Thursday 14 April 2011

Gathering pace


THE BALLYHEA BONDHOLDER BAILOUT PROTEST MARCH
We’re gathering pace, and though the protest hasn’t yet spread nationwide - confined to ourselves, Fermoy and Cork last weekend - the message is certainly getting out there.  Our local newspapers, The Vale Star and the Corkman, have been hugely supportive, as have been C103 and Live 95FM; two national newspapers – The Irish Times and The Daily Mail – have given it good exposure, and this week TV3, on the Morning Show with Cybil and Martin on Thursday last, gave the protest another boost.
With this increase in attention it’s important that here in Ballyhea, where it all started, we give it as much support as we can from now on.  There is a change in time and day this week, moved to this Saturday evening at 8.15pm – please make every effort you can to be there.  The march will take no longer than usual, ten minutes at most; the impact will last much longer.
Our focus hasn’t changed – we say No! to the bondholder bailout.  The ECB came to Dublin last November ostensibly to help bail out a floundering nation, but in reality they came with their own agenda, to bail out their own banks, their own bondholders.  A deal was done but it was a foul deal, a deal of financial enslavement, a yoke fashioned by the ECB and forced across the shoulders of the Irish people – we say no.
Two fundamental questions: Justify to us, the Irish people, why those whose billions fuelled the inferno that engulfed our economy and still rages out of control, have themselves not even been singed; justify to us, the Irish people, why we should have to assume, in full, the private debt accumulated by our banks to those bondholders.  For every reckless borrower there is a reckless lender – where is their pain?
Join us, this Saturday, 8.15pm, in Ballyhea, then again on the following Sunday morning, April 24th, 10am, on exactly the 95th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising.  The freedom and national independence for which those men and women shed blood has been usurped, wrenched from us by the ECB; it is surely worth marching for now.
TV3 LINK:
http://www.tv3.ie/shows.php?request=themorningshow&tv3_preview=&video=34704