This is the second of three talks I delivered at the Prague S26 counter summit.
When I left school in Ireland the first job I applied for was in McDonalds. They didn’t advertise jobs, there was no need but instead whenever they needed people they mailed out to a list of those who had called into the joint in the last couple of weeks. They interviewed about 60 people for four or five jobs. I didn’t get one! On Friday as I got the bus to the airport in Dublin I noticed a bus shelter where McDonalds were advertising for workers and boasting they were paying over the minimum wage. Like all low paid service sector employments they now have massive problems finding enough people to work for them.
In the late summer of 1996 I was one of the two Irish delegates to the 3,000 strong international meeting held in the rebel areas of Chiapas Mexico. The experience of getting to the meeting through miles of jungle and military checkpoints was an experience in itself but the meetings themselves were an extraordinary thing to find oneself at. For me it was a transformative experience both personally and politically, one of those points at which ‘two roads diverge in a wood’.