(en) wsm.ie: Refugees are welcome march in central Dublin -
1000s take to the streets
Thousands of people gathered in central Dublin Saturday to take part in an emergency
refugees are welcome march in response to the ongoing crisis of hundreds of thousands of
people being trapped on the European borders and over 2,500 drowned this summer alone
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jWb1dEz6cg ---- Ireland is going to take about four
thousand refugees. It's estimated this will cost us about 48 million. In comparison the
Irish government is refusing to accept nineteen billion, that's nineteen thousand million
in taxation from Apple ---- In fact its taking a case to the European courts to try and
prevent Europe forcing Ireland to collect this nineteen billion in tax. Nineteen billion
would actually be enough to fund 1.6 million refugees so you can imagine the amount of
housing, hospitals, schools and everything else that could be created if we took that
money off Apple and invested it. Of course that's not going to happen because as far as
the Irish government is concerned the people they look are the super wealthy including the
multinational corporations who are residents here for tax evasion purposes.
There is a housing crisis but there were 300,000 empty homes The reason we have a crisis
is because our landlords and our speculators have boarded up those houses and are leaving
them deliberately vacant in order to artificially inflate rents and push up mortgage
prices. We would have no bother housing not only the four thousand refugees we are
accepting but every single person in Ireland who lives in substandard accommodation. If we
forced the landlords to open up those houses and make them available for use.
Irish people are no strangers to migration for every generation tens of thousands of us
have migrated, mostly for work all over the world but in our history we also had a massive
refugee crisis in the 1840s in what is called the Irish Famine. Not really a famine
because there was food here but it was being exported to pay for rents.
In the period of the famine something like one and a half million people died in Ireland
and another one and a half million people had to emigrate. These people were subjected to
exactly the sort of racist fear-mongering that we are seeing directed at Syrian refugees
at the moment
Particularly in the USA there was a fear that the arriving Irish were religious violent
extremists who would impose their religion on the country and switch the USA from being
mostly Protestant country to mostly Catholic country. One of the sad things about the
crisis today is seeing Irish people whose ancestors survived this famine actually
repeating the same sort of racist garbage that was directed at their ancestors.
On the other hand huge numbers of Irish people have spontaneously organized to help
refugees arriving here and also to organize convoys to the places in Europe where refugees
are being gathered into camps particularly at Calais. At this stage there are dozens and
dozens of people intending to go to such destinations.
One thing we've noticed here at Solidarity Times is that the people doing this organizing
are very same people who previously had been organizing the homeless people here, for
single parents and against Shell at Rossport
This gives us confidence for the future, it gives us great confidence that we will
recognize that we are not an isolated country, that the problems we face are global.
Climate change for instance does not stop at borders it needs a global solution.
We are all the same people, we must come together!
WORDS & VIDEO: Andrew Flood
http://www.wsm.ie/c/refugees-welcome-march-central-dublin-sept2015
