Tag Archives: protest

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Staff at Independent News and Media are to protest outside a company meeting today over a 70% cut to their pension benefits.

Earlier this month INM announced it would no longer be contributing to the defined benefit pension scheme, which will now have to close.

Separately, the company will today seek shareholder approval for measures that would permit the resumption of dividend payments for shareholders including businessmen Denis O’Brien and Dermot Desmond, who between them own almost 45% of the company.

In 2013, Independent News and Media restructured its defined benefit pension scheme.

Under that ten-year plan, staff had to accept benefit cuts of around 40%.

But last month INM announced  that it would cease contributions to that scheme citing factors including regulatory funding requirements and falling bond yields.

INM staff set to protest over pension cuts of 70% (RTE)

UPDATE:

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Ingrid Miley tweetz:

Union briefing re: pension cuts at INM gets underway – protest to follow outside EGM at 13.30…

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It’s on.

Finally.

The Dublin Cycling Campaign writes:

Cycling continues to get the crumbs at the table when it comes to overall national transport spend. Of the €10billion allocated for transport investment in the Capital Investment Plan for 2016-2021, active travel (encompassing walking, cycling and other such measures) is allocated just €100million.

That means that cycling is to receive approx 0.5% (half of one percent!) of the transport pie. If that wasn’t bad enough, we heard in the last few weeks of further cutbacks in future funding for cycling projects for Dublin City Council by the Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport – as reported on Irishcycle.com.

This all comes at a time when we have had nine cyclist fatalities in Ireland this year already, the most recent of which was the tragic death of Donna Fox at the junction between Seville Place and Guild Street in the north inner city.

Dublin Cycling Campaign is calling on everyone who uses a bike in Dublin – for transportation or for leisure – to join our protest on Monday 3rd October so as to send a loud-and-clear message to the Minister that he needs to recognise that the status quo is not good enough – cycling needs proper funding to make it safer and to enable Dublin to reach its potential as a world class cycling city.

We are calling on the Minister to allocate cycling a better share.

Gulp.

Cycle Protest to Demand Proper Funding for Cycling! (Dublin Cycling Campaign)

Poster: Andrea Figueira

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This afternoon.

Outside Leinster House on the first day of the Dáil term after the summer break.

Gardaí at the gates of the Dáil.

And members of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, SIPTU and the Psychiatric Nurses Association calling for “the restoration of incremental credit for nurses and midwives who graduated between 2011 and 2015”.

Those protesting included nurses Maria Phelan, Christine Gibbons and Eimear Byrne from Kilkenny Mental Health Services (above).

Pics: Sam Boal/Rollingnews and Mick Caul (second from top)

HMV Henry Street’s Twitter this afternoon.

Hilco Capital, the parent company of HMV Ireland and Xtravision shut up shop on the former at the end of last month, and have apparently gone into liquidation the night before they were due to settle up with staff.

This is not the workers’ first rodeo with HMV.

Meanwhile…

…and HMV Limerick staff have spoken on their treatment by Hilco to the ‘sheet.

“It was first of all hard to hear that your job was gone, but the promise of a redundancy payment from HMV made that a bit easier and would have given people a bit of breathing room financially, while looking for new employment.With that now delayed it makes this a very difficult time for the staff that put Trojan work in right to the end, as we always did, to ensure the store closures went as smoothly as possible.”

Brendan Miller

“As well as that I think it’s the fact that a conscious decision was made by HMV Ireland/Hilco to lie to its employees and promise them a timely redundancy which was never going to be paid out. That was to ensure we were not in a position to use any leverage against them to ensure we got paid.”

Damien Mullane

More as we get it.

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This afternoon.

Outside the Iranian embassy at Mount Merrion Avenue in Blackrock, Dublin.

A group of academics from Dublin’s major universities gather in full academic garb, to call for the release of anthropologist and Irish citizen Homa Hoodfar from prison in Tehran and to highlight what they claim is the Irish government’s lack of action.

Homa has been in prison in Tehran for the past three months and, a week ago, her family and friends received the news that she has been hospitalised.

In a piece recently published in The Guardian, Tariq Ramadan wrote:

As a Muslim scholar, I am deeply troubled by the unlawful and unjust detention of professor Homa Hoodfar, an Iranian-Canadian scholar who was detained in March while visiting friends and family in Iran. Members of the Revolutionary Guard raided her home, confiscated her personal belongings and passports, summoned her for interrogations, and finally imprisoned her in Tehran’s Evin prison without access to her family or a lawyer.

Her treatment violates principles of intellectual freedom, justice and fairness that are central to the Islamic system of morality.

Born in Iran and now a Canadian and Irish citizen, Hoodfar is a senior anthropologist who has devoted her academic career to studying the family as well as the duties and rights of women in various Muslim contexts.

A renowned scholar, she has taught at Concordia University in Montreal for the past three decades. Her research on Muslim women’s struggles – both in the Middle East and in the west – is balanced and characterised by respect for those about whom she writes.

Her extensive work on Muslim women living in the west and their veiling strategies has been a particularly important contribution to challenging colonial images of the Muslim veil, while at the same time helping to address Islamophobia in the west.

Since she is neither a political activist nor part of any political movement opposing the government of Iran, she never hesitated to visit the Islamic republic to see family or conduct historical research.

While Tehran’s prosecutor recently announced indictments against Hoodfar – along with several other dual nationals – the charges she faces remain unknown. Semi-official reports in newspapers with links to the Revolutionary Guard, however, accuse her of “dabbling in feminism” and fomenting a feminist “soft revolution” against the Islamic republic.

Hoodfar’s treatment demonstrates the extent to which her work has been misunderstood by the Iranian authorities. Her research poses no threat to Iran’s government or its people, and her arrest is deeply disturbing for anyone who values academic freedom and independent scholarship.

The detention of Homa Hoodfar is unjust and unIslamic. Iran should release her (The Guardian)

Pics: Emer O’Toole

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The Kinsale Road direct provision centre in Cork

And living in Cork?

Further to the recent death of You Jung Han, 36, from South Korea, at the Kinsale Road direct provision centre in Cork…

Red FM reports:

Residents of a direct provision centre in Cork are staging a demonstration today in protest at the system they’re living in.

It follows the death of a young mother in the Kinsale Road Accommodation centre in recent weeks and similar protests in 2014 where asylum seekers living in Cork called on the government to end the system.

…The protest is taking place today on the Grand Parade at 2pm.

Protests Due to Take Place By Residents of Direct Provision Centre in Cork (Red FM)

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The Women’s Centre on Berkeley Street, Inns Quay, Dublin

Re (al) Productive Health writes:

In February 2014, we held a picket outside the anti-choice counselling office on Berkeley Road to oppose the intimidation and lies the ‘clinic’ promoted and its location beside a Marie Stopes service.

A report this morning from Ellen Coyne and Catherine Sanz [in The Times Ireland edition] has revealed that the service advises that abortions ’cause breast cancer and can turn women into child abusers’.

This service tells women lies, intimidates and cooercives their choices and is directly linked to Catholic anti-abortion groups.

We deserve better than this, we deserve to be given factual, non-judgemental information and to be supported in accessing safe and free reproductive choices along the spectrum.

Please join us to protest against this service and insist that dangerous, unregulated services such as this are closed.

Re(al) Productive Health (Facebook)

Earlier: Behind The Blue Door

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Protesters outside the Dáil calling for a statutory inquiry into Mother and Baby Homes in the 2014

You may recall how, in December, representatives from the Coalition of Mother and Baby Home Survivors delivered a letter to the offices of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes, at 73 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin 2.

The letter was addressed to the chair of the investigation, Judge Yvonne Murphy and, in it, CMABS called for the commission’s terms of reference to be widened.

Paul Redmond, of CMABS, said at the time:

Only about one third of the entire total of people who were separated as single mothers and children are being included in this inquiry.

Further to this…

The Coalition of Mother And Baby Home Survivors (CMABS) writes:

Survivors from Mother and Baby Homes, and other institutions and homes associated with forced and illegal adoptions, will picket the official Inquiry into such homes [today at 1.30pm] for refusing to include ALL survivors.

The survivor community has been sliced in two by the Terms of Reference for the Inquiry and thousands have been excluded. This wanton discrimination and exclusion is insulting and deeply hurtful to our ageing survivor community.

Despite a formal meeting with the Inquiry and the presentation of irrefutable and conclusive evidence that it would be in the public interest, as well as morally and legally necessary to include all survivors, the Inquiry has stalled and fobbed off our community for nearly 18 months.

The indisputable fact remains that the Inquiry’s own Terms of Reference allow it recommend to the Minister for Children and the Government that its terms be expanded to include all survivors. The Inquiry has refused to make such a recommendation without even giving a credible explanation.

The Inquiry has refused to include all survivors despite the fact that the excluded survivors have no other means of legal remedy, meaning the Inquiry itself – as well as the Government – is now in breach of European human rights laws.

Illegally adopted people are now formally denied justice in Ireland, as are many elderly survivors who happen to have been born in places or situations outside the named Mother and Baby Homes.

Survivors are dying without seeing justice and are profoundly wounded and injured by the discrimination the Government and the Inquiry are implementing on a daily basis.

The Coalition of Mother And Baby home Survivors (CMABS) will lodge a formal complaint and objection to the Inquiry today at 1.30pm. We will be publishing the complaint shortly afterwards in a press release.

CMABS is also seeking a pro bono legal team to challenge the continued exclusion and discrimination against an elderly survivor community who are dying by the hundreds and thousands every year. Thousands have already been denied justice and an apology in this life.

CMABS has offered the Inquiry a low-cost and speedy method to include all survivors but this has been ignored.

Some of our activist comrades who have recently passed away are named and remembered in our complaint. How many more of us will join them in the grave while this Inquiry drags on and the Government hides behind it?

CMABS demands an immediate Acknowledgment, Apology and Redress from this Government while there is still time. Many groups have the evidence to conclusively prove their cases now. Why are they being ignored? Deny ’til they die? “To add the halfpence to the pence”, in the centenary year of the 1916 Rising?

Previously: The Sin Of Omission

Sam Boal/Rollingnews

Thanks Paul Redmond

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Further to the ever-rising motor insurance costs…

Ireland Underground writes:

Come [out tomorrow] and support us. We need every car, every van, every person possible to show the government and the insurance corporations that they answer to us. The power is with the people, they know this, we need to recognise this too.

…Meet us in Dublin at midday. We will drive through the city from midday and from 13.30 we will have on-stage entertainment followed by guest speakers in Merrion Square.

…Here is a brief outline of what we’d like to see happen:

  • Establish a task force (similar to the motor Insurance Advisory Board previously in place)
  • Tackle the claims culture more aggressively.
  • Reduce compensation payouts.
  • More transparent pricing structures of all insurance companies
  • More transparency on out-of-court settlements
  • Insurance purchased within any EU member state to be valid in Ireland

Beep!

FIGHT!

Ireland Underground

Previously: ‘There Is A Cartel Of Insurance Underwriters’