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The Only Thing Growling Is Workers’ Stomachs

26/07/08

Last week’s industrial action taken by public sector workers in the Six Counties was evidence, if evidence was needed, that all is not well on the economic front in occupied Ireland.

Public sector workers were offered a rise in pay that effectively meant a cut in income. This seemingly anomalous situation has arisen due to the fact that the 2.45 per cent increase offered by the local government employers is significantly below the level of inflation and dwarfed by the increasing costs of food and fuel, among other things.

The situation in the private sector, however, is perhaps even grimmer, with output for June hitting a record low, housing construction down, home repossessions up by more than 30 per cent and unemployment figures reaching their highest level for over five years.

For some at the heart of the Six County administration, economic salvation lay in the example set by the ‘Celtic Tiger’. Indeed, many key figures at the heart of that administration spoke of the economic model deployed in the Twenty-Six Counties in glowing terms, leading to headlines, such as that in the Derry Journal, that “McGuinness wants ‘Celtic Tiger’ to growl in the North”.

However, things in the Twenty-Six Counties are, perhaps, even direr, with the Sunday Business Post recently reporting that:

“Firms are going out of business and unemployment is rising; last month, over 19,000 people lost their jobs – the biggest number ever.”

That’s 635 people every day. In the last year, over 50,000 people have lost their jobs, a massive number by any reckoning and not just a statistic, as those 50,000 people have mouths to feed and bills to pay. The human cost of the flawed economic system on this island is incalculable. People are losing their jobs and will lose their homes. Home repossessions have doubled in the first six months of the year. Food and fuel prices are soaring; house prices are sinking.

Thus, despite the ‘new dispensation’ in the Six Counties and the neo-liberal economic model fashioned in the Twenty-Six Counties, which all of the establishment political parties assured us would bring unprecedented prosperity, all the wrong records are being broken. Unemployment and repossessions are up, whilst income and living conditions are down. And all this while natural resources and state employment sectors are being privatised and sold off.

It would appear, then, that the only growling to be heard in Ireland at present, is that of the workers’ stomachs.

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