THE past year has seemed overcast with gloom.
But there is as much brightness as dark on the horizon up ahead.
Everywhere that there is oppression there are people fighting back. It is on the outcome of these struggles that the future depends.
The key reason the earth is at risk of climate catastrophe is that production is not organised in the interests of the many but is geared instead to profit for the few.
Despite all the fine words at Cop26, investment in fossil fuels is as high as ever – because that’s where capitalists reckon the highest profits can be made. The pursuit of profit is the source of most of the world’s ills.
In Ireland, women have made great strides through fearlessness, organisation and struggle, and have been at the heart of everything good that’s happened in 2021. Women’s liberation can free us all.
In Ireland, Britain, the US, across Europe and the wider world, the trades union movement is stirring again. Rank and file groups are pushing union leaderships into action.
The docks strike in Derry, the actions throughout the public sector, the Debenhams stoppage and many more examples show that workers are full of fight when their power is let loose.
The brilliant campaigns in the US for union rights at Starbucks, Amazon and beyond show the way forward.
Pressure for change from below is as strong as ever.
The possibility of a New Ireland has been widely discussed in 2021. But only a strong socialist presence can ensure that it’s the content of society which must be transformed, not just the constitutional arrangements.
It’s easy in the face of the multitude of problems that assail us to conclude that the world is going to hell in a handcart and there’s nothing much we can do about it.
That’s wrong. There’s always something we can do, if we do it together, in an organised way, according to the politics of liberation – that is to say through socialist struggle.
We mustn’t wait to discover what the new year has in store, but begin to organise action – in workplaces, communities, campaign groups, everywhere – to bring about a better world, starting with our own little patch of the world.
On the many crises with which we are faced, time is running out. Action is needed.
Only socialist politics can unite the struggles. That should be our watchword for 2022.
EAMON McCANN
People Before Profit,
Derry City
Great non-event has come and gone
2021 has come and gone and with it the great non-event of the centenary – the would-be celebration of partition which even the British monarch was too embarrassed to partake in.
Despite all the feeble attempts of Westminster and the unionist collective here in the colony to make the farce work and give it a veneer of respectability and acceptance, not a single unionist, loyalist or British representative could bring themselves to apologise to their fellow Irishmen, Catholic and republican, for the atrocious inhuman way they used their hegemony of power to maltreat us for the best part of the past century. With internment and forced emigration in every decade, house raids and harassment by RUC and B-Specials and UDR, no jobs, no houses, no votes and no rights – practically non-people.
Culminating in the Civil Rights Movement and the British declaration of war on the IRA, giving the loyalist paramilitaries, aided by the RUC and UDR, the green light to murder Catholics at will. Now we have the ongoing subversion of democracy by HM Government to deprive those maimed and deprived of life from any form of recompense. So where now is the ill-gotten British empire? Where is Churchill and Sir James Craig? It has all fallen to dust. And what about the union – a union of nothingness and a Westminster parliament at war with Europe.
The dawn is nigh. All that is left is an Orange, sectarian quagmire in which to drown or suffocate for those too stupid or ignorant to see another way.
LAURENCE O’NEILL
Martinstown, Co Antrim
Coping with energy price rises
We are a single income pensioner family and we had natural gas installed six years ago. The cost was not low by any means and people using oil heating watched in glee as oil prices fell.
In October 2021 the firm announced a near 40 per cent rise. In November there was a further rise of nearly 40 per cent, meaning that gas now nearly doubled in price.
What I am curious about is how people have adjusted. For our part we have switched off the gas completely and rely on a log fire from morning to night – boiling kettles for washing up and using an electric shower. Much more work is needed...in fact it is a return to our childhood in the 1950s. The house is cold in the morning but we are paying for our fuel as we use it – not waiting for a sky-high rise in our gas direct debit.
Maybe you could poll your readers to see how their lifestyles have changed.
RAYMOND MITCHELL
Portadown, Co Armagh
Vitally important principle must be protected
The Irish News reported in an article – ‘Beattie ‘quite probably’ the man who will save the union’ (December 31) – quoting Baroness Ruth Davidson. Your article did not mention that she referred in her article to the need for Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom lest it would make it more likely that Scotland would also leave the union.
Ruth Davidson is generally a progressive Conservative, but it is important to point out that in this case, she is repudiating the statement in the Downing Street Declaration 1993 that the British government has ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland’. This is a vitally important principle, and all political parties and all those working for a new and united Ireland should work very hard see that it is respected by all the political parties who may form a future British government.
DECLAN O’LOAN
Former SDLP MLA,
Ballymena
