The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition was founded by the Socialist Party sister sections in England, Wales and Scotland as well as the Rail, Maritime and Transport workers union (RMT) and a number of other political groups.
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October 1998
AN UNPRECEDENTED wave of anger and revulsion has swept across Northern Ireland in the aftermath of the Omagh bomb. In Omagh virtually everything shut down for a week as the town braced itself for the agony of the funerals.
On the Monday morning shop stewards approached the management of the Desmonds factory, one of the biggest employers in the town, and the result was the closure of the factory for a week. In the town centre only newsagents and florists stayed open. A vigil organised by local community activists on Tuesday evening, and held in a car park close to where the bomb went off, drew a huge crowd.
With more hikes in fuel prices, this winter will see even more people deciding whether "to heat or eat".
Campaigners will protest outside Belfast City Hospital in South Belfast on Saturday 13th August at 12pm against the threatened closure of the accident and emergency unit.
In the vast acreage of print devoted to last week’s two political retirees, former parliamentarians George Lee and Deirdre de Burca, there was little recognition of the real lessons which are, that personality politics holds nothing in the way of a solution to either our economic or political problems and secondly that ordinary people should not put any faith in establishment political parties or politicians.
For some the spectacle was highly amusing. As the air thickened with recrimination between the pair and their political parties, for some reason the writer Flann O’Brien came strongly to mind. Perhaps it was that I remembered reading that his fractious relationship with his political masters caused him to resign amid, it was said memorably, ‘a cacophony of f**ks.’ Or maybe it was a subconscious association of the departees with the title of one of his famous books, ‘At Swim Two Birds.’
