Second William Thompson weekend school "Making the links" Cork (Ireland): May 4th - 6th 2001 The William Thompson weekend school was an interesting event from the point of view of social movement thinking. Organised by Praxis, a group of engaged intellectuals based in Cork, it's an interesting mix of ideas from, for and about movements (though here as elsewhere the phrase "social movement" often seems to be used to mark off something special and different from other ways in which ordinary people do politics). Sessions covered protests, activist biographies, the politics and economics of (Irish) corporatism, community organising and global movements, approaching movements from a range of different angles. This has strengths and weaknesses: a strength is its ability to attract, and bring together, a wide variety of interests and perspectives - "making the links"; a related weakness is a potential tendency for people to come only to a few sessions and so miss out, perhaps, on the possibility of developing a more general discussion. My own guess was that perhaps half the participants (30 - 60) at any given point were there for the whole event, with a lot of more intermittent attenders. I didn't know many of the people there, but there was clearly a good mix of activists and academics (often both), with an unusual age range - rates were very low (down to £3 a session, £20 for the whole weekend), and posters were up on lampposts round town as well as in college departments. The whole thing was also videoed, by community video group Frameworks , and hopefully some of the sessions will be circulated more widely. I missed Sheila Rowbotham's opening talk, on women's livelihood protests, but by all accounts it was as good as ever, and she remained for much of the rest of the weekend, which is not always the case with famous guest speakers.... The first session, on Saturday morning, covered "radical Irish lives": Rosemary Cullen-Owens on pacifist feminist Louie Bennett, Donal O Drisceoil on socialist republican Peadar O'Donnell, and John Horgan on left-wing symbol Noel Browne. In a sense all three of the talks illustrated a similar history: how after a long period of movements from below, from the Land War to the War of Independence, the new Ireland created by this long nationalist revolution left little if any space for radical activity from below that challenged the new status quo. Peadar O'Donnell's story, as a trade unionist, communist and Old IRA man who found the space for any kind of radical left slowly squeezed out over the 1920s and 1930s to the point where he retired into literary work and the patronage of progressive causes, is obviously a classic example of this; so too is Louie Bennett's: the suffragist movement across Europe was in any case riven by nationalism at the start of the 1914 - 1918 war, but what finally broke the Irish movement was republican feminists' insistence on the primacy of nationalist violence even after partial independence had been achieved. Noel Browne, as a figure who rose into prominence in the grey years of the 1940s and 1950s, probably owed much of his individuality and unpredictableness precisely to this lack of an adequate movement milieu within which he could have learned the skills of building effective alliances rather than developing a rather isolated celebrity. The afternoon session covered the workings of "social partnership" in Ireland, with socialist Kieran Allen's presentation of his usual arguments about the inequalities of the "Celtic Tiger", and trade unionist Des Derwin's analysis of the peculiarities of current breakaway unions opposing corporatist agreements, media response and the way forward in the building of rank-and-file activism. The discussion that followed this session was very animated but not very coherent: clearly much of the reformist left is deeply committed to partnership arrangements, whether for ideological or pragmatic reasons. At the same time, Allen's analysis of "what's wrong with partnership", which rests on the observation that relative inequality is rising even though most people are doing better in absolute terms, ran a bit into the sands of its populist presentation: relative inequality is indeed a problem, but not for reasons which can be explained within the tabloid style that Irish leftists often assume constitute's ordinary people's limits of thought. Slightly apart from this discussion, there was an unscheduled speaker from Colombia (whose surname I couldn't catch), here in Ireland to protest against the activities of Irish-based multinational Jefferson Smurfit in Colombia: a good illustration of the changing shape of the world economy and Ireland's position in it. That evening, there was a linkup with the annual trades union Mayday march, which had apparently been a very sad event last year (about 30 people and the National Anthem being played) - this year, after a handful of trade union leaders, we had Jubilee 2000 (church-based anti- debt campaigners), all the left, a range of environmental groups and some spectacular stuff from a community arts network - and a street party running for a couple of hours. As one of the organisers put it, "well, this year we reclaimed the pavement, so you know what to expect next year". At all events, this was a good counterpart to the discussions on making links during the day. Probably the highlight of the conference, for me, was the Sunday morning session, with community activists Sheelagh Broderick and Cathleen O'Neill. Sheelagh's presentation, on the personal and emotional path of activism, was very interesting for anyone who finds the question "how do we keep going?" a valuable one. Unfortunately this was completely overshadowed in the ensuing discussion, by the reverberations of Cathleen O'Neill's talk on the counter-productive effects of social partnership on working-class community organising. It isn't entirely the first time that community activists have been publicly critical of partnership, but it is certainly rare for the private grumbles to be replaced with a well- grounded (experientially and historically) analysis of the *structural* problems with the involvement of community organisations with local government and welfare state structures in Ireland, particularly when it comes from one of the most-published activists in the country as an apology to her own community for involving them in the process, and the video should be assured of a very wide audience indeed. In terms of making links, responses to a question from Rosie Meade on the Saturday about transferring the critique of industrial partnership to the community arena had shown how little informed much of the traditional left are about community organising (something which Des Derwin, with refreshing candour, admitted publicly), so that the meeting of the two is important in more ways than one - again, not perhaps unique, but certainly something that needs to happen far more frequently. The last Sunday session included a spectacular presentation by historian Peter Linebaugh on the kinds of trans-Atlantic links and solidarity he's found between resistance to late 18th century capitalist globalisation - links between Irish republicans and Native Americans, sailors and slaves, forming an alternative "globalisation from below" which was anything other than ethnically essentialist. Development worker / journalist Mick McCaughan gave a talk which in some ways paralleled this, drawing links between the Zapatistas and the "anti- globalisation movement", and I did a piece on the new movement, its Irish relevance, and how activists can relate to it. This event was a remarkable piece of political organising (funded by raffles, pub quizzes etc.) creating a good discussion space for a fair range of movement participants, as well as a fertile intellectual event which has the added usefulness of legitimating a kind of discussion which happens all too rarely in Irish academia. It's interesting on an international scale to see just how much is possible in terms of academic / activist events, bringing together a variety of perspectives and movements, and it'll be good to see what the organisers come up with next! Laurence