Following the success of the Vita Cortex workers’ occupation, employees of businesses in financial trouble may look to sit-ins as a way of securing their entitlements. Here’s a handy guide drawn up by Hayes Solicitors. Worth noting that Employees are ‘Preferred Creditors’ in Ireland but ranked behind ‘Revenue, Liquidator and holders of fixed charges [usually banks]’. In the UK the Crown (the equivalent of Revenue) was removed as a … Read More
Candidate Camera
‘Buachaill’ went door to door in Dublin with real government policies to see how popular Fine Gael & Labour are with the public. Posing as a Fine Gael candidate, he voices his support for the Water Tax, levies on wages and proposing a chimney tax. Did it go down well? “Get out of me garden now or I’ll ring the police.” “Get out that gate before I fucking stab ya.” … Read More
Yeast-er Rising
The French are Revolting. As many as 20 staff of the Paris Bakery restaurant on 18 Moore St. are picketing the premises this morning over unpaid wages. Reports from staff who arrived to work this morning at the historic address are that they found themselves locked out without notice. Some haven’t been paid since March, one worker claims to be owed €3,o00. The Bakery’s premises is due to be bulldozed … Read More
#meEJit: We’re Adults! Get RTE Away From Us!
It is remarkable just how much RTÉ can chime with Irish government policy. Oireachtas Retort looks at Montrose’s latest offering of unreality TV. The broadcaster’s role in normalising austerity and undermining dissent is nothing new but their lifestyle & entertainment content is equally insidious. Think of it as Fáilte Ireland for the home audience. Towards the end of Ireland’s housing bubble we had I’m An Adult Get Me Out of … Read More
Burton’s Bullshit: Unemployment Nearly 3% Higher Than Reported
Just this evening, 3,850 Irish visas for Canada were gone in less than five minutes but emigration isn’t the only way Joan Burton fiddles the figures behind Ireland’s unemployment horror. Oireachtas Retort has a poke around. Labour Party TDs & ministers were beside themselves last October with claims that jobless figures fell below 400,000 for the first time since 2009. Their steadfast commitment to patronising and coercing the unemployed … Read More
What You Do During An Election
Promises, promises. Every now and again we get a little chuckle from digging up some statements of dearly held beliefs that were cast aside after elections. A visit to Irish Election Literature brought up this doozy from Labour’s Joanna Tuffy. That text in full: The move by Environment Minister John Gormley to install a water meter in every home in Ireland represents a retrograde step towards the introduction of a regressive tax. … Read More
Free For Those Who Can Afford It
Junior Health Minister Alex White (Labour) appeared on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland this morning and was asked if he intended to push for a charge instead of the proposed universal free GP care. Following the introduction of free GP visits for the under 6’s it is expected that Minister James Reilly will introduce universal free GP visits by 2016; asked several times whether he could rule out point-of-access charges as the … Read More
#goggleBox: Bonus Street
Times are good on Bonus Street although drug taking and paranoia are high. Most of these people don’t have a job and now they’re having to learn how to get by on even more money than before. Benefits Street, that hugely controversial show on Channel4 in the UK, purports to be a fly-on-the-wall look at a Birmingham street populated by the feckless underclass. However, working families that were followed for … Read More
#outBeyond: Chomsky on TPP – The Biggest ‘Trade’ Agreement In History
The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal is an agreement between the US and other Pacific executives and the most powerful organisations. It is being described as NAFTA on steroids and possibly the most important and impactful agreement in history – yet without these two Wikileaks leaks we would know almost nothing about it. Noam Chomsky briefly explains what it is on the Laura Flanders show. Watch another 5 minute clip from … Read More
Benefits Street Scrounger
‘Margaret Thatcher’s pal Nischal is known as Goldfinger and rakes in thousands from families living on the breadline renting out damp homes with faulty heating’ writes today’s Mirror. The squalid rented four-bedroom home on TV’s controversial Benefits Street is so riddled with damp that water runs down the walls. There is no heating because the boiler has long been broken – and the tenant’s children are so frozen at … Read More