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A DCU LECTURER from St Patrick’s Campus in Drumcondra brought her students to the local Tesco today so that workers could inform them about the nature of the strike action.
This comes as the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) reaffirmed its support for the industrial action after workers at Tesco Drumcondra stated that local students had been crossing the picket line and entering the store.
Susan Pike, lecturer of Geography Education at DCU’s St Pat’s Campus, took her class down to Tesco earlier this morning so that they could speak to the workers involved in the picket.
“We’re always getting the students to try to think big, to think critically about issues,” she said.
So why not come over here where a local issue is meeting a global issue.
Pike said that an email had been sent to staff of the college advising them to encourage students to support the strike, after the issue was raised by Tesco workers of students passing the picket line.
“They might have their own opinions about it but one of the things is to question the power of big companies like Tesco and the impact that can have on people who are out on strike,” she said.
I didn’t tell them what to think before we came down here as that wouldn’t involve them think critically.
She also defended students who did pass the picket, saying that Tesco was the only supermarket in the local vicinity and that students may not have the time to shop elsewhere.
“The trouble is for the over 3,000 students in Pat’s is that there is no other supermarket in the vicinity,” she said.
So students have been passing but some of them have no choice.
Calls for support
Tesco Drumcondra worker Jackie Kearns told TheJournal.ie that students from St Pat’s campus had regularly passed the picket since action began at the store last Friday.
“A lot of these students will be teachers in the years to come and they’d like our support,” she said.
It’s the principle here… you just don’t pass the picket.
Labour senator Aodhán Ó Ríordáin was also present outside Tesco today, expressing his support for the industrial action.
“Any of us at any stage of our lives could be in a strike and it’s important to have a level of solidarity with those in the dispute,” he said.
Ó Ríordáin said that the Labour Party supported the strike action and he called on students and the local community to stand behind the workers.
The USI also expressed its solidarity with the Tesco workers.
USI president Annie Hoey told TheJournal.ie that the union was encouraging all students to boycott Tesco for the duration of the industrial action.
“We fully support the strike action,” said Hoey.
“DCU Students’ Union (of which St Pat’s are members) were out on the picket line with the Tesco workers this afternoon,” she said.
We have called on all of our members not to cross the picket line.
In response to reports that students had been crossing the picket, Hoey said that the USI had been sending information about the action out on social media and through the various Students’ Unions across the country.
“They have the full support of the USI,” she said.
Industrial action is currently ongoing in 16 Tesco stores across the county, in a dispute over the proposed changes to contracts of long-term Tesco workers.
About 250 workers in total – who have been working for the company since before 1996 – will be affected by these changes.
A further 10 stores were balloted to join the action last night, with four voting in favour of striking and six voting against. This means that 20 stores will be striking by next Monday.
All stores have remained open despite the industrial action. Tesco claimed yesterday that 45,000 people shopped in stores picketed by strikers over the weekend.
Tesco has repeatedly labelled the work stoppage unjustified and irresponsible, calling on the Mandate trade union to accept Labour Court recommendations on the proposed contract changes.
Mandate, for its part, has criticised Tesco for not properly engaging with the union, claiming that the contact changes will negatively impact workers’ pay and conditions. Tesco has disputed this.
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I am impressed, the journal did not turn it into a climate world is boiling.
@: climate change makes the work of arsonists easier. In Greece’s case, the boundaries of forest areas are marked but aren’t set law, so there’s an inventive to burn dowm and redraw forest boundaries by those that want to build houses, hotels and tourist resorts. About half of fires in Europe have a known cause, and of these just over half are arson.
@David Jordan: why are you trying to link climate change to arsonists?
@Shane Doyle: I think you’ll find the OP brought climate change into the discussion.
@Diarmuid Hunt: op says afp enough said..love their articles describing children killed in Palestine as 15 year old militants.
@David Jordan: next you will be telling me the Nazis had gas chambers. Your very easily led in fairness or your paid. One or the other.
In 2009, the public discovered emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit exposing how scientists who have been enormously influential in promoting the concept of man-made climate change actually attempted to cook the books to obtain results that served their narrative that the planet was heating at a dangerous trend due to higher levels of carbon dioxide. One of these scientists included Dr. James Hansen, a former NASA climatologist who is known by some as the “father” or “grandfather” of the climate change myth, as it was his “Model Zero” that first introduced the concept of global warming.
Hansen, Philip Jones, Michael Mann, et al. were all involved in trying “to lower past temperatures and to ‘adjust’ recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming,” according to the leaked emails. The emails also revealed how this cabal of scientists would discuss various ways to stonewall the public from seeing the “background data on which their findings and temperature records were based,” even going as far as deleting significant amounts of data. They would engage in efforts to smear “any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work.”
@: You’re / your. Anyone paying you needs a refund.
@Ken O’Neill: Even ExxonMobil scientists accurately predicted global warming back in 1977. Exxon’s scientists ran about a dozen sophisticated computer models nearly 50 years ago, and given the models are now nearly half a century old, it’s possible to see if their projections came true.
Exxon’s research correctly forecasted the globe would warm by around 0.2°C every decade.
Supran, G., Rahmstorf, S. and Oreskes, N., 2023. Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections. Science, 379(6628), p.eabk0063. https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abk0063
Human caused Climate Change is not nonsense, it’s one of the most scientifically validated and important challenges we face. The first predictions of global warming were published in newspapers over 100 years ago, the science is not new, look at the evidence:
This graph shows the rapid rise in Temperature and CO2 for the last 2,000 years (0 – 2000 AD) perfectly overlap, showing that the CO2 we add to the atmosphere is driving global warming:
https://imgur.com/gallery/5ioVzFY
But instead of warning people, ExxonMobil buried the evidence and instead paid conservative think tanks to lobby against the science of human caused climate change.
For example, 40% of the total funds of The Heartland Institute, an American conservative and libertarian think tank that rejects of both the scientific consensus on climate change and the negative health impacts of smoking, came from from ExxonMobil between 1998 and 2007 e.g., ExxonMobil donated $119,000 in 2005 to Heartland, its biggest gift since 1998.
(The Heartland Institute was founded in 1984 and it worked with closely with the tobacco company Philip Morris throughout the 1990s in an attempt to discredit the health risks of second-hand smoke. Some of the same lobbyists that worked to defend tobacco company profits also lobbied against climate change related science)
See: Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science
Contrary to ExxonMobil’s sponsored disinformation there is an overwhelming 99% consensus that humans are responsible for global warming. It’s something we are responsible for and something we need to remedy.
Lynas, M., Houlton, B.Z. and Perry, S., 2021. Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters, 16(11), p.114005.
@Ken O’Neill: “Dr. James Hansen, a former NASA climatologist who is known by some as the “father” or “grandfather” of the climate change myth, as it was his “Model Zero” that first introduced the concept of global warming.”
No. The term Climate was first coined in 1975 by Columbia University geochemist Wallace Broecker. We see here, two papers dating from 1977, that used the term climate change:
Baes, C.F., Goeller, H.E., Olson, J.S. and Rotty, R.M., 1977. Carbon Dioxide and Climate: The Uncontrolled Experiment: Possibly severe consequences of growing CO2 release from fossil fuels require a much better understanding of the carbon cycle, climate change, and the resulting impacts on the atmosphere. American Scientist, 65(3), pp.310-320.
Schneider, S.H., 1977. Climate change and the world predicament: A case study for interdisciplinary research. Climatic Change, 1(1), pp.21-43.
Also, Eunice Newton Foote first demonstrated in 1856 that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it traps the Sun’s heat via en experiment with tube filled with CO2.
“An atmosphere of that gas would give to our Earth a high temperature,” wrote Eunice Foote in her paper titled Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays.
And one of the first warnings that burning fossil fuels would cause global warming was published in Popular Mechanics in 1912:
“The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the Earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.”
So we understood that CO2 warms the planet over 100 years ago, and scientists made predictions that burning fossil fuels and adding more CO2 to the atmosphere would warm the planet, decades before warming was noticed. This successful prediction, proves the theory that humans are causing global warming, is true.
@John Jon: john, will you ever pick a side, no wonder everyone takes the p I s s out of you.
@David Jordan: that was way too long to read tbh. But the narrative is shot in the arse when you look at all the companies involved. All the companies involved on the green and fossil side are shareholder controlled by blackrock , vanguard and state street. All the craziness in the world is being pushed by these lunatics and their investors. The climate communism, the woke rubbish etc… The public are not stupid. Nothing in the world has the right to take peoples freedom or force behavior. Its wrong and totalitarian. I will not comply and neither will most people.
@Shane Doyle: In utter desperation I assume?
@David Jordan: Long story short – Arson is not Global Boiling.
@Ken O’Neill:
.
The Climategate scandal was given new life in 2011, with the release of new emails. The new round of leaked emails at the time provided more teeth to the revelations of 2009. Here are a couple of egregious emails from Jones found, via Forbes:“I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process,” writes Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a newly released email.“Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden,” Jones writes in another newly released email.
To all those Journal contributors relentlessly attacking those of us who highlighted the fact that these fires were in all probability started maliciously and not the result of “Global Warming” I want to say Thank You.
Thank You for offering us such a humble and contrite public apology.
For future reference:
Don’t believe everything the MSM tell you.
Use your CRITICAL FACULTIES and investigate properly before speaking.
Once again Thank You.
(Can’t be easy admitting you were duped so easily)
@Tommy Haze: David Jordan will be along with a 10 meter comment on how wrong you are.
@Eric Gaffney:
Haha!
Actually, I like Mr Jordan, he’s civilised and polite, not easily ruffled, reminds of those French civil servants who upon receipt of a towering stack of foldered paperwork, smile and rub their hands with glee.
@Tommy Haze: sorry to rain on your parade but only a minority of these fires were started maliciously. If you had bothered reading the article, you would have noticed this section: ‘Fire department spokesman Yiannis Artopios said 140 people had been arrested on suspicion of arson, most of it accidental. Most cases were related to welding and agricultural work that ignored high-risk weather warnings.’
Critical faculties… hahahahaha!. Very good.
@Tommy Haze: I like the comparison.
@ForrestG45:
.
Prove it or stfu.
Last week’s cOnSpiRaCy ThEoRy is this week’s news.
Again.
@Alan B: Not helping but not a deciding factor either. It should have been reported on. It was known weeks ago that arson will involved.
@Alan B: Those who mocked people for pointing that out on previous wildfire articles didn’t know that, clearly. The usual “come off facebook and youtube, climate denying tin foil hat wearing blah blah blah” crowd.
By everyone do you mean them too?
@Alan B: how dare you use plain logic in the journal comments! They won’t like that around here
Well thanks for finally reporting on this.
The big problem across Europe is forest management and leaving land in overgrown states
@john mac: (plus global warming, and lack of rain).
@john mac: Ahh that comment reminded me of the brilliant mind who suggested that the problem was that the forest floor should have been raked… Ahh pure gold…
It stands to reason that if you have an itinerant population lighting fires for cooking/heating water etc, out in the open then a fire can start extremely easily. This would explain the high migrant death count .
Arsonists should always get charged for attempted murder with long mandatory jail time…
I love increasing my carbon footprint every year :)
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