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

Reference was made in various speeches this morning to the global crises of Covid and cost of living with which this Government has had to contend. These were big shocks but the Government had some advantages in dealing with them. Economic buoyancy was one. Cheap money was another. These are advantages the Government will not be able to rely on in its second half. The backdrop in 2023 will be a backdrop of international capitalist recession - a recession from which Ireland will not be immune.

A glimpse of the challenges that will be presented was shown when the new Taoiseach stated that job losses in the tech sector will be measured in the thousands rather than in the hundreds. There are times in history when multiple private sufferings remain no longer as private sufferings but coalesce and burst to the surface as collective grief, collective action and collective resistance. In the past month, collective resistance against the effects of the cost-of-living crisis bearing down on working people has burst to the surface in the form of general strikes in both Belgium and Greece. On this island, it has burst to the surface in the form of a wave of strikes within the national health service in Northern Ireland. I do not know whether collective resistance will burst to the surface in this State in the remaining two years of the life of this Government. I know there is a multiplicity of private sufferings around the housing crisis, around the cost-of-living crisis and around the oppression of women which remains ever-present. I also know there are many people who will cast their votes against Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Greens come the next general election but who cannot afford to wait for change. I would encourage those people to get organised and to fight back to campaign for change. I wonder whether the arrival of the gas and electricity bills in the new year might be a time when people choose to do so. Either way, the commentators today will focus on the changes at the top as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael swap the big jobs but I suspect that the leaders at the top will look on with some concern as 2022 changes to 2023 and the rumblings from below in Irish society that anyone with an ear to the ground can hear these days start up again against the backdrop of a very different economic situation.

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