Friday, 9 November 2012

Community groups and campaigns connecting struggles

Common Threads: a Creative Summit on Debt Cancellation

F2 Centre, Fatima, Dublin 8

Saturday 1st December, 11am - 4.30pm

Community groups and campaigners across the country are desperately fighting against cutbacks and charges that are disproportionately impacting on the most vulnerable sectors of society.  But very often these struggles are isolated and even if one battle is won we are left with the knowledge that many other people are still losing out. What is needed is a thread connecting these shared struggles, a way of placing them in a broader context that allows everyone to win together. That thread is debt – the repayment of illegitimate debt is largely responsible for austerity, and suspension of unjust debt repayments would allow all our communities and campaigns to share in a common victory.

So we are inviting you to Common Threads: A Creative Summit on Debt Cancellation, to be held in the F2 Centre, Fatima, Dublin 8, on Saturday 1st December, from 11am to 4.30pm. The timing is significant – the budget to be announced the following week will feature yet more cuts and charges impacting on the most vulnerable sections of our society. We envisage a day that facilitates both learning and the building of relationships, and which will feature:

• An opportunity for participants to relate their experiences of austerity and resistance.

• Provision of accessible, jargon-free information on the Irish debt crisis, including how it arose and its current scale; there will be a particular emphasis on how suspension of the Anglo ‘promissory note’ payments would free up enormous resources that could be used to defend and regenerate communities, combat deprivation and poverty, and generate employment.

• An overview of what people are doing elsewhere in Europe and the world to fight against unjust debt repayments and what lessons we can learn and apply from them.

• Speaker: Nick Dearden, Director, Jubilee Debt Campaign UK.

Creative workshopping on what innovative, effective models of resistance we can adopt to advance our struggle against unjust debt, including how to better use the mainstream and new media,  how to be a community educator on debt issues, and how to make use of visual and other artistic tools to get our message across.

• Music, magic, theatre and all-round inspiration.


Who is this event for?
• Community groups

• Campaigners against cuts, charges and debt

• Local and global NGOs

• People active in the arts who want to apply their skills to the struggle for social justice.

A full programme and supporting documentation will be circulated shortly.  In the meantime, if you would like to attend this event, please email info@notourdebt.ie

We look forward to seeing you on the 1st of December.

Who are we?

We, Debt Justice Action, are a broad coalition of non-party political organizations and individuals campaigning for debt justice, both in Ireland and in the Global South. We seek to build alliances with networks and organizations in Ireland, Europe and the Global South on the issue of debt justice, and act in solidarity with peoples worldwide affected by the imposition and payment of illegitimate debts. Since 2011 we have run a campaign called 'Anglo: Not Our Debt', which calls upon the government to refuse to pay the debts of Anglo Irish Bank (now the IBRC) on the grounds that the debts of these now state-owned institutions are not the responsibility of people in Ireland, and that the payment of this illegitimate debt has had and will continue to have devastating consequences for Irish society. 

Our website is here:  www.notourdebt.ie