The talks between the government and ICTU have collapsed following pressure from the FF back benches. Apparently they had been pressured from “the private sector” to oppose plans for unpaid leave proposed by the union leaderships. Make no bones about it. What this really means is that the Irish bourgeoisie and the multinationals are putting on the pressure and demanding that the public sector takes huge cuts. It raises the temperature in what is already a charged situation.

The Ryan and Murphy reports have exposed the extent of the abuse carried out against children by Catholic priests in the Dublin Diocese between 1975 and 2004. It is also clear that such abuses have occurred in practically all parishes of the Roman Catholic Church in the whole island.

The TUC has worked out that the richest folk in the land get subsidised massively in their old age by the rest of us. No change there, then. So it’s nice to see the rich are all right (as usual). What about the rest of us? Nearly two thirds of over 50s are worrying that pension and savings are just not enough to see them through retirement.

Thursday's planned public sector strike has been suspended after the government and the union leaders announced that a breakthrough had been made. The "agreement" means that some of the cost of wages would be offset by the workers taking "unpaid leave". As we pointed out on more than one occasion recently, the political and economic situation in the state is such that any agreement that has been reached on the basis of "social partnership" will inevitably mean cuts in worker's wages and increased work load and pressure on already stretched services. Effectively it means that the public sector is being put on short time.

Stock exchanges and commodity prices are on their way up. The world economy is showing faltering signs of recovery. There’s no doubt that it’ll be a long haul. Millions of people all over the world have had their lives devastated by the economic tsunami. It will take years to clean up all the mess. But one major national economy after another has announced that the recession is officially over – France, Germany, Japan and even the USA. All except Britain. Why is British capitalism still stubbornly stuck in the mire?

Striking refuse workers in Leeds have voted to return to work after nearly three months on the picket line. The all-out industrial action, which ran from September 7^th to November 25^th, was in response to savage pay-cuts that would have slashed individual wages by thousands of pounds per year. Workers attending a mass meeting at the suitably flamboyant Jongleurs Comedy Club voted by nearly four to one to return to work, endorsing a deal which benefitted many workers but raised concerns for some.

New Labour, the government that introduced tuition fees and student loans in 1998 and then narrowly passed a bill to introduce top-up fees of £3,200 per year from 2006, have recently launched a “higher education finance review” to look into raising the cap on tuition fees (possibly up to £7000 per year) and examine the way in which universities should be funded.

Well over 250,000 Irish workers in the public sector were on strike on the 24th of this month. There would have been many more, but the unions guaranteed emergency cover including flood relief in the west, the midlands and the Shannon area and in Cork City. It’s a feature of every major strike, not just here, but throughout the world, that the well fed representatives of the bourgeois and particularly the mean spirited and greedy petty bourgeois attempt to criticise and attack the worker's movement.

Today Irish public sector workers are taking militant strike action. Some sections of the trade union leadership view this as a way of letting off steam. What is needed is the opposite. This day should be part of the campaign for a one day general strike, to bring out the full force of the Irish labour movement. This is the only way of stopping the attacks on the working class.

We might be out of the World Cup, but the Irish working class is at the forefront of the struggle against the bosses crisis. It’ll take much more than a dodgy hand ball to take the heat out of this situation. Earlier today yet another major union voted massively to join the public sector strikes on November 24^th. SIPTU’s 70,000 members voted by 85% in favour of participating in what is becoming more or less a de facto Public Sector General Strike.

65,000 teachers in the primary and secondary education, further education and third level institutions have voted to back the strike action on 24^th November. The action covering both academic and non academic staff means that effectively the entire education sector will be shut down for the day. The four unions involved INTO, TUI, ASTI and IFUT which organises two thirds of university teachers have all returned huge votes in favour of strike action.

The breakup of Yugoslavia led to the domination of imperialism over the republics that made it up. It led to terrible fratricidal killing and the emergence of reactionary political forces, all pushing a nationalist agenda to the benefit of a small clique. This is clear today in the situation facing workers in Bosnia. Here a Bosnian Marxist makes an appeal to all genuine socialist and communists to come together and offer the workers an alternative.

Monday saw the beginning of negotiations between the government and Trade Union officials on the implementations of €4 billion worth of budget cuts in the public sector. €1.3billion of this burden is set to fall on public sector wages. (RTÉ November 9) This follows on from the ICTU demonstrations of over 100,000 across Ireland on Friday in opposition to cuts, and precedes the upcoming public sector strike on November 24^th. It is all too clear that the past politics of social partnership can only lead to diminished service, job losses and attacks on pay and conditions.

A major trade union conflict erupted in October in the Piraeus Port Authority, where dockworkers are fighting attempts to destroy all their hard-won rights, of privatisation of the port which is being handed over to COSCO, a Chinese company. After a two week strike they suspended their action awaiting results of negotiation. Now they have taken up strike action again.

The crisis of capitalism is shaking every corner of the world. Now Austria, considered in the past as a country of social peace and “dialogue”, has been hit by a massive student protest that is attracting widespread support among the workers, who are also showing signs of radicalisation.