In the village of Dún Chaoin, Co Kerry, one of Ireland’s most well-known Gaeltachtaí, only 55 of the 126 houses are owned by locals while the rest are summer homes. These 71 second homes are unoccupied 8-10 months a year, while young people and new families are unable to buy houses in their own backyards.

Údarás na Gaeltachta member Breandáin Mac Gearailt claims that “Dún Chaoin is becoming a playground for rich Dubliners, ultimately leading to the destruction of the local culture”.

Furthermore, it appears that the authorities intend to increase the number of summer homes, worsening the situation.

Breandán Mac Gearailt believes that “the situation is a delicate one that needs to be handled with kid gloves,” and he proposes that “the local community should be part of a consultative planning process,” as “language and culture are not on the agenda”.

When asked about the possibility of the Welsh solution to holiday homes being adopted in the west, (when English-owned holiday homes in Wales were burned down) Mac Gearailt stressed his opposition to such a campaign but pointed out that “people had been talking along those lines not long ago . . . and stupid things might happen”.

The problem of housing is more pronounced in Clifden, Co Galway where 64% of homes are summer homes, according to Leo Hallassey, a local teacher and resident.

In relation to the threat of arson Hallassey maintains “that tension isn’t there yet,” but does stress the severity of the damage being done to his community.

He illustrates this by referring to the “tremendous pressure placed on land prices” by such a high proportion of second homes, and is angered at the fact that young local people who rely on poorly-paid seasonal work (typically £3 an hour for 12-14 weeks of the year) are expected to pay upwards of £20,000 for a site to build on.

This leads to young people being forced out of their communities in search of somewhere to live. According to Leo Hallassey there are “few examples of the indigenous society left” due to this cultural erosion.

“The council should be buying land and selling it back as serviced sites,” he said. “We all have to decide what vision we want for the rim of the country.”

The Welsh campaign, started in 1979, was a response to the thousands of second homes being bought by wealthy English people. This helped to step up the British government’s long-running policy of anglicising rural Welsh-speaking areas.

At first, second homes were simply burnt to the ground, but as the campaign intensified, offices of estate agents responsible for their sale were also targeted.

The way to avoid such drastic measures being taken here is for the State and local councils to recognise the importance of consultative planning and to embrace the up-to-now alien principle of people before profit.
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Recently, I have returned home to Derry on holiday from my adopted country of the past 34 years, Trinidad and Tobago. These islands are home to 1.3 million people, are natural gas rich with per capita annual income of US$3,000. We also export iron and steel products, and have become a major producer of fertilisers (ammonia and urea) and methanol. A large one billion US$ natural gas liquefaction plant, to meet export demands, is about to be built and many multinational companies are drilling for oil and gas.

All this sounds economically glorious but the industrial expansion is foreign investment driven, is highly capital intensive with many government concessions. All this co-exists with a general recorded unemployment rate of 16%.

The country is looking at diversifying its economy away from the energy sector and a foreign investment driven economy, to one that exploits local resources in agriculture, information technology etc. There is the view held by some of our economic planners that the establishment of Export Processing Zones (tax-free EPZs) is the way to go since these encourage labour intensive industries.

Unfortunately these industries, which are looking for competitive advantage based on cheap labour, are very footloose and think nothing of moving from country to country as wages increase or currencies appreciate.

One of our sister islands, Jamaica, lost hundreds of jobs in one of these free zones to Mexico because the Jamaican economy began to improve, the currency appreciated and real labour costs to the multinational conglomerate increased. These companies encourage developing countries to compete among themselves on low labour rates which is anathema to economic development. In fact, if low labour rates were a competitive advantage the underdeveloped world would be making the greatest development strides.

You can well imagine my surprise, yet déja vu, when I picked up local papers and saw that United Technologies was closing its factory in Derry and moving to countries with lower wage rates: Spain, Poland etc.

United Technologies’ Mr Greer, as the President of an international company operating in this viciously competitive global market, knows his company can only survive if it continues to meet the demands of its customers: ‘price decreases not increases’.

These multinationals cannot afford to have any allegiance to a host country with respect to its long-term social requirements. Hence, they remain lean, mobile and efficient. Neither Ireland nor my adopted country Trinidad and Tobago, (T&T) cannot depend on cheap labour to survive.

Neither, in the case of T&T can it depend on the availability of natural gas resources and attracting foreign investment to exploit it. We have to concentrate on building wealth in the first instance by establishing industries, using resources, to which we can provide high added value and these are clearly not in the assembly or cut and stitch industry.

We both have to take a lead from Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea and the other Asian Tigers, not necessarily to do what they have done, but to use our greatest resource, our people, to create brain intensive products, especially using the information technologies, to support both the foreign investment we will attract and products that are uniquely Irish or Trinidadian.

The world knows the Caribbean for its unique exports in music; reggae, calypso, zouk. Ireland, in utilising the new multi-media technologies can also make its art and culture into a major export industry. The world stood up and applauded its Riverdance. The recent triumphs of Robert Cooper of BBC in the Six Counties (£22 million of new production) point the way ahead.

We have to compete not on low prices but on differentiated products. Economics has no ideology in spite of the various experiments tried in the years gone by. However, today with the technology-driven movement away from the rewarding of labour to the glorification of capital, the social cost function that should govern the development of nations is sacrificed on the altar of liberalisation of global trade, WTO (World Trading Organisation) style.

The initial comments of the new Labour government in Britain, those of the French and German governments, give one hope that the European Community will be in the forefront of swinging the industrial pendulum back to centre, putting people before capital in the next millennium.

My two homes are indeed physically beautiful with the bounteous green of nature, but they suffer the same economic problems.
— Mary K King
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They are being charged for their alleged involvement in distributing a video-tape in which ETA, the militant Basque organisation, explains its peace proposals, entitled the ‘Democratic Alternative’.

The Spanish authorities have been quick to capitalise on public outcry at the death during July at the hands of ETA of Miguel Angel Blanco, a local politician in the Basque Country. They successfully pressurised the internet server IGC to remove the New York-based Euskal Herria Journal worldwide web site, which was gathering signatures to the petition against the show trial of the HB leaders.

The Spanish trade union, CCOO’s own form of blackmail backfired however when they demanded that the Argentinean association of mothers of the disappeared, Mothers of the May Square, withdraw their signature from the international petition.

This well-known association was born from the mothers of political, trade union and other activists who were abducted and presumably executed by the Argentinean military junta in the 1970s. The bodies of thousands of these victims have never been found.

The Mothers of the May Square declined the CCOO’s offer of closer solidarity links if they withdrew their name from the petition against the HB show trial, which is due to start on October 6 next. In a written statement sent to CCOO on July 24 Hebe de Bonafini, President of Mothers of the May Square, said that “we do not negotiate our links, we do not accept any mediocre impositions. Just the life of those who fight enlighten our path”. The statement was signed by Juana de Pargament, treasurer.

At the end of May 1996, Bonafini visited the Basque Country together with her colleague Marta Badillo to launch a book explaining their struggle and expressing solidarity with the Basque people suffering repression.

During their visit they met with the hunger strikers in the Cathedral of El Buen Pastor, who were fighting for the repatriation of the 500 Basque political prisoners in Spanish jails. They also joined a demonstration with the relatives organisation, Senideak which is made up of the families of Basque prisoners, deportees and refugees.

More than 20,000 supporters of Basque independence marched through the seaside city of San Sebastian on July 27, at the head of which was carried a massive Ikurrina, the red, green and white Basque flag. The marchers called for a political solution based on the independence of the Basque country.
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Jacques Gaucher who teaches at the primary school in St. Brieuc was reprimanded for teaching Breton history The inspector who investigated the complaint praised Jacques Gaucher work but he was told to teach only French history in future. The incident followed a complaint from one parent.

Celtic League General Secretary, Bernard Moffatt, called the attitude to National minorities living within their frontiers “medieval” and said that “the French government should be invited to join the rest of us living in the twentieth century and not the past”, he went to say French government xenophobia extended also to the national languages of groups like the Bretons,Corsicans and other minorities. It was agreed to support Jacques Gaucher who was one of a number of Breton delegates attending the meeting.

Later in the weekend the French again came in for criticism during the adoption of a resolution on the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages. As a resolution calling on the UK to honour past Labour Party commitments was adopted the General Secretary referred the conference to the pledge of Jacques Chirac to ratify the Charter made on a visit to Brittany last year.

He said: “The French are a curious people. They number tens of millions, yet are petrified of small minorities within their borders — their President by his actions has proved himself to be a liar”.

On the Saturday a resolution was proposed and adopted, calling for “urgent independent assessment” into contamination level from BNFL into the Irish sea. Delegates said Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man were fed up being exposed to risk from the British government. The Irish Sea was being used as an open sewer for discharge of radioactive waste from Sellafield.

The League’s secretary described the “so-called safety provisions” as a joke.

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The British and Spanish governments were accused of using Irish and Basque political prisoners as ‘bargaining tools in their disputes in the Six-County and the Basque Country’. Both governments were ignoring international standards on the detention of prisoners at a distance from their families, the conference heard. The League are to write all EU countries urging them to prevail on the London and Madrid government “to act with more political maturity on the issue”.

The AGM also condemned British plans to complete an order for Hawk warplanes which will be used to further Indonesian repression in East Timor. Representatives pledged all Celtic League branches to oppose the sale.

The meeting was told that the decision showed British Home Secretary Robin Cook’s recent commitment to respect and campaign for International Human Rights was a farce and the British were showing the same contempt as the Indonesians for the rights of native peoples. The League’s Welsh and Manx branches were urged to continue to publicise the use of the RAF base at Valley to train personnel for the murderous Indonesian regime. RAF Valley uses facilities in other parts of Wales, and Ronaldsway on the Isle of Man.
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In the mountain town of Vallegrande, Bolivia on July 4, Cuban archaeologists and Argentine forensic anthropologists finally unearthed the remains of Che Guevara and six of his guerrilla comrades secretly buried by a Bolivian junta sympathetic to US strategic and financial interests.

The Argentine-born revolutionary whose grandmother’s name was Lynch, had come to Bolivia in 1966 to commence what he hoped would be an international Latin American revolution against Yankee imperialism on the continent. After a sustained 11-month campaign against the Bolivian dictatorship, Guevara and six of his comrades were captured on October 8, 1967. Guevara was wounded in the engagement. The seven revolutionaries were held over night and executed on the orders of the Bolivian president and a Cuban-American agent in the pay of the CIA.

The Bolivian authorities deliberately disappeared the bodies of Guevara and his comrades to ensure that his grave would not become a shrine for oppressed people in the region and beyond.

Finally a retired Bolivian General broke his silence in 1995. Mario Verges Salinas claimed he had taken part in the secret burial in the early hours of October 11, 1967. This commenced a campaign by the Cuban Government and Che Guevara’s family to have his body located and exhumed.

The remains of Che Guevara were taken back to his adopted homeland of Cuba where they lay in state on July 13. His daughter, Aleida Guevara was present and spoke at the ceremony.
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