Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am very proud to commemorate the election of 1918. We should remind ourselves that what brought this about was a mass movement against conscription and, before that, the 1913 Lockout and the Easter rebellion, as well as, in no small measure, the Suffragettes, who at one stage threw a hatchet at Herbert Asquith, smashed windows in Belfast and Dublin and used very strong civil disobedience to get their right to be recognised and to vote. Having won recognition of the right to vote, masses of people did vote, with the results we know.

We should commemorate that as the first explosion of the democratic right of the people to vote. What we need to do now is look at what still needs to be achieved. If that was a democratic revolution, we now need an economic one. The democratic programme of the First Dáil states:

[N]o child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing, or shelter ... [there shall be a] scheme for the care of the Nation’s aged and infirm, who shall not be regarded as a burden, but rather entitled to the Nation’s gratitude and consideration. ... It shall be our duty to promote the development of the Nation’s resources ... in the interests and for the benefit of the Irish people.

We have not achieved that, 100 years later. Our next step is to learn from the mass movements that led up to the 1918 election and to winning the democratic revolution which gave us all, men and women, the right to vote. We now have to fight for an economic revolution where we get to say what is produced, how it is produced and how it is distributed, where it is not the markets and a tiny elite of less than 5% around the globe who decide for the rest of us how we are serviced by our own labour and by society. That economic revolution will deliver the democratic programme of 1918. Ordinary men, women and children will be able, after an economic revolution, to say what is needed and how it is distributed. It will not be down to the vagaries of a ridiculous, chaotic market that drives us, ultimately, to war, which is what led to the revolutions Deputy Paul Murphy spoke about. We need that economic revolution and it should be the objective of future generations.

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