Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

These actions represent not just an imposition by a nationalist Spanish Government on the Catalan nation but also a clampdown on a mass movement for both national and social rights by a right-wing pro-austerity government. The actions of the Spanish state serve to confirm the observation of Friedrich Engels that the state, in the last analysis, can be reduced to armed bodies of men acting in defence of private property.

Furthermore, the events of recent weeks undermine the image the European Union likes to project of itself, namely, that it embodies modern European values such as liberty, democracy and progress. Tens of millions of European citizens have watched with a very critical eye as the Spanish state batters senior citizens, women and others off the streets while the grandees of the European Union sit in silence and only break that silence to offer excuses and justifications for the actions of their cousins in Madrid.

Esquera Revolucionària, the Catalan Marxist group, recently stated, "The justification that the PP and its government are merely applying the law cannot mask the fact that the law is unfair and undemocratic and goes directly against the aspirations of millions of Catalans they are trying to muzzle." In this sense, the savage repression of the Spanish state and its support for a fundamentally undemocratic political position, a denial of the right to decide, go hand in hand. The repressive actions of the Spanish state have been met with a magnificent mass movement of protest and resistance, including, to date, a student general strike, a workers general strike, demonstrations of people in their hundreds of thousands and one demonstration of more than 1 million individuals. The activation of Article 155 should provide the signal for a general strike of unlimited duration.

Socialists in Ireland will stand in solidarity with socialists in Catalonia who say that Catalonia is a nation and has a right to decide its own future, that the working class through the entire Spanish state must show solidarity and mobilise against this repression; that the future of Catalonia must be carved out by the masses who defined police repression to vote on 1 October and who made the general strike on 3 October, not by the Puigdemont government, which has wavered on declaring independence and which have imposed austerity on its own people; and that a Catalan socialist republic could abolish evictions, austerity cuts and mass joblessness among the young. It could do that if it put the wealth of Catalonia at the disposal of its people, starting with the introduction of strong capital controls and then socialising the 1,000 plus companies that have attempted to sabotage the republic by moving their corporate headquarters from Catalonia to elsewhere in the Spanish state. A Catalan socialist republic would guarantee minorities their full civil rights. It would aim in all its actions to unite all working people in Catalan society, namely, those who speak Catalan, those who speak Spanish, those who speak both and others.

Eighty years ago George Orwell penned his outstanding eye witness account of socialist revolution, Homage to Catalonia.

A socialist transformation of Catalonia today would put on the agenda not just the fall of the Rajoy government but also a challenge to capitalism throughout the whole of the Spanish state. Socialists will defend to the hilt the right of the Catalan people to decide their own future. We will defend this right hand in hand with the fight for socialist change in Catalonia, in the rest of the Spanish state and indeed throughout Europe.

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