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So How’s the ol’ 1 Percent Getting On?

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The 1-percenters are back in the news with the Oxfam study showing that the world’s richest 1 percent owns more wealth than all the rest of the planet put together. So what about our own 1 percent? How are they doing? Let’s have a look at how that 1 percent and other top earners have been getting along in the crisis.

What follows is based on the EU’s Survey of Income and Living Conditions measurement of income (there may be trouble with the link – go to Eurostat Database/Population and Social Conditions/Living Conditions and welfare/Income and living conditions/income distribution and monetary poverty/distribution of income/the first table). It is a different concept from what Oxfam used: wealth. Wealth ownership refers to assets – real estate (buildings, land) and financial property (shares, bonds, cash, equities, pension pots, etc.). Income refers to the annual flow, whether it is employee or self-employed earnings, investment income, pensions, etc.

Income is only one measure of economic power and influence in the economy. Profits levels, the relative strength of labour and capital, degree of financialisation, place in the production process, social status, ownership of assets – it could be argued that income is the result, not the cause, of unequal power relationships in the economy. But it’s an informative measurement and can reveal something of what is happening around us or, in this case, above us.

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Prior to the crash the top 1 percent held nearly six percent of the share of national income, above the EU-15 average. This fell to 2011 – primarily due to losses in capital and self-employment income arising from property and speculative losses in the crash. However, since 2011 (and the current government), things are on the mend with the 1 percent trending upwards. Still a ways to go to pre-crash levels but with a little time and a few tax cuts, normal business should be be resumed.

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Lower Your Expectations – the Recovery is Settling In

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Remember at the beginning of the recession when we had all those letters to represent the likely course of the economy. There was the V-shape to represent severe decline followed by an immediate bounce-back; a U-shape to represent severe decline, a bit of lingering at the bottom and then a bounce-back; and the L-shape with severe decline followed by flat-lining as the economy stagnated. Between 2008 and 2013 this best fit the economy.

Now the economy is back in recovery mode but under the Government projections we are not going to bounce back to pre-recession levels of living standards. Lower your expectations, sisters and brothers, the recovery is setting in.

Let’s take a historical look at two indicators of living standards. First, consumer spending:

  • Between 1970 and 1995, a period covering two slump periods punctuated with growth, real consumer spending averaged 2.7 percent annually per capita.
  • Between 1995 and 2000 (the good phase of the Celtic Tiger, based on investment, manufacturing and exports), real consumer spending averaged 8.5 percent annually per capita. That was a strong performance, with employment rising, increasing wages and the ongoing shift to a modern enterprise base.
  • Between 2000 and 2007 (the bad speculative phase) real consumer spending averaged 3.4 percent per capita.. A little better than the pre-Celtic Tiger period but as we know, unsustainable.

Then the recession hit and consumer spending fell by over 10 percent. However, as always happens, the economy recovered. In the textbook alphabet, there would be a burst coming out of the recession, representing pent-up demand, and then things would settle back down to past trends. If the Government projections come true, this will not be the case.

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“Wants” A US-style Taxation System?

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The Taoiseach says he wants a US-style tax system. What does he think we have already? Here’s what the EU Ameco database tells us. Ireland data from 2015 comes from the Government’s own budgetary projections.

US Taxation

Ireland already has a US-style taxation system – if we use general government revenue as the benchmark. Before the crash Ireland was awash with revenue from the speculative boom; revenue that quickly evaporated. Since then, Irish government revenue has been steadily falling. By 2017:

  • The Government projects revenue will be below 32 percent of GDP. When we factor in multi-national accountancy practices, this figure rises to 34.5 percent
  • Ameco projects that US revenue will be 34 percent
  • Ameco also projects that Eurozone revenue will be over 46 percent.

A few things stand out in this. First, we are already at low US low-levels of taxation. Second, we are certainly not at European norms. We’d have to raise taxation by a mind-boggling €26 billion to reach the Eurozone average. Even with the demographic benefit of having fewer elderly (which is substantially negated by a higher level of young people) we’d have to increase taxation massively.

Third, the Government projections foresee revenue falling even further out to 2021 when it will be below 34 percent.

And here’s the kicker: this doesn’t factor in tax cuts that a future government may introduce. For instance, Fine Gael wants to abolish USC. That will drive tax revenue down further, potentially falling behind US levels.

When measured as a percentage of GDP, Ireland is at the bottom of EU tables – fighting it out with Romania and Latvia for the rock bottom prize. Nods towards quality health and education services, childcare and eldercare, public transport, pensions and incomes supports are made, but these are little more than nods; perfunctory gestures in a debate that effectively excludes the social.

What the Taoiseach really wants is for Ireland to be a basement-without-a-bargain economy where public resources are squeezed, investment is starved, and the energy bulb frequently cuts out without any window to let in the light.

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How the influence of World Bank policies damaged China’s economy

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Present negative trends in China’s financial system and economy were accurately predicted by me three years ago as occurring if there was any influence of policies of the World Bank Report on China.

While China has made major steps forward in areas such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and New Silk Road (‘One Belt One Road’) unfortunately in some areas World Bank policies did acquire influence. As predicted they led to present negative trends.

There should also be clarity. China has the world’s strongest macroeconomic structure so these trends will not lead to a China ‘hard landing’. But they are a confirmation that no country, including China, can escape the laws of economics. As long as there is any influence of World Bank type policies, which are also advocated by Western writers such as George Magnus and Patrick Chovanec, there will be problems in China’s financial system and economy.

The article I wrote in September 2012 which was published under the original title ‘Fundamental errors of the World Bank report on China’ is republished without alteration. 

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The World Bank’s report China 2030 has, unsurprisingly, provoked major criticism and protest. I have read World Bank reports on China for more than 20 years and this is undoubtedly the worst. So glaring are its factual errors, and economic non-sequiturs, that it is difficult to believe it was intended as an objective analysis of China’s economy. It appears to be driven by the political objective of supporting current US policies, embodied in proposals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Listing merely the factual errors in the report, of both commission and omission, as well as the elementary economic howlers, would take up more column inches than are available to me. So what follows is just a small selection, leaving space to consider the possible purpose of such a strange report.

The report has no serious factual analysis of the present stage of China’s economic development. On the one hand it is behind the times and “pessimistic”, saying China may become “the world’s largest economy before 2030”. This is extremely peculiar as, by the most elementary economic calculations, (the Economist magazine now even provides a ready reckoner!) China will become the world’s largest economy before 2020.

On the other hand, the report greatly exaggerates the rate at which China will enter the highest form of value added production. As such, the report calls for various changes in China, and bases its calls on the rationale of “when a developing country reaches the technology frontier’. But China’s economy, unfortunately, is not yet approaching the international technology frontier, except in specialized defence-related areas. Even when China’s GDP equals that of the US, China’s per capita GDP, a good measure of technology’s spread across its economy, will be less than one quarter of the US’s. Even making optimistic assumptions, China’s per capita GDP will not equal the US’s until around 2040, by which time China’s economy would be more than four times the size of the US’s! Put another way, China will not reach the technology frontier, in a generalized way, for around three decades, so this rationale can’t be used to justify changes now.

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January Issue of Socialist Voice Out Now

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Terrorist attacks are an excuse for war

Terrorist attacks on Western soil will inevitably spark hyperbolic responses from the European establishment, and these very human tragedies are often manipulated, for a number of reasons.
They are frequently used as a pretext for targeting and undermining our rights to privacy and personal freedom, or for justifying confused or downright aggressive plans for intervention in foreign countries.

Venezuela: The struggle continues

Robert Navan and Seán Edwards:
When Obama declared Venezuela to be a threat to the United States he wasn’t being absurd. He meant, of course, a threat to US hegemony in the region.

The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela was the greatest challenge to that domination since the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

Price-fixing and cartels

Paul Doran:
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a cartel is an association of manufacturers or suppliers formed with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition.
The sheer number of cartels around the world is astonishing.

When the British government banned the Orange Order

Dónall Ó Briain
Not many people today know that the British government made the Orange Order illegal—twice. How different Irish history might have been if it had remained so!
The Orange Order was founded in 1795 following a sectarian fight in Armagh.

Pivotal moments in recent Irish history

Nicola Lawlor
The left today seems to be missing some important lessons from pivotal moments in recent Irish history. This article is a brief, and simplified, overview of some of those moments. The lessons are worth keeping to the fore in considering any strategy for building socialism in Ireland, because without them such efforts will be wasted, misguided, and even damaging.

Frank Conroy Commemoration

On Saturday 12 December 2015 a very interesting Frank Conroy Commemoration

Alternative media

Tommy McKearney
The new leader of the Labour Party in Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, recently told the Morning Star that he is exploring options for breaking up Britain’s media monopolies.

That Corbyn and his supporters would consider doing so is hardly surprising in the light of the hysterical and vitriolic campaign waged against them by Britain’s press and broadcasters.

Mind your language Part 2

Robert Navan
A newly arrived Martian would find themselves very confused by much of the language used by our mainly right-wing Western media. The confusion would arise from the constant use of words generally associated with the political left.

(Part 1 was published in Socialist Voice, January 2013)

Paulo Freire: Revolutionary educational thinker

Eoghan O’Neill
Paulo Freire was one of the most revolutionary of educational thinkers. His seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is a major contribution to the concept of learning. It delves beneath the mechanics of the methodology of learning to encompass concepts such as conscientisation

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Walker Evans Depth of Field von John Hill

Photography & Fiction Books of 2015

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Depth of Field, Walker Evans (Prestel)

More than anyone else, Walker Evans made the vernacular a respected field for photography, taking the documentary style of newspapers and magazines to the level of art, holding a mirror up to ordinary life. This book is a retrospective: not just his classic, dispassionate work of the Depression era but material from before and after those years. He managed to do nearly all his work as paid assignments, a remarkable achievement, and his famous New York subway project was a rare exception.

This book is packed with photographs that cannot be forgotten, like the ‘Alabama Cotton tenant Farmer’s Wife’ that captures dignity and goodness in the scrubbed face of a woman standing against a wall of her clapboard house. Her willingness to pose so unaffectedly is more understandable in the light of knowing that Evans spent three weeks in Hale County, Alabama getting to know people and win their trust. He was there with James Agee on a writing assignment for Fortune magazine and looking at the photos Evans took it comes as no surprise to learn the magazine declined to publish them.

Evans’ early work is more formalist than the photography he became famous for in later years but it is also reflective. In New York in the late 1920s and early ‘30s, he took to capturing the presence of Brooklyn Bridge, the barges moving below them and workers taking lunch on the streets and people on the sidewalks. Faces interest him but in his search for what he called ‘contemporary truth and reality’ he photographs people not just for their unique individuality – he likes them to look straight into the camera — but also for the social semiotics they embody. This shows in his Cuba photographs of 1933 and it never leaves him although he finds meaning also in buildings, gas stations, billboards, the interior of a barber’s shop. Middle-class suburban life has little interest for Evans.

The New York subway work, lasting from 1938 to 1941, came after Alabama but there are many sections in Depth of Field that bring less well-known projects to our attention. In 1941 he was photographer for a book called The Mangrove Coast: The Story of the West Coast of Florida but five years later he is back on city streets doing what he likes best, taking unposed pictures of working people going about their lives, and it continues into the 1950s. Formalist concerns return in his late work of the ‘60s and ‘70s when he sets about celebrating ordinary hand tools—‘the fine naked impression of heft and bite’ in a wrench or ‘the beautiful plumb bob’—and in more of his own words he says something about them that extends to his achievement as a whole: ‘…small tools stand, aesthetically speaking, for elegance, candor, and purity’.

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Valerie & TS Eliot

Memorable Non-Fiction of 2015

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The Poems of T.S. Eliot: The Annotated Text. Volumes 1 & 2, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (Faber & Faber)

T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are linked in strange and unlikely ways. They were both anti-semitic (and Eliot was a racist to boot) but this does not prohibit or prevent the appreciation and enjoyment of their poetry except when, as in Eliot’s King Bolo pieces, the bigotry is put into words. Céline is still worth reading, Wagner worth listening to and it’s not difficult to find other examples of artists with objectionable right-wing convictions–after all, who objects to reading Yeats?

The more interesting connection between Eliot and Pound is the way one of this pair of American poets helped the other; for just as Pound was of enormous importance to the young Joyce he also decisively influenced Eliot in the writing of ‘The Waste Land’ – published in 1922, the same year as Ulysses – and that astonishing poem would not exist in the form it does were it not for Pound’s editing of the work. Until the publication of the first volume of this two-set edition the only way to see clearly what Pound achieved was by way of a facsimile and transcript of the original drafts (Faber & Faber, 1986), showing how Pound worked on the text, but now Faber & Faber have gone one better thanks to the annotations provided here by Ricks and McCue. Quantitively, Eliot’s poetic output is not great but with just ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’, ‘The Waste Land’, ‘Four Quartets’ and a handful of other pieces his place in English literature is assured and this is reflected in the fact that the first volume has 346 pages of poems and 965 pages devoted to commenting and annotating them. This, of course, includes a detailed presentation of Pound’s work on ‘The Waste Land’.

It’s always risky to speak of a definitive edition but in this case it is difficult to imagine, unless new work by Eliot comes to light, how the present two volumes could be replaced by something better.

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What Can Happen When We All Pitch In

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Oireachtas committee reports aren’t usually very exciting or overtly progressive. This one is different: the Report on Low Pay, Decent Work and the Living Wage produced by the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation should be read by everyone concerned with these issues. This should feature highly in the upcoming election debate. It should also be a template for progressives; what can happen when we all pitch in.

Here are just a few of the 28 recommendations:

  • The Low Pay Commission consider the findings of the Irish Living Wage Technical Group to make the minimum wage a Living Wage by increases in the minimum wage and investment in public services.
  • The Low Pay Commission should include the living wage as a key target and explore how it can be reached when making its recommendation of an appropriate minimum wage.
  • The state should become a living wage employer and that payment of the living wage should be stipulated as mandatory in government procurement contracts.
  • The Government should set a goal for the elimination of low pay and set a target for halving the number of workers affected by in-work poverty within their term of government.

The Committee makes a number of other recommendations; if you don’t have time to read the full report, at least look at the recommendations on page 13 of the text. They go beyond just the Living Wage – they address low pay and working conditions. Just to recap:

  • The Living Wage is €11.50 per hour – it is estimated that 345,000, or 26 percent, of all employees earn below this amount.
  • The low pay threshold is €12.20 per hour – it is estimated that over 400,000, or 30 percent of all employees earn below this amount. The low pay threshold is two-thirds of the median wage which, in turn, is the wage at which 50 percent earn above and 50 percent earn below.

The Committee has gone further than just calling for the Living Wage (though it has done that), it has called for the end of low-pay itself. This is truly a far-reach recommendation.

How did we get to this point that a parliamentary committee made these proposals? Let’s go through the elements of the campaign.

  1. Early in 2014, the Living Wage Technical Group began work on estimating the Living Wage. This was led by the Vincentian Partnership for Social Justice, based on their work on the Minimum Essential Standard of Living which they had been researching since the 1990s. They were joined by the Nevin Economic Research Institute, Social Justice Ireland, TASC, SIPTU and UNITE. They produced the Living Wage for 2014 – at €11.45 per hour. A key element of this estimate was the detail and robustness of the methodology. Though opponents tried to undermine the concept and the method, they were unable to find any fault.
  2. Several sections of the media immediately took this up because the Living Wage seemed so darned fair. What could be more common sense than that people who work full-time should be paid a wage that ensures they don’t live in poverty. This should remind us that the media in its entirety is not some right-wing conspiracy against the people; there are many journalists, presenters and producers who are progressive and many more who are concerned that issues are thoroughly explored and all sides presented fairly.
  3. Civil society groups immediately took up this issue – those working on poverty, migrants’ issues, and community concerns. In particular, the trade union movement got involved with many unions producing policies in pursuit of the Living Wage. ICTU, in particular, played a strong role. The theme of its 2015 Biannual Conference was ‘Living Wage, Strong Economy’; they further produced a Workers Charter incorporating the Living Wage and which they asked general election candidates to sign up to.
  4. Political parties which straddled the Government / Opposition divide contributed to the growing support, creating a broad progressive front in political society. The opposition parties – Sinn Fein, PBP-AAA, including independents – were joined by the Labour Party in supporting the Living Wage. Parties outside the Dail (e.g. the Workers Party) also joined in support. A particular intervention was made by the Minister of State for Business and Employment, Ged Nash.
  5. He sponsored a Forum on the Living Wage which brought together trade unions, employers and civil society groups to listen to the arguments. The Forum featured UK employers who supported the Living Wage and which made our own employer representatives uncomfortable. This shows that while you may oppose a particular government, this doesn’t mean you can’t work with supportive elements in that government.
  6. Individuals and groups contributed through social media – with websites, Facebook pages and Twitter being used to promote the Living Wage and various proposals to further its implementation. Many used official channels to put forward the case – for example, submissions to the Low Pay Commission.
  7. Such was the robustness of the method, the fairness of the proposal and the broad support it received, opponents were put on the defensive. Business representatives, in particular, have never been comfortable arguing against it; ‘we don’t have enough money’ is becoming less credible as the economy experiences a tsunami of growth, profits and spending (and the notion that profits grow while the employees who help create those profits live in poverty seems particular miserly). Even Fine Gael, who wouldn’t usually support overt interventions in the labour market (at least, not on behalf of labour) has had to respond; though its proposals to subsidise employers from public funds is poorly thought-out, potentially very expensive and ultimately unworkable. All this led to the Committee report. That it was supported by all members – including Fine Gael and Fianna Fail members – again should remind us to avoid the trap of seeing political opponents as some impenetrable hegemonic force. With a robust, fair and common-sense proposal, unified opposition can be undermined and support gathered across a broad spectrum. This helps us to isolate the opposition.

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Goya in London

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Art Review

Goya: The Portraits. National Gallery. Until 10 January 2016

The Goya exhibition at the National Gallery shares something with The World of Pop by bringing to the attention of our eyes an aspect of his art that had previously passed us by. Goya is not famous for his portraits — but if you’ve seen his ‘Antonia Zárate’ in Dublin (loaned to London for this show) you’ll know he can paint people like an angel — but he earned his keep by turning them out for rich patrons and only now, by bringing together so many of them, is it possible to take in his extraordinary achievement. 

His pure skill as a painter reveals itself in the ability to render those parts of the human body not hidden in costumes or layers of clothing; witness the fine skin and eyebrows of Maria Teresa de Vallabriga, the young wife of Infante Don Luis. Goya was hired by the royal couple as a portrait painter and he grew to like them as people capable of being themselves, not straitjacketed by court protocols. And when painting the Duke and Duchess of Osuna with their children Goya seems equally enamoured by their personal qualities and portrays them with a sense of animated informality.

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LookLeft 23 is Out Now!

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Political Policing -Francis Donohoe assesses the arrests of left-wing representatives and water charges protestors

Fine Gael’s NATO romance –Gavin Mendel-Gleason discusses the plans to further undermine Irish neutrality.

Ballymun’s lessons – Richard O’Hara finds out about mistakes in the development of Ballymun that can inform future social housing projects.

The Corbyn Surge – Francis Donohoe and Dara McHugh report on the movement that powered a socialist to the head of the British Labour Party.

Europe – Left or Leaving? Is it possible to have a progressive European Union? Nessa Childers MEP and Patricia McKenna debate.

Tory Assault on Trade Unions – Tory plans for draconian new laws will provoke a powerful response from the trade union movement, Kerry Fleck reports.

Portugal’s Deeply Rooted Left – Áine Mannion discusses the past and present of the Portuguese Communist Party. 

Forum – The politics of migration, international trade deals, the Carrickmines fire and class in NGOs

A forgotten revolutionary – John Jefferies explores the radical life of John Dowling, a Munster trade unionist and socialist.

Gemma Hutton – The outspoken Belfast comedian talks sexuality and sectarianism with Dolan.

The Great Propagandist – Looking at the art world of the USSR through the life and work of El Lissitsky.

Refugees Welcome – The football fans reaching out to refugees in Ireland and abroad

And much more…

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Teresa BugaÔÇÖ Cubes Courtesy of Tate Modern

Pop Art in London

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Pop art — a complicit reflection of and a critical response to the plethora of media that bombarded popular culture in the 1960s: magazines, photographs, billboards, colour advertising, television, brand names, celluloid – was bound up with the climatic ascendency of US power in its manifest destiny to conquer the world with military might and icons and logos of the good life and the free market. Baudrillard noted this in 1970 when he characterised pop art as the ‘total integration of artwork into the political economy of the commodity sign’.

crowd of people, even dissenters, becoming just a collection of potential consumers.

Tate Modern’s exhibition refocuses this debate not by bringing together the familiar works of Pop Art but by looking at its international face and showing how it was used by artists to raise
social and political issues that went beyond the remit usually associated with Warhol et al. For Evelyn Axell, the space age of the 1960s becomes a site of sexuality in Valentine (1966) by showing Valentine Tereshkova, the Russian cosmonaut, waiting to be unzipped in an act of erotic voyeurism that celebrates female intimacy. In Joan Rabascall’s Atomic Kiss (1968) the archetypal movie-inspired female mouth in red lipstick is juxtaposed with an image of an atomic explosion. These are interesting and arresting but other pieces on show seem lightweight, like Teresa Buga’s Cubes (1968) which looks like a dismantled Rubik’s Cube painted with graphic signs. It is supposed to anticipate a post-modern world where meaning is never fixed, always subject to deconstruction and reconfiguration, but if
you were unkind you’d say it would not be out of place in a children’s play area. Kiki Kogelnik, an Austrian who went to New York and met Warhol, Rauschenberg and the gang, gives us Bombs in Love (1962), a mixed-media sculpture of two found bomb-casings painted in lurid colours of hippydom. It has a curiosity value but a museum rather than an art gallery might best serve as its permanent home.

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December Issue of Socialist Voice is Out Now

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The December issue of Socialist Voice is now online.     

No Christmas for the homeless
AROUND THE the country the twinkling of the Christmas lights and decorations beckons us into the glitter-adorned shops and shopping centres, caressing us and persuading us to part with our hard-earned money, to place the little plastic card in the machine to buy that must-have present, to push everyone further into debt in a shopping frenzy to buy goods we don’t really need.

TTIP – A cloak for imperialist expansion
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, now being secretly negotiated between the European Union and the United States, is an agreement designed to attack the gains of workers, to open up public utilities…

Not so much a ‘Fresh Start’, more a political limbo: Tommy McKearney
SO THERE you have it. The Stormont Assembly crisis is over, and we’re told that everything is settled. Well, the crisis has been resolved—that is, until the next kerfuffle arises, sending all hands scurrying back to London for another lengthy round of arbitration.

Maria fighting back:
Maria decided to fight back, on the strength of her political education with the outreach group from UCD women’s studies group in Mid-West Dublin. She received a HETAC level 7, which was a great achievement. She contacted the relevant…..

Global wealth and distribution in October:
The Swiss banking company Credit Suisse published its sixth report on global wealth in two informative and useful publications, Global Wealth Report, 2015 and its complementary Global Databook, 2015.

Sovereignty and democracy at risk in Denmark
Mary Graham in Copenhagen
The Danish people go to the polls on 3 December to vote on whether to shed the country’s power under the Lisbon Treaty to opt out of EU laws on justice and home affairs…….

Reclaim the Vision of 1916 International Poetry Competition,
2016 Following consultations with some of its patrons and supporters working in the arts, Reclaim the Vision of 1916 is delighted to announce that we will shortly launch an International Poetry Competition. We are grateful to Poetry Ireland for their advice.

Health and safety is a class issue:Alan Hanlon

The Safety (Health and Welfare at Work) Act (2005) is the main body of legislation governing the whole area of health and welfare at work. This particular act gives effect to EU Council Directives 89/391/EEC of 12 June 1989 and 91/383/EEC of 25 June 1991 to introduce measures to improve health and safety at work.

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Everyone on Board for the Great Hamster Wheel

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Feel like your pay rise, if you get one, is barely covering the cost of living?  That the tax cut you’re going to get next year will only bring you back to where you were this year?  Feel like you’re running just to stand still (if you’re lucky)?  Welcome to the great Hamster Wheel where you can run and run and go absolutely nowhere.

Christmas is coming and Santa is bringing a big bag of price increases.

Health Insurance:  Now is a busy time for health insurance renewals and Charlie Weston reports a series of price increases.  Aviva is to increase prices by 5.1 percent in January. 

‘The Aviva price adjustments come just months after similar hikes. At the start of the year, the insurer announced a rise of 3.5pc. And in the summer, it announced rises of 5.1pc, effective from the start of last July.’

Other insurers have also announced prices increases. 

The health insurance market is getting more complicated.  72 Aviva health plans (yes, 72) will experience increases, many won’t while 47 plans will be withdrawn.  These will entail increases of €150 to €200 per year for many policy holders.  Weston quotes one independent broker as saying that most plans only have a life-span of 12 months.  Sign up if you will but realise that your plan may not exist after 12 months. 

Hands up all those who would just rather pay for their health through social insurance – one plan to cover all contingencies – and share that cost with employers.

Public Transport Fares:  urban bus, Luas, rail and Bus Eireann fares are going up, though some travellers will experience a decrease with a number of zones being merged.  Some of the increases will reach 15 percent meaning an additional €70 per year.  But while there will be winners and losers in these price increases and changes, over the last four years public transport has experienced considerable inflation:

  • Rail fares:  17.3 percent
  • Bus fares:  21.4 percent
  • Overall inflation:  1.6 percent

That’s a substantial gap.

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We Make Our Own History: Discussion and Book Launch

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The launch event takes place in Connolly Books (East Essex St, Temple Bar) at 6 pm on Wednesday 9th December.

How are social movements doing in Ireland? What kind of real change might be on the cards, here and in Europe or further afield? What are the key issues that we should be thinking about if we want to see it happen?

Co-written with Norwegian researcher on Indian movements Alf Gunvald Nilsen, my book We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism (Pluto, 2014) draws on the Maynooth tradition of activist research in social movements to read Marxism as a reflection of the learning of popular struggles and uses this approach to explore how movements grow out of the struggle to meet human needs, how they develop, how the collective agency of the powerful and wealthy works and what all this means for the struggle against neoliberalism today.

Launched at the London “Historical Materialism” conference, the book has raised interest wherever movement struggles are intense (reprinted in South Africa, translated into Turkish, with Indian editions and translations under discussion) and we have been invited to discuss the book at Ruskin College Oxford’s International Labour and Trade Union Studies MA, the European University Institute’s social movements research centre, the Collège d’Etudes Mondiales in Paris, the University of Gothenburg’s Forum on Civil Society and Social Movements, Reykjavík Academy / Radical Summer School, the University of Bergen, and in South Africa at the universities of KwaZulu Natal, Johannesburg, Wits and Rhodes among others.

It’s been reviewed among other places in Counterpunch, Working USA, Marx and Philosophy, Radikalportal, Trade Unions and Global Restructuring and Social Movement Studies, along with mentions on Pravda.ru and … the Huffington Post. Excerpts and related essays have appeared in Ceasefire, Progress in Political Economy, OpenDemocracy, Reflections on a Revolution, Discover Society and E-International Relations.

For the Dublin launch, rather than focus exclusively on the book there will be a discussion about the state of movements and our possible futures. Chaired by John Bissett, there will be short talks from Margaret Gillan, Andrew Flood and Fergal Finnegan to open a wider debate.

The launch event takes place in Connolly Books (East Essex St, Temple Bar) at 6 pm on Wednesday 9th December.

By way of an appetiser, here are some excerpts from what the book has to say about working-class community activism in Ireland

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