Three hundred and twenty Personal Financial Advisers (PFAs) have been locked out since February 6 last when Irish Life proposed implementation of changes in our work practices without comment. When PFAs refused they were suspended without pay on the grounds of ‘serious misconduct’.

This has angered our members greatly as serious misconduct in the financial industry means fraud or embezzlement.

PFAs are very disappointed at their indoor colleagues, members of the same union, who continue to pass our pickets, despite a request for their support.

Another group who have let us down are the MSF sales managers, work colleagues whose jobs have been cut by 50% In fact sightings of these managers have been so rare over the last 16 weeks they must now qualify to go on the endangered species list!

What is very worrying about the dispute is the lack of any great media coverage. Recently over 500 MSF workers had a protest march to Dáil Éireann. They were ignored by the media. Who is pulling the strings?

Irish Life keep saying that the PFAs have turned down a £2 million compensation deal. The actual compensation offered by the Labour Relations Commission to the PFAs is £500,000. Originally Irish Life offered £200,000. Look at this against the bonus paid to four Irish Life executives recently: £1.2 million.

Despite being 16 weeks in the street our members were still strong and more united than ever. Existing on £55 per week dispute pay from our union we have so far been refused the dole even though we have been locked out.

The proposed changes to our work are so drastic that we will be facing a totally new job. If Irish Life dealt with us honestly and fairly they should have offered redundancies to those who will not be able to cope with the new job.

When this dispute is over Irish Life will get rid of these people at no cost. As one regional manager put it “when they go back to work we will sweat them out of the job.”

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What lasting job security can be expected from a company run by fat cats only interested in lining their own pockets?

Their attitude to staff is to lock them out till they starve.

The result of the recent binding arbitration from the Employer Labour Conference is very disappointing from the workers’ point of view. The only difference between this and a Labour Relations Officer’s document of two months ago is £1,000. Most workers have lost twice this amount during the last eight weeks in pay and commissions.

The most disappointing thing is that all the new work practices which were rejected by us are still there. Now we must work them because of the binding agreement.

The assurances given to us by ICTU now sound very hollow. Even their promise that we would be first to hear the result was untrue. RTÉ news announced the result two hours before we were officially informed.

Generally we feel betrayed and let down. What hope is there for industrial peace in Irish Life with 320 disappointed workers feeling they were conned going back to work?
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If this happens it will be the first time striking workers have been imprisoned in Occupied Ireland since 1944. That action led to a walkout from other companies in Belfast resulting in the release of the five men.

The dispute dates back to last October, when the 270 hourly-paid staff rejected a miserly pay offer and called in their union, the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU).

After a ballot of the plant workers, a series of half-day strikes, a work to rule and an overtime ban was decided on from April 10.

After their return to work, two of the fitters were asked to operate the machinery.

Realising the machinery had been operated by management during the dispute, the fitters refused to touch the machinery until a health and safety check had been carried out. They were sacked on the spot and this led to a mass walkout.

Following a threat of legal action the union (AEEU) backed down and claimed the ballot had been improperly called, a claim denied by the men.

Over 20 workers have since been sacked. Montupet’s managing director, Georges Senninger, has ruled out any hope of re-instatement.
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He promised to bring both the Garvaghy Residents and the Orange Order to a meeting, chaired by himself. “It is a positive development and a definite sign of progress,” said Hume.

However, on the following day, May 20, John Hume was somewhat perplexed. “I am confused,” said he to the fact that the Orange Fuhrer Robert Saulters would not meet with Breandan Mac Cionnaith because of his prison record.

A statement from the Grand Lodge of Ireland said “We wish to pursue the path of peace,” but refused point blank to meet any residents who had a record of militant nationalism, accusing the Provisionals of manipulating residents groups. As Republican Sinn Féin has consistently claimed, an accommodation with tyranny only entrenches that tyranny.
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Cloghoge residents wondered whether their bright new checkpoint (well equipped) would do them any harm. Dr Allen and Co spread the bad news but thanks to certain SDLP councillors at that time residents were encouraged to ignore the doctor’s warnings.

Now, three years later, that same community group have invited Dr Allen and Co back again to Cloghoge, but this time they weren’t curious about the possible effects of the Brits’ hi-tech surveillance gear, this time they were feeling them.

Actually the first campaign against this highly suspect equipment was born around the mid-eighties, after British troops seized masses of farmland, and occupied many hilltops around the South Armagh area in order to erect spy posts enabling them to survey the whole Armagh border area and well into the 26 Counties.

There are now 13 purpose-built Brit surveillance towers, two massive fortified permanent checkpoints, plus five joint British army/RUC barracks in the South Armagh area alone. All equipped with pulse-emitting equipment. The surveillance equipment is also carried, and used on remote roads and on helicopters.

Farmers soon noticed an increase in ill-health and a high rate of abortions among animals grazing beneath the spy posts. Unfortunately efforts to raise awareness of the threat were ignored by the then establishment and any real movement soon fizzled out.

Then in 1990 at the request of the people of Crossmaglen, who were gravely concerned, Dr Mary Allen formed the CARE group (Campaign Against Radiation Emissions).

The people of that small town could not help but notice the serious escalation of ill-health in the area. In an area of roughly 2,500 people there was a phenomenal and inexplicable rise in brain haemorrhages (approximately ten times the national average), leukaemia and brain tumours. There was a general pattern of ill-health, a fact later verified by the Six-County Southern Health Board. For example, depression, sleeplessness, chronic fatigue and headaches were becoming increasingly common.

Incidentally these same symptoms were and still are noticed by the protesting women at Greenham Common, to this day many experts claim that the women were being “zapped” by equipment of a similar nature to that being used in South Armagh.

The spy posts in South Armagh are fitted with hi-tech surveillance/communications equipment, composed of infra-red, microwave, radar, heat-seeking and oscillator equipment.

From what scientists have told the CARE group, it appears that some of the equipment delivers pulsed microwaves. There was and still is a problem in Crossmaglen dating back to the first installation of the British spy equipment there – sadly, although not surprisingly, other areas in South Armagh like Cloghoge and Forkhill are now having to sit up and confront this very real threat.

At the latest public meeting in Cloghoge, doctors and scientists (biophysicists and epidemiologists) supported and agreed with the local people’s analysis, and sympathised with their concerns regarding effects on health from the British army’s equipment.

A nursing sister who resides in the Cloghoge area told the gathering that official figures pointed to a 25% increase in breast cancers, a figure far exceeding the rate for the rest of the Six Counties.

Local people, including politicians across the board, reinforced this opinion, citing horrific examples of illness and death in their localities.

Dr Allen confirmed at the meeting that, indeed, Cloghoge was beginning to experience the side-effects from which Crossmaglen had already being suffering and called for public representatives on both sides of the Border to help establish a proper monitoring system of illness and deaths along the Armagh/Louth/Monaghan area.

Interestingly there was an angry exchange at this point between Dr Allen and SDLP Councillor John Fee (locally renowned anti-Republican and Brit apologist), who said that he would assist any campaign “if he thought there was a problem”. In his own words John Fee was “not convinced” prompting Dr Allen to reply “Will you be convinced when we have all been affected and the graveyards are bursting at the seams?”

Thankfully, in spite of the SDLP’s negligence, there was a wholehearted approval of the proposed motion. To their credit the people of South Armagh have largely sat up and acknowledged the threat that Brit-sponsored pollution poses to their well-being.

No doubt many are aware of the British state’s appalling record of protecting its own citizens and troops (Sellafield and Gulf War syndrome spring to mind). Perhaps they now realise that Irish people are an even lower priority and they can expect even less consideration.

The mobilisation of the people around this common issue is however something which the SDLP in the area are obviously uncomfortable with. It seems that a ground-level campaign, free from bureaucracy and prepared to challenge the establishment just isn’t their scene. Perhaps that is why throughout the years they have defended the spy posts.

One CARE activist expressed the SDLP’s cynical stance by asking “What’s in it for them?”
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As the speech was nearing its end, Mr Bruton decided to go global, and using a peculiar form of speech and wording that is becoming ever more common currency in Euro political circles, Bruton talked about “Ireland’s responsibilities to the wider world”. John Bruton later went on to say “If the United Nations had not been created in 1946 in San Francisco, we would have had to invent it today because we must have a means of making rules, which allow us to share the world together”.

Such laudable sentiments were later joined by a call for “Global rules against terrorism, terrorism which exploits the freedom of the media”. Was this about curtailing the freedom of the press? “Ireland strongly supports the United States efforts to create world rules to combat terrorism.” Again, analysis of this quotation could lead one to the conclusion that State-sponsored terrorism and overthrowing the Governments of the other countries not favourable to Washington’s interests is not really terrorism at all.

Finally, John Bruton, who was acting in his capacity as the then President of the European Union, asked Congress to work together with Europe to build a structure for peace in the world. The structure he talked about was polite parlance for a global army and possible global police force. Unusually, none of the extracts were mentioned in the Irish media at the time. A curious omission.

Without being too harsh to John Bruton, he is merely articulating the ideology practised daily by such modern day leaders as Mary Robinson, who frequently speaks on lofty topics such s the “Global Ethic” and “International Partnership”.

To the layman on the street, the phrases uttered by such people is forked tongue dialect for stripping civil liberties and reducing nations you live in to the status of a mini province lorded over by global banks and unelected bureaucrats.

PRE-1916

Ironically future generations of Irish school children will read in their history books that such an outrageous change was achieved without firing a single shot. All that was needed was money. The history teacher may also point out to them that the British managed to pull off the same stunt centuries earlier when they bought the country’s first fledgling parliament for a sack of gold. The entire Irish Parliament in 1800 committed parliamentary suicide and voted en masse to join the act of Union with England.

The origins of our present fast dissolving ‘sovereign State’ can be traced back to a secret organisation formed shortly after the end of the Second World War called the Trilateral Commission. The organisation was set up and funded by the same international bankers who financed all the warring sides in both World Wars, including the Communists and the Nazis.

The Trilateralists plan was simple: to unite the world’s most influential industrialists, oil cartels, bankers, media barons and politicians under one umbrella cabal and to use the mass concentration of power and wealth to carve the world into three administrative units.

The fruits of this ambitious scheme is the modern day European Union dominated from Brussels. North and South America which is dominated by Washington and the Far east which is dominated by Tokyo.

Brussels, Washington and Tokyo are in turn answerable to the Trilateral Commission. Presently the only fly in the ointment to the Trilateralist plans is the one billion strong Arab world who won’t play ball and isolationist China, a superpower in its own right. By accident, or perhaps by design their biggest stumbling block in the past in their quest for global power was the USSR, a superpower which conveniently collapsed in the mid 1980s.

IRISH MEMBERS

So now you know what Mary Robinson, John Bruton and others mean when they speak in woolly global terms. The sad aspect of these revelations is that thousands of people of influence in Ireland are aware of the controlled plan of power.

As a final footnote the Trilateral Commission has a long-range plan to “pacify” the Six Counties. After all, what secret all pervasive controlling organisation wants armed rebels spoiling their frontierless paradise?
— Tom Prenderville
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