End The Dictatorship of Fear! Support the Greek People on Bloomsday

Press Release from #greecesolidarityirl

“God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together we might do some­thing for the island. Hel­len­ise it”

This Sat­urday, Blooms­day, we will take to the streets of Dub­lin to show solid­ar­ity with the Greek people in their brave struggle against the destruc­tion of their soci­ety by the Troika.

Our demon­stra­tion will take place on the eve of elec­tions in which the Greek people can break the cir­cuit of fear imposed on the peoples of Europe. This fear is imposed by polit­ical and eco­nomic elites whose intent is to do away with demo­cracy altogether.

Without Greece, Blooms­day would have been simply unthink­able. James Joyce was deeply influ­enced by Greece –its philo­sophy, its lit­er­at­ure, its lan­guage, its mythology.

Ulysses, the book cel­eb­rated by Blooms­day, ‘the rev­el­a­tion of all life in a single day’, as one writer put it, is based on Homer’s Odys­sey. Joyce wanted the cover of Ulysses to show the col­ours of the Greek flag. Joyce would have been hor­ri­fied at the destruc­tion vis­ited on present day Greek society.

If Leo­pold Bloom, Joyce’s mod­ern Odys­seus, were wan­der­ing the streets of Dub­lin this Sat­urday, he would make his way to the Spire.

Bloom, the cent­ral fig­ure of Ulysses, is an inter­na­tion­al­ist. He longs for uni­ver­sal­ity and demo­cratic equal­ity: the very things that the regimes imposed by the Troika place under attack.

In the European Com­mis­sion, the European Cent­ral Bank and the Inter­na­tional Mon­et­ary Fund, Leo­pold Bloom would have seen his vis­ions of ‘man­u­fac­tured mon­sters for mutual murder’ made reality.

Uni­ver­sal­ity and demo­cratic equal­ity: the Greek people can stand up for these val­ues with their vote on Sunday.

On Blooms­day, that is what we will be stand­ing up for too. We will not stand by and allow dreams of a demo­cratic Europe to be des­troyed by fear, or, as Leo­pold Bloom put it, by the ‘hideous hobgob­lins pro­duced by a horde of cap­it­al­istic lusts’.

The Spire, O’Connell Street, 1pm.

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