Fingal Voice - A Review

national | arts and media | opinion/analysis Tuesday January 13, 2004 04:11 by Adrian Alienation

This is the second in a series of reviews of publications coming out of the Irish activist scene.

To avoid monotony I have decided to intermingle reviews of the less obvious publications in amongst those of the usual suspects right from the start. With that in mind, this review will deal with the Fingal Voice, the only paper of its kind produced by the Irish left.

The Fingal Voice (FV) is an eight page, A4 sized, local paper produced by the Socialist Party (SP).

The SP puts out three more or less regular publications. The most commonly seen by activists is the monthly newspaper, the Voice. They also have a magazine, Socialist View, which looks at issues in greater depth and is supposed to come out every three months. In reality it seems to appear whenever they get around to it.

FV is by far the least visible of the three amongst activists. It isn't sold on demonstrations or at political meetings. It isn't available in the shops. Instead it is distributed for free through leafletting networks to houses across West and North Dublin. In fact, it is distributed on a massive scale - estimated to include two thirds of the sixty thousand plus households in Fingal.

It is reasonable to wonder how many copies of any free paper are actually read. Even so, we are talking about a publication with a much wider distribution than anything else coming out of the Irish activist milieu, dwarfing even that of An Phoblacht. An Phoblacht of course, has to be paid for and is thus very much more likely to be read by anyone who ends up with a copy, but the general point I am making about scale of operation stands.

Workers Solidarity, the paper of the anarchist Workers Solidarity Movement has certain formal similarities with the FV. They are both produced by one organisation rather than as generally left enterprises. They both come in A4 format. They are both distributed for free on an impressive scale, with perhaps 5 or 6,000 copies of the anarchist paper distributed every couple of months.

The comparison misses the most important point however. What makes FV such an interesting experiment is that it is a direct attempt by a section of the Irish left to root itself in a particular set of communities. The degree to which such an experiment is going to be succesful is difficult to predict, but the imagination shown in thinking to try in the first place is laudable.

The particular issue dealt with in this review, is from November 2003. There is, apparently, a new one due out soon but as I don't live in Fingal getting hold of it isn't as easy as getting hold of most left papers or magazines. The other advantages in this little bit of cheating with the date is that this issue was produced at the height of the bin tax struggle in Fingal.

The November FV is eight pages long. The first page seems to have been reproduced from the front page of a contemporary issue of the Voice. At least, the pictures of Ray Burke and Liam Lawlor seperated from a picture of Joe Higgins and Clare Daly being led away by the cops by the headline "One Law for Them, Another for the Rest of Us", seems familiar.

Joe Higgins and Clare Daly each contribute a regular page. Daly's column is divided into three sections, all bin tax related. The first of her articles explains how the bin tax leads to privatisation. The second compares the levels of tax paid by workers with the tax paid by the rich. The third details how Fingal bin workers have been treated by management. Like the rest of the paper, the articles are clearly aimed not at activists but at the punter in the street and all three are short, clear and persuasive.

Higgin's page consists of a longer article, dealing with the environmental background to the dispute. He argues that "it is not people's attitudes that are the problem, but rather the abysmal failure of successive governments to put in place a comprehensive infrastructre to deal with with waste reduction, re-use and recycling". The amount of waste produced by business is compared to that produced by ordinaty households.

Most of the arguments made by Higgins and Daly and throughout the paper would be familiar to people who have been active in the anti-bin tax campaign. What makes them unusual is the context. The detailed arguments are being addressed directly to every household in most of Fingal rather than being filtered through the corporate media, edited down to a leaflet or restricted to the much smaller number of people willing to buy a left publication.

Understandably, the bin tax features on every page of the FV. The legal situation is explained with regard to putting rubbish in stationary bin trucks, while the centre pages are devoted to a feature by Ruth Coppinger entitled "Bin Tax Battle: The Story So Far". Coppinger's article is a brief history of the Fingal Anti-Bin Tax Campaign. It goes long on praising the courage of ordinary residents in the campaign with, perhaps surprisingly, the Socialist Party only being mentioned twice.

Page six consists of a short article on the local elections, stating that SP members will "organise and take the fight from the Council chamber out into the community". The rest of the page consists of short profiles of seven of the SP candidates, notable in part because of some of the entertaining mugshot photos.

Page seven is a long article looking at the prospect of more attacks from the government on workers, through more local taxes and privatisation. Its main point is difficult to disagree with - the government has shown its willingness to use repression against bin tax protestors and that we have to be prepared for the same in future battles.

The back page is a "join us" call to arms and as such there isn't much to say about it, except that it is well written as these things go. The editors of Socialist Worker might do well to compare its explanation that SP members want to replace capitalism "with a socialist society where all the major wealth and industry is publically owned and democratically controlled by the working class" with the liberal shopping list of questions included in their own most recent call for members.

FV is not a paper likely to fire the blood of the average Irish activist. It isn't, I suppose, intended to be. It is very much a party publication, though there isn't anything necessarily wrong with that. On the positive side, it manages to be straightforward without dripping with condescension. It represents a very interesting idea and it impressed me more than I expected it to. Only time will tell how much of an impact it has but I like the idea of an activist paper that is aimed so completely at people outside the activist scene.

I'm going to move away from the Trotskyist left for the next few installments. Next up for review will hopefully be either Workers Solidarity or Red Banner. After that I will take a look at something from the Republican end of things.

Lastly, as I said at the end of my first review, if you have comments to make about the Fingal Voice I would be interested to hear them. If you just want to rant about how evil the SP are, or worse still you want to have a go at the anarchists/Labour/SWP/Sinn Fein, please keep your bile to yourself. There are more than enough threads of that kind already.