ye would not give. 

Did ye really think to conquer our people? 

Or that law is stronger than life and men’s desire to be free. 

We are going to have it out with you now. 

Ye that have harried and held. 

Ye that have bullied and bribed. 

You’re nothing to us now. 

Only tyrants, hypocrites and liars.

I think that sums up our government quite well. We must unite our communities in solidarity and defend and fight injustice from our doorsteps. Starting with rejecting and combating the instillation of water meters, build peoples’ confidence in our ability to challenge gross injustice and prioritise right over wrong lawful or otherwise.

The void between law and justice ever increasing is merely a reflection of greed driven on behalf of the elite by our legislators that we must challenge, from unjust taxes to land grabbing by private individuals of our foreshore and commonage on our hills and mountains and the decline in right of ways. It is our duty to take back what was taken. We ourselves are the custodians for future generations. Because the ones entrusted have betrayed and joined the fleshpots of Europe.

I will conclude by quoting Seamus Costello part of oration he made at the Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown in 1966:

The lesson of history shows that in the final analysis the robber baron must be disestablished by the same methods that he used to enrich; himself and retain his ill gotten gains.