Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland
8 March 2016
Today, 8 March, the Communist Party of Ireland expresses its solidarity with women throughout the world. We salute your courage and bravery in the face of the inhuman burdens placed upon working women. Women still bear an uneven burden and suffer super-exploitation and are a significant source of massive profits for monopoly capitalism.
In this, the centenary year of the 1916 Rising, we salute the women who contributed so much to the seminal events in the long struggle of our people for independence, democracy, and sovereignty. The defeat of those goals has led to a century-long carnival of reaction, borne in particular by the working women of Ireland as well as the working class as a whole.
Today women are in the front line of the struggle against imperialism and for peace and social justice. We salute the courageous women of Palestine, suffering untold violence from the Zionist state of Israel. We also express our solidarity with the women of Syria and Yemen, suffering greatly from the violence inflicted on them by the proxy forces controlled, financed and armed by the Western powers. To all women fighting against physical and sexual violence, we stand with you to end the scourge of imperialism and the culture of machismo.
Today here in Ireland the water resistance is sustained and maintained by thousands of women within their communities. The success of the Right2Water campaign is due in large part to the tenacity and ingenuity of the women water warriors. To those women in the forefront of the campaign to repeal the 8th Amendment to the Constitution of Ireland and for the right of women to choose and to avail of safe abortion, to all women in Ireland active in the water struggle, active in their trade union, within their communities, fighting to keep services open and available to all, on this International Women’s Day we once again express our admiration and our solidarity.
Capitalism is incapable of providing a society of equality, of justice or of solidarity. It is based, by its very nature, on division, exploitation, violence, and backward cultural values. It propagates division and policies of divide and rule.
We aspire to an Ireland of equality and justice, an Ireland that is independent and sovereign, where the people are sovereign in all economic, social and political decisions. Only with a fundamental radical challenge and a radical departure that places the people at the heart of all decisions can we begin to bring about real and meaningful equality. Women have a central role in bringing that new Ireland to fruition. We salute them.
