May General Meeting: Wednesday May 20 at 6:30 pm. 

Full details to follow shortly.
 
Second Annual Summer Forum: Saturday June 13.
 
The invited speakers for the Summer Forum are Enno Schmidt and Che Wagner, from the Swiss Basic Income campaign (grundeinkommen.ch). The group conducted a successful campaign to hold a national referendum on the introduction of a Basic Income in Switzerland, due to take place in 2016, by collecting over 120,000 signatures. 

You can find one of the many interviews with Enno available online at http://preview.tinyurl.com/meyct3t, together with an interesting video on BI done by the US public broadcasting network PBS.  

The next General Meeting of Basic Income Ireland will be on Tuesday, April 29 at 5:30 pm in DIT Aungier Street, room 3-077. Please note the earlier-than-usual starting time.
 
If you would like to participate by skype (audio only), please contact John Baker at john.baker@ucd.ie by Sunday April 26th, to arrange this.

The meeting will have two parts.
 
Part 1. Discussion of some issues of political strategy, based on a recent paper by a leading writer on basic income, Jurgen De Wispelaere, “The Struggle for Strategy: On the Politics of the Basic Income Proposal” (forthcoming in the journal Politics).
 
In this article, De Wispeleare considers two problems that affect the coalition-building efforts of BI advocates. “The problem of cheap political support” is that the support for BI from some political parties and other organizations may be of little cost to them but of little value to us, or even counter-productive. Should we be more cautious about such support?  “The problem of persistent political division” is that superficial agreement amongst committed BI advocates may mask persistent disagreement on what model of BI to adopt. Should we be take a clearer stance on these disagreements?
 
John Baker will introduce the discussion with a brief summary of the paper's argument. A copy of the full paper is available at http://preview.tinyurl.com/of5bjpb. You might also like to look at the video mentioned below, which contrasts the approaches taken in the US by liberal and conservative proponents of basic income.
 
Part 2. Review of recent and up-coming actions and events; update and discussion of the Annual Summer Forum in June; update and discussion on future strategy.