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
