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Title: Grassroots Gathering
Author: Andrew Flood
Date: March 26, 2005
Language: en
Topics: grassroots organizing, Ireland, gatherings
Source: Retrieved on 8th August 2021 from http://www.anarkismo.net/article/202

Andrew Flood

Grassroots Gathering

The Grassroots Gatherings are a regular series of gatherings of

libertarian activists that happen in the cities of Ireland. They have

spun off a number of libertarian campaigns and local groups.

The Grassroots Gatherings were set up in 2001 out of discussions between

activists involved in the environmental movement, Latin American

solidarity, anarchist politics and community development who shared a

commitment to non-hierarchical, bottom-up ways of organising. Gatherings

are spaces for discussion and building links: they are not dominated by

any political party, and the only decisions taken at Gatherings are

about where the next one will be.

There are usually 2 or 3 Gatherings every year, rotating between

different cities — Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Limerick and Galway have all

hosted one or more. Gatherings are organised by local activist groups

according to their own ideas, and have very different styles and shapes.

Sometimes they are as small as 50 people, sometimes as large as 250.

They are always free, and food, accommodation, childcare etc. when

provided are covered by donations.

The Gatherings have been a very creative space for activism. Out of them

have come the Grassroots Network Against War (GNAW), which organised

mass direct actions at Shannon, Dublin Grassroots Network (DGN), which

organised the Mayday 2004 protests for an alternative Europe, and a

whole host of other connections, projects and ideas. See Links page for

some more info on “spin offs”

A number of local Grassroots groups have come out of the Gatherings,

which take action locally around issues they decide to work on. At

present these include Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Galway. There is also a

national Grassroots mailing list for discussion and information. There

is no head office, no central decision-making and no membership fees:

Grassroots is what you make it, not what someone else does for you.

The Grassroots Principles

The call for the first Grassroots Gathering in 2001 set out a list of

principles which have become accepted as a basis for the Gatherings. The

basic points are these:

People should control their own lives and work together as equals, as

part of how we work as well as what we are working towards. Within the

network this means rejecting top-down and state-centred forms of

organisation (hierarchical, authoritarian, expert-based, Leninist etc.)

The network should be open, decentralised and really democratic.

We call for solutions that involve ordinary people controlling their

own lives and having the resources to do so:The abolition, not reform,

of global bodies like the World Bank and WTO, and a challenge to

underlying structures of power and inequalityThe control of the

workplace by those who work thereThe control of communities by people

who live there

We argue for a sustainable environmental, economic and social system,

agreed by the people of the planet.

We aim to work together in ways which are accessible to everyone,

particularly women and working-class people, rather than reproducing

feelings of disempowerment and alienation within our own network.