Not that long ago, the Republic of Ireland was being heralded as a Celtic Tiger, with a booming economy, a massive house price bubble and a rising population as people returned home to Ireland to join the boom. But all that seems a long time ago now as the government announces a bail-out plan that will give the Allied Irish Bank and the Bank of Ireland 2 billion Euros ($2.8 billion dollars) each in return for preference shares. In the case of Allied Irish this amounts to nationalisation as the government will have 75% of the voting rights. 

After the government agreed to guarantee 100% of Irish Bank Deposits on September 30th the ISEQ (Irish Stock Exchange) Financial Index has fallen by 72%, house prices are still falling and, due to the high rate of the Euro against sterling, thousands of people are travelling over the border for cheap shopping deals. The stock market falls are put down to bad debt and the crisis in the building industry. Ireland is supposed to be one of the most sustainable and relatively rich and peaceful countries on earth, but even here the crisis is beginning to hit. 

The crisis of contaminated pork, which is very important because of the importance of Irish farming, has also had an effect. At the moment the numbers of repossessions are running in the 30s every week, which massively understates the problem as many families are having to cut everything else out to be able to keep the house going. 

The Labour Party is in opposition to the Fianna Fáil government, but what’s lacking is a clear Socialist programme. The Labour Party opposed the government’s bail-out plan, but it was left to the Labour Youth conference in November to call for more far reaching measures. The conference resolution on finance called for, “A radical revision of the disastrous system of deregulated global capitalism that caused this crisis, including areas outside the financial system.”

A further motion supported, “The strong stance taken by the Parliamentary Labour Party in Dáil Éireann against the Government's bank bail-out scheme. Conference calls for the nationalisation of the Irish banks.”

Ireland has changed rapidly over the last period. The working class has been strengthened by the growth of the economy. But the economic crisis will threaten much of the increased living standards of Irish workers. Now more than ever we need a fighting Socialist alternative to the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum politics of the two bourgeois parties. Labour needs to oppose not only the detail of the bank bail-out, but also to provide an independent Socialist programme as an alternative which challenges capitalism itself.

As James Connolly explained when he was criticising the President of the TUC in 1901:

“A Socialist in the position of Mr Bowman would have striven to infuse into the minds of his hearers a spirit of revolt against the system that holds them as its slaves, a system that tortures them with want in the midst of locked-up storehouses of plenty; a Socialist would have taught the workers to manfully take their destiny, politically and socially, into their own hands; Mr Bowman taught them to whine for capitalists to come and exploit them. The wage received by 87 per cent of the wage workers of Ireland is less than £1 per week; Mr Bowman tells them to achieve the industrial regeneration of Ireland by establishing “people’s banks” out of their savings!!! Out of the savings of men who support a family on less than £1 per week?? This is what the capitalist Evening Herald termed a “splendid statement”.