The trade union campaign against the wage cuts announced in Lenihan’s December budget will begin to escalate over the next few weeks as different groups of workers across the public sector take action in what is being portrayed as an ongoing campaign of selective action. Today the air traffic controllers are coming out, which will have a dramatic and very public effect on air travel. It’s likely that the workers concerned in the various selective actions will receive strike fund support in many cases and as such the campaign could continue for a considerable time. But what is the underlying situation and what are the issues for the movement?

The scandal involving the wife of the First Minister has revealed the utter hypocrisy of the politicians who run Stormont. While they are perfectly prepared to impose draconian spending cuts on welfare, they line their own pockets. The workers of the North require a fighting working class political representation and not the present bunch of parasites.

This article originally appeared in "The Red Plough" an independent Email journal of Republican Marxist opinion. It takes a clear position against the arguments of the capitalist press around the strikes on the 24th of November. In particular it deals with the question of "the national interest". The bosses are always keen to try and mask the class nature of society and here Gerry Ruddy points out the contradictions in their arguments and offers a class alternative.

The last year has marked a huge turning point in the Irish economy and most importantly a huge shift in the relations between the classes in Ireland. While the Celtic Tiger had been on life support for a while, 2009 saw a huge crisis that has had massive economic consequences and political change that will play out for a whole period. This year represented a shift from one historical period to another; a whole new perspective has opened up for Irish society, not just in the 26 counties, but increasingly across the whole island as the impact of the capitalist crisis begins to be felt to its full extent in the north.

The decision of the Garda Representative Association to ballot for strike action shows two things. In the first place it shows the scope of the opposition to the pay cuts outlined by Brian Lenihan in the budget released yesterday. On the other hand it shows the deep discontent that exists in Irish society.

So, the Gards are voting for strikes and the Turkeys are voting for Christmas. That's right, the “Soldiers of Destiny” will be voting for the Budget today, Wednesday. They'll be voting to cut Child Benefit, cutting Social Welfare, cutting services to old people, the sick and the children. The same children that they claim to be defending form the terrors of the clerical abuse. Its not so long ago that people were flooding back here to take advantage of the Celtic Tiger. But in the Ireland of today the only people taking advantage of anyone else are the bankers and the big bosses.

After the recent decision of the INLA to renounce the armed struggle and its call on its members to take the political road, an analysis of this important turn from a Marxist point of view by Gerry Ruddy was published in The Red Plough. We believe it puts the Marxist case very clearly and make it available here for our readers.

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.

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.

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.

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.