The Communist Party of Ireland sends warmest May Day greetings of solidarity to the working people of Ireland. For the Irish working class there is a clear crisis in housing and health. We emphasise the need to build resistance and struggle to demand and secure decent public housing and to establish an all-Ireland free public health system and for an end to private health services as a priority.
The building of all-Ireland people-centred and controlled universal public services, free to all, is a priority in the struggle to end the partition of our country and eliminate the scourge of division.
This May Day we are mindful of all throughout the world who have suffered so terribly in the Covid-19 pandemic. On all continents, including Europe, it is has been working people, the poorest and the powerless who have suffered most.
Health care is a basic human right. The distribution of vaccines and essential medicines should not be impeded by considerations of patent rights, corporate profits, or chauvinistic control. The actions of the EU, United States and Britain in blocking access to and the production of vaccines for people all over the world is shameful and demonstrative of their clear class priorities.
We express our solidarity with the Cuban people, and we salute the heroic Henry Reeve International Contingent of Doctors (Cuban Medical Brigade). They have shown what socialism has achieved, and shows that a different path of economic and social development is possible and necessary. Real solidarity is a hallmark of socialism, while “thoughts and prayers” is the best that capitalism has to offer.
Capitalism is a deeply flawed exploitative system that has nothing to offer but growing misery. The capitalist mode of production serves the interests of the ruling class while offering the working class nothing but misery. It promotes sexism and racism. War and violence are inherent features of the system, a system that is destroying our planet in its constant pursuit of ever-increasing corporate profits. It is also increasingly destroying people’s minds and spreading alienation throughout the world.
We express our solidarity with all those around the world struggling against imperialism, to the hundreds of millions of workers suffering savage exploitation by both the local capitalist class and transnational corporations. We offer solidarity to all those nations and peoples struggling to build a new society, to build socialism.
Globally, we face a growing environmental catastrophe created and driven by the capitalist system. We face a constant and growing threat by imperialism to world peace, posed by those trying to launch a new Cold War: the imperialist powers, such as the United States and the European Union.
Irish neutrality is needed more than ever, and working people need to oppose those who seek to undermine it. We need to end the Government’s spending commitments to the European Union’s PESCO military budgetary targets and divert that spending to social and economic development at home. We call for a progressive neutrality based on international solidarity and support for people.
For the working class of Ireland there is a clear need to build resistance and to struggle to secure decent public housing, and to establish an all-Ireland free public health system for all. The pandemic has exposed the gross inequality within society. It has exposed the extent of low pay and precarious employment, which have had the hardest impact on women and young people. It has exposed the massive exploitation by parasitic landlords and the global speculative investment funds, the new absentee landlords, that increasingly control and determine housing policy, making vast profits from people’s need for shelter.
Workers need to build more militant trade union and community organisations to defend and advance their interests, to protect their living standards and their rights. Workers need the right to join and be represented by a trade union, with the right to unrestricted access to represent workers and the right to organise. We support workers seeking to rebalance power in their work-place through unionisation.
The Irish capitalist class, allied with transnational corporations, have used the pandemic and the restrictions imposed on workers to restructure their businesses, to lay off thousands of workers, or to close down completely, including finance, banking, and global retailers. Remote working, unrestricted, offers capital a truly global market in which to exploit workers.
Working people need to challenge the anti-worker laws, north and south, including the Industrial Relations Act (1990) and the anti-union laws in the Six Counties. We need a Bill of Rights for all workers, for the whole of Ireland.
The Communist Party of Ireland remains resolute in its conviction that real qualitative changes to the lives of our people, north and south, will only be met by the building and expanding of public services, industries, assets, and institutions, decoupled from capitalist profiteering and private ownership.
Expanding public ownership, active participation in our institutions and industries and socialist transformation is the only solution to the capitalist crisis engulfing not only the Irish working class but the global working class. We need
- an all-Ireland national industrial strategy
- an all-Ireland national bank and insurance agency
- an all-Ireland national building company for urban and rural planning and development.
The future belongs to those who struggle.
A better future is won through struggle.
