7 CENTRES OF PROTEST Dublin Kilkenny Cork Limerick Galway Sligo Cavan PLEASE READ TO THE END Protesters – we need a plan of action – this will allow us to travel less, protest more, organise better and include our neighbours. It is how we present and maintain our campaigns against Irish Water and the introduction of a water charge. This war will be won on the backs of communities just like yours, or not won at all. This country will be saved by communities just like yours, or it will falter and we will lose. If you use this time to organise within your own communities and to decide best as a group how your community should resist the demands of this government, not only will your political will and vision be collectively agreed upon, the responsibility for the journey and the drive to realise that political reality will become a collective responsibility. All protest starts in self-interest; each individual act of protest makes a difference, even only by it being the act that identifies you as a protester. Every protest marched, every chant, every call and response on cold wet and windy days, every poster placed in doors and in windows, every meter installation stopped, every application pack ignored, destroyed or returned unwelcome, every personal boycott of Topaz, RTE or Independent News and Media, every gathering of communities to prevent eviction or repossession are the acts of a people already at war with this state and its government. All of these individual, community based activities and initiatives are the basic building blocks of this movement for change. Individual or community initiative allows the freedom of association needed to organise organically with openness, transparency and honesty. Each and every protester therefore owns this movement. All action is implicitly political, and organisation now at community level will ensure that this remains your movement both in its theory and in practice; the ownership, direction and deployment of the movement remains at the behest of the people fuelling it, and not with those intent on steering it. We should investigate the use of existing constituencies as an organisational tool. We can use them to identify centres of protest. We can use them to geographically group communities of protesters. We can use them to target politicians, instead of letting them be used by politicians targeting us. In this way, communities of protesters all over the country can organise and affiliate as they themselves see fit; there is a clear and effective process of communication and information sharing; there is the ability to call agreed upon action at local, provincial and national level and there will be a cohesion and uniformity of purpose that no government will ignore. Right now we need to be at the very least an illusion of an alternative. A visible countrywide plan of action is necessary. We need to present, in our communities as palatable, visible, organised and effective. We need to be accessible and inclusive. That is how we swell our ranks. This is how we become the attractive alternative to compliance and apathy. This is how we spread the movement for change. This is how we become organised resistance. If we all agree to identify 7 centres of protest – Dublin, Kilkenny, Cork, Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Cavan and group existing constituencies around them, we immediately give people an identifiable accessible location to protest. By concentrating on population centres, we have a chance to convince greater numbers to attend all protests, meetings and information sharing events. With only 7 agreed locations to coordinate, there will be no need to have separate protests on any one day, and national assemblies of all protesters in Dublin (a source of great disruption to, and embarrassment for, the government) can be organised quickly and without hindrance. Each grouping of communities can be mobilised with minimal notice. Each grouping of communities should liaise with, and support protest or anti-austerity activity undertaken within their own areas. Each grouping of communities should be self-governing, yet available when called upon for appropriate action by other groups and other areas. Each grouping of communities should see itself as political, yet unaffiliated to established political parties or campaigns. Each grouping of communities will have the ability to individually, or through free association, collectively disrupt order within the state. This is how we divide and conquer the political establishment. This is how we stretch the resources of the state, while capitalising on the valuable resource that we, as protesters, are. This is how we impose our own ring of steel. This is how we make them come to us. Make no mistake – mass mobilisation in Dublin on a weekday is by far the most impressive and threatening tool we have at our disposal. This is for those times in between those protests. Take responsibility. Join the protests. All information for each location in comments section.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 18:05:44 +0000
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