Months of intense resistance by ordinary people in Greece appear to have resulted in a partial victory. The EU crisis summit conceded that bond holders be forced to shoulder 50% of their losses. This did not come easy, Greek workers have staged several general strikes and Athens has seen day after day of large scale rioting.

Only the traitorous intervention of the Stalinist Union to help the police prevented the 500,000 demonstrators taking Parliament on the 2nd day of the last General Strike.

The contrast with Ireland is clear. Here the union leadership called off token resistance in the first months of the crisis and workers passively marched, shrugged their shoulders and went home. As a result the ordinary Irish worker alone, the majority of ‘the 99%’, have shouldered all the costs. Bond holders will scontinue to have their failed gambles covered. Next

week alone another 700 million will be handed over to the Irish & global 1% to cover their losses in Anglo. This is our ‘thanks’ for being the poster boys for austerity across Europe.

It is true that the intention is still to impose further vicious rounds of austerity on workers in Greece. So this partial victory is only that but hopefully it will give heart to those who have fought and are continuing to fight to resist those intentions there as well as being a lesson on how resistance is fertile to those of us in Ireland.

The details of how the EU will finance the bailout are dodgy to say the least, running from a reliance on China to lend the needed funds to the construction of another round of mysterious ‘Special Purpose Investment Vehicles’ designed to turn the debts into attractive investments. Despite this the Stock Markets have still initially welcomed the new deal, presumably out of desperation and relief that the next stage of the crisis has been once more postponed.