Somewhere between 200 and 250 people attended the AAA event “Water, Protests, Elections- Building a New Movement for Working Class People” in Cork on Thursday 5 March 2015. The demographic was tilted towards the over-50s with only a sprinkling of younger faces there to hear Cork councillor Mick Barry and TDs Joe Higgins and Paul Murphy (all members of the SP). I distributed just over 100 copies of the IBT leaflet “No payment! No meters! Abolish the water charges!” at the meeting which saw the AAA gain a good number of new recruits.

Mick and Joe’s presentations overwhelmingly emphasised the electoral side to the AAA’s perspective and were enthusiastic about the potential for electing AAA and other anti-austerity candidates to the Dáil. Paul gave a more rounded presentation about the need to replace capitalism as a system and repeatedly linking this to working class organisation outside the structures of capitalist…