The general secretary of Britain’s National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) has condemned attempts in Ireland to blame migrants and other minorities for the challenges presented by the cost-of-living crisis and said the trade union movement needs to be at the heart of the fight against racism.
Mick Lynch said there were “elements in Ireland right now trying to blame the poorest people in the world for virtually all of the problems on these islands and the problems in western society. They’re trying to blame the people that are struggling to exist.
“They’ve tried it in our movement, time and time again. They tried it in the labour movement in Britain, about the Irish, about the Jews, about the Poles after the war, then about the black people from Afro-Caribbean communities, and about people from what they used to call the new Commonwealth, South Asia all the rest of it.
“We cannot have that in Ireland and I would plead with everyone in our workplaces to oppose it because it is the most poisonous thing that can get in to the working class.”
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Speaking at the Robert Tressell Festival, a commemoration of the author of the book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, at Liberty Hall in Dublin on Saturday, Mr Lynch said generating a resurgence in the trade union movement involved “inspiring people. It’s about bringing people on board. But we’ve got to make sure that our movement just doesn’t consist of fighting the battle every day in the workplace. That’s vitally important, but we must keep our eyes on the prize and that prize is that we can change the world.”
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He said the festival was welcome because it gave people an opportunity “to talk about ideas because we’re usually talking about pipelines and shift patterns and overtime rates and all that, which is all vitally important but it doesn’t always inspire you to carry on when you have all those sleepless nights about particular campaigns. It’s Tressell and other things that you’ve all read in your lives that keeps you going, that’s why you want to do it. So it’s great that we’re back in debating ideas.”
The event was addressed by officials from a number of unions and other representatives of groups on the left from Ireland and overseas.
Many talked about the current challenges facing the trade union movement in Ireland; opening the day’s first panel discussion, Siptu deputy general secretary Ethel Buckley said: “Ireland may be ‘the best small country in the world in which to do business’, to quote a past taoiseach, but Ireland is certainly the most hostile country in western Europe, if not in all of Europe, in which to unionise your workplace and to exercise your fundamental human right to negotiate collectively with your employer.”
