A challenge for us all that we cannot afford to lose

THE VITA CORTEX OCCUPATION, CORK | ‘THIS IS NOT ABOUT MONEY — IT IS ABOUT JUSTICE’

» BY DARREN O’KEEFFE
Co-ordinator of the Support the Vita Cortex Workers Online Campaign
(Writing in a personal capacity)

AS I SIT DOWN to write this, the Vita Cortex workers have entered the 70th day of their sit-in. There have been a lot of words used to describe their story over the past few months, including ‘dispute, struggle and fight’.  One word which has not been used as often is the word ‘challenge’. This is surprising since this situation does indeed represent a challenge on a number of levels within Irish society.

In 1984, the battle between Britain’s Tory Government, under Margaret Thatcher, and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) represented an ideological battle between socialism and laissez-faire economics. The bitter conflict would determine which of the two schools of thought would determine and dominate the direction Britain would take, not just economically but also socio-culturally, over the next three decades. As a result of Thatcher’s intransigence, the social fabric was torn out of entire communities that had depended, for generations, on the coal industry for their incomes and their identities. Thatcher, in the midst of developing of her own brand of neo-liberalism, used the full apparatus of the British Government and associated agencies to smash the spirit and strength of the miners. Her victory was shared not by the ordinary British family but by those salivating at the thoughts of the opportunities that would be afforded to them by a society where consumerism would be diffused as a human value to be held dear. My point is that the miners’ strike (and this has been said many times before) was not simply some huge industrial action. It had a fundamental impact on the shaping of British society.

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(Clockwise from top left) Noam Chomsky, Mary Robinson, Alex Ferguson Christy Moore, Paul McGrath, and Cillian Murphy