Time for radical change – Putting working people first!
In June 2024 the people of Ireland will be asked to vote to elect individuals and political parties to institutions whose decisions or lack of action can have an impact upon each and every one of us. We are under no illusions that these institutions, as currently constituted, can radically change our lives. Institutions more designed to control our lives than vehicles to radically improve our lives, our families, or our communities. Nor are they institutions to empower us and give us more control.
The Communist Party of Ireland is a political party of working people, with over a century of experience of involvement in our people’s struggles in the fight for our national freedom and independence, the struggles against the partitioning and division of our country and people, in the people’s struggles for public housing, against mass unemployment, poverty, poor working conditions and low pay. A century of opposing sectarianism, bigotry, racism, and division. A party committed to building national unity and the unity of all our people regardless of race, colour, creed, gender or sexual orientation.
The position of the CPI not to contest elections is based on our rejection of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, a system which is fundamental to maintaining the interests of the ruling capitalist class through the oppression and exploitation of the working class.
Democracy
It is clear that the people of Ireland have little control over our lives, little or no control over decisions that have a significant impact on our lives. It is becoming increasingly clear to more and more people that decisions made at both local and national level are made to suit the interests of big business, speculators, and banks. That democratic input by the people continues to be reduced.
The Irish political and economic establishment driven by its own self-interests wishes to further limit democratic accountability, it is prepared to sacrifice further sovereign powers to unelected institutions and bureaucrats in the EU.
Many of our communities are under increasing pressure from widespread drug abuse and the control by organised crime gangs. These forces have an increasingly worrying influence in some of our communities, sowing division and hate. Some of the leading individuals claiming to be the protectors of our “Irishness” or “Irish values” are slum landlords or linked to criminal gangs. Individuals and groups who have no problem living off the misery of others or forcing families to live in overcrowded rented squalor.
These people and groups do not care about communities as the ply their death trade, forcing growing numbers of youth to get involved. They wish to present themselves as defenders of the community against “foreigners” and asylum seekers. They exploit people’s legitimate concerns and deep frustrations with how our country is run and in whose interests it is run. These individuals and groups are only looking after their own interests and benefit from spreading hate and division.
They peddle the myth that “foreigners” and asylum seekers are responsible for the housing crisis, rising poverty, growing hospital queues and low wages. Who benefits from such division and hate? They want to deflect people’s anger away from the real source of our problems, the economic system that places greater value on increasing profits for private and corporate landlords, big business, banks and finance houses, than they do on meeting people’s basic needs like health and shelter.
Rising housing costs, driven by speculators, vulture funds, and investment bankers is making it almost impossible for people to either rent or buy a place to live. Tens of thousands of our educated youth are emigrating because they can’t afford rents, can’t find an affordable place to live. The housing waiting list grows daily. Both national and local government are unwilling to change course and are wedded to failed economic and social policies designed to make the rich richer.
War & Peace – Irish Neutrality
Globally, the Irish government is willing to actively cooperate in the growing drive to war in Europe but also globally. They want to see Irish youth take part in the numerous and growing military adventures that the EU and the US are involved in. The Irish political and military establishment want to be more active junior partners in the oppression and control over the peoples and nations of the Global South. They want a great reward from the plunder of the world’s natural resources and destruction of our planet.
All the main establishment parties in the Dáil are in favour of greater militarisation of the European Union. To increase spending on armaments is demanded by NATO. The two big establishment parties are in favour of abandoning our neutrality, while some of the smaller political parties in the Dáil pay lip service to neutrality but go along with this growing militarisation and war.
Environmental Crisis
The Irish state and the main political parties are only too willing to fall in behind the EU policies on the environment. To facilitate the plunder by global corporations in their never-ending drive for greater and greater profits, at a huge cost to the global environment.
That is a long way from the aspiration set out in the 1916 Proclamation and the 1919 Democratic Programme. Those who fought for our people’s freedom and independence envisioned a sovereign independent Ireland to be a beacon for all other oppressed and dominated peoples across the world. Not to be part of the forces that plunder and wreak havoc on the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
