Maybe revolution isn’t in the air just yet but yesterday’s demonstration of more than 100 000 people in Dublin is proof that workers are not happy with the government’s plans to literally make them pay for the collapse of the Irish economy. On top of that the Irish Army seems to be succumbing to Bolshevik agitation.  

Pdforra,  the organisation which represents soldiers, sailors and aircrew, is seeking an assurance from the government that they won’t be used to break strikes. Its general secretary Gerry Rooney said Defence Forces personnel had been used in the past to break strikes, including those by ambulance and bus workers. He called on Minister for Defence Willie O’Dea to assure his members they would not be used in the same way again saying “it will be morally wrong for soldiers to be ordered to break strikes arising from the imposition of the pensions levy”.

That’s the good news then he went and ruined it by saying “Members of PDFORRA’s National Executive will be attending the ICTU demonstration on Saturday. This is being done to show support for ICTU’s efforts to resurrect the Social Partnership process and introduce a Social Solidarity Pact.”

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) called the massive demonstration to mobilise a response to the levy that the Irish government is proposing to make on public sector employees. A person on €15,000 gross earnings will pay a levy of 3 per cent or €450 a year. This will rise to 5 per cent on a salary of €25,000 and, in a number of further stages, to 9.6 per cent for somebody earning €300,000. Now while it is true that ICTU is opposed to the levy it is not opposed to make cuts of 2 billion euro in public expenditure. In much the same way that a demonstration of 100 000 can be translated into British term you can do the same mathematics with the cuts that ICTU had signed up to. How do we know that the ICTU leadership has agreed to this? The Taoiseach Brian Cowen said so. Cowen told the Dáil that while “the social partners” had last week endorsed a framework for economic renewal, they had not been able to agree to a pension levy which would save €1.4 billion a year. “While this is regrettable, it does not mean that the engagement with the social partners was a failure: the overall framework has been agreed, the need for an immediate adjustment of €2 billion on a credible basis was also agreed,” he said.

Irish capitalism is a byword for corruption and short termism. Little of the money made during the boom years was spent on the health system, school or transport. The government has admitted that it did not carry out due diligence checks when it was putting public money into banks run by ministers’ cronies. The union leadership’s response to this bunch of crooks’ blatant attempt to make Irish workers pay for this is to plead to be taken seriously as “social partners”.  The problem with this is that the whole point of “social partnership” was to keep wages low and incorporate the unions into the privatisation process while allowing the union leaders to bluff themselves that they had some influence over government policy.

The main attack on the misbegotten theory of “social partnership” is coming from a right wing which senses that this a moment to open up a frontal attack on the unions. After a bit of flamboyant rhetoric about “a prolonged campaign of resistance” ICTU bends the knee committing itself to restoring the public finances through “a negotiated solution in which the burden would be shared by all sides in accordance with their ability to contribute”. You can be pretty certain that the gombeen capitalists won’t be paying a fraction of what is being nicked from public sector staff.

Yesterday’s march was very large and very impressive. Those who were at it say that it wasn’t just the working class who were there. It was the organised working class. The Irish ruling class is blazing a trail by trying to directly steal money out of the pockets of working people to pay for the €7 billion they have donated to their mates in the banking sector. If there is one thing more bankrupt than the Irish political class it is the strategy of social partnership between workers and the people trying to shaft them. It has to be rejected just as firmly as the levy.