Give me your name and address or I’ll rape you” - the words of a Garda Sgt as he discussed with at least two other Gardai how they were going to interrogate one of two female Shell to Sea campaigners they had arrested and who were being brought to Belmullet Garda station. Just second earlier while they were discussing how to interrogate the women one Garda suggested they threaten her with deportation. The Sgt responds with the addition of the rape threat which he repeats before another so far unidentified Garda chimes in with “hold it there, give me your name and address there, I’ll rape you” prompting the Sgt to repeat it one last time as “or I’ll definitely rape you.” [Listen to the 2 minute audio] [Spanish translation]

Thursday 16th December saw the European Courts of Human Rights finally announce its judgements on a very important pro-choice case taken to the court by 3 women supported by the IFPA.  The WSM has been consistently involved in pro-choice struggles in the three decades of its existence and on Thursday as part of that involvement we were trying to provide coverage, analysis and background as the stories broke on WSM.IE.

The last two years in Ireland have been dominated by the massive assault launched on the working class as our rules have successfully forced us to pay for the crisis in their system.  Tens of billions have been used to bail out the property developers, speculators and bankers, money that has been generated by the slashing of public services and the imposition of a massive pay cut on public sector workers. The response of the left has been weak and highly fragmented, reflecting in part the massive hold neo liberal ideology has on the working class but also a left that was in no way prepared for the coordinated assault that fell on workers in Ireland. WSM had its six monthly conference in May and as you might expect this topic took up a good chunk of the agenda.

One of our ideas with running the Rethinking Revolution discussion series is to try and return to old core concepts for the left in fairly fresh and non dogmatic ways.  It probably comes in part from a view that a lot of the 'movement of movements' left are tending to throw the baby out with the bathwater on some of these concepts in focusing on quite narrow, orthodox interpretations of these issues.  The audio with this blog 'How do we know who will Struggle?' was the first of the meetings where we tried to return to the importance of class through a somewhat indirect route.