When people are told they don’t have to pay their way, why are we so shocked by the Tallaght chaos?
DISGUSTED, yes. Ashamed, absolutely. Angered, for sure. But nobody has any reason to be surprised by the scenes in Tallaght over the weekend, when supermarkets were first looted and then destroyed with a JCB, their safes dragged out and battered open and their stock stolen, when cars were burned out, and emergency responders attacked. Those scenes, so at odds with the wider international response to a shared crisis, were an entirely predictable consequence of a culture of entitlement and impunity that has flourished in this country in recent years.
Fuelled and cynically manipulated by supposedly left-wing politicians – who have long since jettisoned the inconvenient left-wing principle of labour as essential to human dignity – that sense of sacrosanct victimhood and righteous prerogative was fully to the fore in Friday’s events. Aided and abetted by a criminal justice system that wrings its hands over the rights of criminals while rarely pausing to consider the welfare of their victims, the mobs who wreaked mayhem on their own community were facilitated by the perfect storm: not a meteorological one where strong winds met snowfall, but a far more dangerous confluence of PC posturing and judicial vacillation. And the mess it has left behind will take far longer to clear than a few feet of slush.
When a group of thugs from the same area surrounded the then tánaiste Joan Burton’s car, a few years ago, in protest at being asked to pay for an essential public service, they were staunchly defended by political opportunists insisting this was a function of anger, marginalisation and economic hardship. The water protests, we were assured, weren’t just about water, but about frustration over years of political neglect and inequality. It will be fascinating to see just how those same shameless opportunists justify the destruction of a discount retailer, one that brought well-paid jobs and affordable, good-quality fare to a hard-pressed community, by blaming it on the Government and the tax-paying, law-abiding citizens who pay for everything.
John Connors, the Traveller activist, was first out of the traps on Friday night when he defended the looters, saying he wouldn’t be calling the gardaí ‘if I see any young ones or young fellas robbing a few loafs (sic) of bread from a big corporation. These c***s are robbing all of us every day.’ Except, to judge by the footage, it wasn’t loaves of bread to fill their empty bellies that the looters had in their sights. Video footage shows well-dressed folk in snug ski-gear making off with slabs of beer and boxes of Haribo jellies – hardly the stuff of a John Steinbeck novella. Connors deleted his tweet when he began feeling the unfamiliar chill of Twitter’s wrath (being far more accustomed to the unconditional approval of social media virtue-signallers) and is now threatening to sue some of his critics for defamation. But he’ll be lucky if Lidl, the first supermarket in Ireland to sign up to the Living Wage Campaign, isn’t the party calling in the libel lawyers over those remarks.
Of course there are others who regularly articulate such failsafe crowd-pleasers and they normally go down a treat. No so-called ‘left-wing’ politician or activist has suffered, over the past decade, from parroting the same certainties to their receptive constituencies and their wider audience of guilt-ridden middle-class media lefties.
Inadequate
This new dispensation, wrought by those political ideologies that once advocated the dignity of labour, proclaims as a first principle that working for a living is strictly optional. If you do not feel like taking a low-paid job, as a means of getting out of long-term unemployment and a lifestyle of dependency, then you don’t have to, and any suggestion to the contrary is the work of fascist bigots. Instead, the drones who actually get up in the morning, that much-scorned cohort, will keep you in the style to which you have become accustomed, even as the country approaches full employment and there’s enough work for everyone.
Secondly, not having a job, not working for a living, not sending your children to school and securing them a decent education are no barriers to the trappings and privileges of a conscientious working life. The dole will fund your iPads and smartphones, your 4G television, your car, your leisure and your annual foreign holidays, or there will be hell to pay. Because, thirdly, if it does not, and you must dabble in welfare fraud, insurance scams or casual theft to afford a second spell in Gran Canaria this year, you must remember you are a victim of inadequate government supports and not, perish the thought, a criminal. Politicians will trip each other up in the Dáil in their haste to denounce measures such as Leo Varadkar’s ‘Dole cheats cheat us all’ campaign, which might impede your right to take what you want, whenever you feel like it. If store owners are stupid enough to leave their premises unprotected, in the midst of a national crisis and while the emergency services are thwarted by heavy snow, that is their problem. And how dare Joan Burton suggest expensive smartphones, on which to film yourself protesting against water charges and looting shops, are not a basic human right?
Helpfully bolstering all of these precepts is a general judicial leniency towards repeat offenders, violent criminality and cynical career burglars. If you know, with near certainty, that you will be looking at a suspended sentence for your 103rd offence committed on bail, you’d be stupid to change your ways. If you know that your mean-spirited, cowardly or sneakily predatory crime will be finessed into a ‘cry for help’ by a clever lawyer – funded by the poor tax-paying idiots, naturally, through your 103rd bout of free legal aid – you’d be mad not to go for it. Damascene conversions are mythological prospects peddled to sympathetic judges and juries, and have no real place in the business models of career criminals. Experience shows us people will not change their behaviour until they have reason to fear the consequences. For years, for example, workplace harassment, pay discrimination and casual sexism were scarcely viewed as transgressions at all, but suddenly, since Weinstein, men who’d been flaunting such behaviour for years are now quaking in fear. Not because they’re newly ‘woke’ to women’s rights, not because they’ve realised the error of their ways, but because they’re terrified for their careers if they’re outed now.
If they had no reason to be afraid, though, they’d never change, and so it is with repeat offenders, welfare fraudsters and opportunistic crooks too. Emboldened by political cynicism, cowardice and pandering, and facilitated by inconsistent and lenient sentencing, a substantial community of people in our midst want everything for nothing, have been assured they’re entitled to it, and will seize their perceived due with complete impunity.
So while most decent folk will have been disgusted by those scenes of looting, vandalism and mindless thuggery, none of us has any real business being surprised.