Students fight fees in Ireland

Following large regional demonstrations around the coutnry, including 6,000 students on the streets of Cork, up to 15,000 Dublin students took to the streets on the 22nd of October. Students were opposing the doubling of the registration fee to 1,500 euro, and the continued threat of the re-introduction of full fees. Students carried signs such as 'I need a bail-out, not the banks' and shouted angry slogans against the cutbacks in education.

The Socialist Party and Socialist Youth gave out over 2,000 leaflets and we also distributed over 3,000 leaflets with others from a campaign we're involved in called FEE - free education for everyone. FEE held a meeting after the demonstration which agreed to spread the campaign to all the Dublin colleges urgently. The need for grassroots campaigns to pressure the Student Unions and USI (Union of Students of Ireland) to take a more serious approach to fighting fees was pointed to. Students involved in FEE are committed to building a mass, militant campaign against fees. FEE activists will be attending the protest in Dublin this coming Wednesday organised by the teachers' unions against the draconian attacks on primary and secondary education contained in the budget. This will assist the building of a campaign of students, school students, teachers and other education workers that can exert massive pressure, not only to reverse all the attacks on education, but also to invest in public education to have genuinely free, quality education for everyone.