Launch of €540Billion note

national | environment | event notice Friday February 11, 2011 12:45 by Dermo - Dublin Shell To Sea

Politics is for life, not just for elections.

Saturday - Dublin Shell to Sea Stall – 14.00hrs – 15.30hrs St. Stephen’s Green end of Grafton Street – 12th Feb. 2011

An Irish general election fever grips the Country, where promises flow like water running off a mountain, and where the sun, the moon, and the stars are laid at the feet of the people, all for the sake of a no. 1 on the day itself.

From looking around us now you witness the desperate scramble of prospective candidates to get into power in the Dáil, to receive their €100,000 PA salary’s plus expenses. Jobs and Reform appear to be on top of the agenda, yet no one appears to be responsible for the transgressions of the past. Also all these Jobs will not take place without investment, yet since we are effectively broke and availing of an unsustainable loan from the IMF/ECB to pay for the speculators losses, it is hard to see how this promise of jobs will come to pass

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An obvious answer takes the form of the amount of Natural Resources this country has. Not one political party is talking about this subject. Not one of the established figures mentions the fact or talks about the deal that’s been reached with Shell where they can extract what they find and the exchequer see’s NOTHING from this. You would think that the conservative estimate of €540Billon in Natural Resources would be a primary focus for political parties, and a good place to start would be to re-negotiate the deal with Shell. You would be wrong.

Politics is not about the circus that we are seeing now as people vie for those seats in the Dáil. Politics is about the struggle towards improving conditions in the here and now, in people’s daily lives. Politics is not just about scratching your mark on a piece of paper every 4/5 years and hoping they’ll sort it out for you. Politics is about sorting it out for all of us, it’s about solidarity.

Dublin Shell to sea will be launching the €540 billion ‘commemorative bank notes’ to members of the public, symbolising the cost to the exchequer of the extraordinary giveaway of Ireland’s oil and gas reserves. The commemorative notes mocked up to look like Euro bank notes and contain information for voters in the forthcoming general election on the infamous Ray Burke deal, which resulted in the State handing over control of its oil and gas reserves to multinational oil corporations.

Come along, help us hand out these notes, and let’s help ground the debate around real issues. What we do with our Natural Resources, and how we extract them, whilst respecting the rights of the people directly affected, is a real debate. Let’s move away from the never-never land of empty promises and towards what kind of Ireland we want to live in and how we are going to get there.