Wednesday night, Ballynabola. On a freezing night over 100 people packed into the local pub to organise against the household charges.

The retail trade is the predicted bubble burst for 2012. But the La Senza occupation victory will set the trend for other workers to fight back.

As the economic crisis rolls on, Kieran Allen assesses the prospects for Irish socialists in the aftermath of the global revolutionary struggles of 2011.

Introduction

The courageous act by La Senza workers to occupy their workplace must be applauded and supported.

Many workers over the last two years when faced with redundancy have walked away heads hung low and accepted their fate but not workers in Vita Cortex in Cork or staff from the La Senza stores.

Labour Minister, Joan Burton, is robbing €811 million from the mouths of the poor. She is giving the money to bondholders like Goldman Sachs and is helping the Irish rich to avoid new taxes.

David Cameron described the strikes as a ‘damp squib’. Behind this attempt to downplay the strikes is a fear of what is to come.

Leo Varadkar is posh, real posh. He went to the private fee-paying Kings’ Hospital School and then straight onto Trinity to become a doctor.

The ongoing revolution has reached a critical point as protesters and police clash in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, writes Sameh Naguib from Egypt’s Revolutionary Socialists

My message to the workers of Europe is this – the struggle is the only solution to the crisis.