Mass protests have met the Dublin government’s attempts to impose on a water tax on people throughout the southern Irish state. The government is a Fine Gael-Labour coalition, which has been imposing a vicious austerity programme. Anne McShane of the British paper Weekly Worker recently spoke to a leading member of the ‘Cobh Says No’ campaign:
Working class in rebellion
The introduction of water charges in Ireland is the latest of the anti-working class measures in the austerity package agreed with the troika by the last Fianna Fáil/Green government and continued under the present regime. Previous protests in 2012 and 2013 against the austerity deal included a boycott of the household tax. But the government then employed direct taxation measures to beat the working class into submission.
The state was confident that it had won the battle. Earlier this year a semi-state company was set up and water meter installation…
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