Where do people stand on this protest? I see it got violent today.
As most of ye can probably guess I’m with the protestors here. Irrespective of local safety concerns (not that I’m dismissing them) the country has once again sold off its national infrastructure for nothing.
Privatising Eircom was a disaster - there was an argument for privatising the telephone operator but as we have seen since the lines themselves are a national infrastructures and should have remained in state hands. We are always told by the capitalists that state ownership = monopolies = bad for customers. But when you look at what happened with eircom you see that an infrastructure like that should never have been placed in private hands. Smart had a decent business model to roll out broadband at very competitive prices but they could not do so because eircom wouldn’t let them. And the government (or comreg) weren’t able to enforce anything because eircom owned the whole thing.
Likewise allowing a company like Shell to explore the Corrib gas field would be tolerable if we still owned the field and the pipes network, charging Shell to extract profits from a national resource. Just handing the whole lot over to Shell (as Ray Burke did) was typical of so many crazy decisions this country has taken in trying to emulate the Thatcher model that decimated Britain.