Early in 2011 I gave a talk via Skype to the Toronto Anarchist Bookfair in which I described some of the aspects of the anti-colonial struggle in Ireland that I thought has some particular relevence to the colonial situations of the America's in general and Canada in particular.  The video was put on youtube in May and I had intended to find and tidy up the notes from the talk to publish here with the video but as 2011 is on its way out I'm going to post the video here as part of my end of year archiving / tidy up.  

At the end of another year I've had a look back at all the articles I wrote in 2011 and how many reads each received here in Anarchist Writers and on the WSM site.  Below are the five most popular according to those counts.  In think all of these were also published in other locations so both the count and rank are only approximations. 

I visited the site of Occupy London when I was in London at the end of October for the London anarchist bookfair and took the photos that in the flickr slideshow below.  These are a selection of over 100 shots, in particular I took photos of all the signs and leaflets that were stuck up to archive, most of them aren't interesting enough to include here though.

The last 3 General Assemblies at Occupy Dame Street have seen greatly reduced numbers in comparison with those leading up to the controversial vetoing of common work with DCTU. I've been at all three and it seems quite a number of people have walked away, at least for a while, including at least a couple of the blochers. On the other hand the camp is solidifying, in particular with the construction of a large wooden hut last night to be used as a kitchen. It sends the clear message to those watching that whatever the differences we have been debating out under their CCTV cameras the camp is not going away.

Monday night saw the final in a series of Occupy Dame Street's GA's that focused on the proposal that ODS link up with the Dublin Council of Trade Unions. Unfortunately both proposals for some form of collective participation in the DCTU protest march of November 26th were vetoed by a small informal group who objected to working with the unions on what amounted to a range of ideological concerns.

What do you do when the people making the right arguments are manipulative idiots who have so alienated people that opening their mouths amounts to emptying a full magazine into their feet? I started this blog having just come from an Occupy Dame Street assembly. There I witnessed a car crash in glorious slow motion. I felt that deep sort of frustration, where you can see just what is coming, but remain unable to tear your eyes off the disaster as it wrecks all around.

The issue on the face of it is simple. The Dublin Council of Trade Unions has called a pre-budget demonstration and would like Occupy Dame Street to co-organise it. Straightforward enough you'd imagine. Well it's a bit more complex. Occupy Dame Street is a little prone to an anti-union line that is about the 8/10's Sunday Independent’s 'The unions are running the country' and 2/10's the left communist’s 'The unions are running the country.' [Ian, please note that the 2/10's comprises both people who might be called 'autonomists' with some degree of accuracy: Everyone else, there are two in-jokes there, only one of which most of you have a hope of working out].

Like I suspect many other Anarchist Writers readers I've been playing a part in the Occupy X movement. I've visited the camps in Cork & London (and published photos of both, see end of this post for images from Dublin) and I've been active from time to time in the General Assembly of the Dublin Camp at Occupy Dame Street. I also did a workshop on activist journalism at Occupy Dame Street about 10 days back.

I just discovered this report I wrote about the 2006 London anarchist bookfair hidden on the WSM site.  Thought I'd blog it here although being nearly 5 years old its only really of historic interest.

Saturday saw the 6th Anarchist Bookfair in Dublin, once more in Liberty Hall, the HQ of the largest Irish union.  It's always a hectic time as a huge amount of work has to be done in terms of promotion and organisation, not helped this year by the removal of 70% of the posters we put up, we presume by the Garda.  This has some impact on numbers, I noticed that I at least vaguely recognised a much bigger proportion of the people who attended then at last years's bookfair and we think the numbers were down by a couple of hundred.  I've no time to say a lot about the bookfair but here are some photos I took during the day along with the advance publicity material we produced.

Given that I wrote four articles, edited two bits of audio, shot one video and published 60 or so pictures online it seems odd to see the Garda rape tape controversy as an example of not having the time to write something up.  Yet that is the reality.  Outside of what was written I could probably write four times that amount on aspects of the story, the way it was covered and the way we and others dealt with it.  I'll probably never get around to it but here at least I'm linking to some of the pictures and video I shot at the protest on Friday.