If you’re marching in protest, at least direct your anger properly

ALTHOUGH it was billed as a protest against the rising cost of living, judging from the photographs of Saturday’s march in Dublin, every grievance under the sun was put on parade.

Handwritten placards demanding everything from ‘Scrap College Fees’ and ‘Price Controls Now’ to ‘Eat The Rich’ and ‘Stop governmentbacked profiteering of the people’, reflected a general mood of disaffection with the times in which we live, underscored by populist myths about how deep-seated problems can be solved at the stroke of a pen and how the Government is responsible for every malaise.

Organisers predicted that the turnout might match the mass protests against water charges in 2015, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets, so they may have been disappointed at the numbers snaking from the Garden of Remembrance, through O’Connell Street, and on to Leinster House.

Still, a few thousand protesters is a respectable show. The real question is why on earth did they take that route?

Surely, if the Cost-Of-Living Coalition are sincere about seeking change rather than simply winding up a mob for no reason other than to show they can, they would have marched on the Russian embassy rather than the Dáil, which is absolutely powerless to do anything about the surge in energy prices?

Granted, that would have taken the marchers into the unfamiliar territory of Rathgar. Instead of turning left at Nassau Street, they’d have headed up Grafton Street to St Stephen’s Green, then to Harcourt Street and onward to the embassy at Orwell Road.

It would have added an extra four or five kilometres to their journey, but that’s not much of an inconvenience for people who have nothing better to do on a Saturday afternoon than disrupt city traffic, or who are looking for an excuse to meet their mates in town.

Saturday’s protest route may be almost beyond parody, but rising energy prices are serious, a real source of worry for most households as winter draws in. Soaring energy costs also play a significant part in fuelling the cost-of-living crisis, said to be forcing more and more families to choose between eating and heating.

But the responsibility for that appalling Sophie’s Choice lies with Vladimir Putin, not with the Government. By cutting off the gas supply to Europe indefinitely, the Russian leader has left European countries struggling for supplies and dealing with record energy prices.

The crisis is being felt across the EU – from Paris, where the Eiffel Tower went dark last weekend as part of a plan to slash the city’s energy bill, to Prague, where office blocks have been relieved of half their light bulbs and old bulbs have been replaced with lowerenergy LED ones.

Like his nuclear threat, it’s another tactic in Putin’s repulsive strategy to weaken international support for Ukraine and strongarm the war-torn country into a truce on Moscow’s terms.

It stands to reason that Saturday’s march should have descended on Putin’s representatives in this country, to demand that he restores energy supplies, rather than indulging in the empty symbolism of a Dáil rally.

Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald and People Before Profit TDs Richard Boyd Barrett and Paul Murphy, as usual, outdid one another with their cynical cure – all promises and antiGovernment rhetoric. They know perfectly well that, when it comes to energy bills, we are at the mercy of events in Ukraine, not Government policy.

Mr Boyd Barrett vowed that protesters would be back on the streets in bigger numbers if the Government did not take action on energy prices and the housing crisis.

It’s easier to make pointless threats and prophecies standing at the gates of Leinster House than reverse the Left and Sinn Féin’s traditional indulgence of Russia by bringing a protest to that country’s front door.

In tomorrow’s Budget, the Government promises to ‘soften the blow’ of the soaring cost of living with measures to increase social welfare payments and assist with school books, childcare costs, university fees and transport.

ASYSTEM of energy credits like that introduced early this year is also thought likely, with a rumoured three extra credits at intervals over the winter.

Ideally, energy credits should be targeted at the more vulnerable in society rather than distributed to every household regardless of means, but the truth is that with household energy bills perhaps tripling in size, only the very prosperous will not feel the pinch. There will also be a ban on disconnecting electricity supplies to customers this winter.

Realistically, what else can the Government do? Curiously, Sinn Féin policy is calling for a cap on electricity bills, similar to UK prime minister Liz Truss’s freeze on energy bills at around £2,500 per household.

The problem with this initiative is that it rewards those who consume the most electricity, assures a healthy income stream for the profiteering energy companies, puts the taxpayer on the hook for a blank cheque, and does nothing to persuade people out of bad habits like keeping the lights on in every room or the central heating on full blast.

It sounds like a radical policy dreamt up by Donald Trump to favour the fat cats over the little people.

Surely Sinn Féin, of all parties, can do better than that.