May Day 2013 in Belfast

One thing that struck me during and after this march yesterday was still how little the trade unionists or political activists had to say about what was going on in the streets around them. Indeed in having it at Writers Square and in collaboration with the City Council and losing out to a competition with the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival or even the dire Festival of Fools it had the effect of corralling what should be a class based counter culture working towards a Co-operative Commonwealth as envisioned by Larkin and Connolly into an adjunct of the cultural quarters model of gentrification and a speculative studentification which is supposed to bring about a 'creative city' built on the destruction of existing social and spatial relations. The closest I got to a conversation on any of these matters was when someone from the Sparts was decrying the Richard Boyd Barrett led campaign about the Baths in Dun Laoghaire while a comrade raised in North Belfast lamented the demolition of a Bathhouse there.