Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Some in the Labour Party have the audacity to suggest that Connolly and Larkin would comfortably sit on the Labour benches were they present today. One year after the Lock-out, as the capitalists of Europe lined up to slaughter millions in a struggle for their markets and profits, James Connolly called for "the final dethronement of the vulture classes that rule and rob the world" and definitive labour movement action to obstruct the war effort. He stated, "Starting thus, Ireland may yet set the torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and the last capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of the last War lord." This is what the man who founded the Labour Party with the men and women socialists of his day thought in regard to the system that still dominates our world. How could anyone believe for a second that, if James Connolly could leave that pedestal behind me and walk down this aisle, he would for one minute associate himself with the Labour Party that rescues the very vultures that he spent his life fighting to destroy? Does anyone believe that Connolly and Larkin would tolerate a Government that introduced legislation to the Dáil that held a sword of Damocles over the heads of public sector workers unless they balloted and accepted cuts to their wages and conditions that would be slightly less onerous? Sadly, some trade union leaders today - the leaders of congress - suggest that Larkin and Connolly would act as they have acted. Does anyone really believe that James Connolly and Jim Larkin would connive with this coalition Government in forcing through the troika's austerity agenda by consciously, consistently and persistently undermining the confidence of working people - members of unions - that they could resist the deleterious affects of austerity and fight back? To ask the question is to give the answer.

Conditions have changed since 1913, but there are astonishing resonances in today's society. The financial capitalists and their political representatives who subject hundreds of millions of Europeans to savage austerity to secure their profits are the exact equivalents of William Martin Murphy, the employers and the capitalists of Dublin 1913.

The Irish Independentand the Evening Herald, Murphy's mouthpieces, that never lost an opportunity to blackguard, abuse and slander the huge struggle of the working class people of Dublin to raise themselves out of degradation and poverty, or to slander their leaders, are still with us today, sadly, playing a similar role, propagating austerity, vilifying the left, socialist ideas and any idea that working people can or should stand up and fight. They denounce working people or communities when they go into struggle and denounce as tax dodgers those who stood up and continue to stand up to fight against the new home taxes of this Government.

Working class people, workers in general and communities should commemorate the men and women of Dublin in 1913 who stood and fought against some of the most horrific conditions in any part of Europe of that time, those who fought for an alternative. The greatest monument we could build to them would be a movement to mobilise the enormous power working people have, socially and politically, in this society to break the austerity agenda. It would be to build a new mass party for working class people that would implement the vision of Connolly and Larkin, because the party they founded has left the stage as far as that purpose is concerned. It would be to build a democratic and socialist future which would not only challenge the austerity agenda and the horrors it inflicts on our society but which would also challenge, for example, the system represented by the G8 leaders who met a few hundred kilometres from here during the past week. This is a system that keeps hundreds of people in starvation while its leaders build weapons of mass destruction and waste countless resources on military spending. That is the type of monument we should build to the enormous struggle of 1913. That would be a fitting tribute to those who fought and left us a great tradition that has helped our society and workers to achieve many of the gains they have achieved throughout the years to the present day.

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