Wait until the election ...that’s people power
AS THEY slow marched up O’Connell Street in the darkening gloom, the hardcore anti-water charge protesters repeated their defiant chant. ‘Enda in your ivory tower, this is what we call people power,’ they thundered. Two or three hundred voices raised in unison, echoing around by the Rotunda Hospital and up towards the North Circular Road and Mountjoy Jail, where their heroes, including the self-styled champion of Western liberties, Je Suis Derek Byrne, had just been incarcerated.
Earlier, the crowds of shoppers and workers had dispersed in all directions, ahead of the snail-paced march. From the point of view of the organisers, this had the unfortunate effect of ensuring that their spontaneous eruption of people power was greeted by streets that were almost ghostly in their emptiness.
Along the quays, busmen and gardaí doled out advice to commuters about the best way of avoiding the shenanigans – no interest in people power there, either.
In a sense, it is surprising that more people didn’t heed the proverbial injunction to stand up and be counted last Thursday, given the ability of social media to galvanise the troops at the drop of a hat.
The arrest of Paul Murphy TD and other activists for the Jobstown protests is still, after all, fresh in the collective memory. No rightminded citizen could argue that the actions of the gardaí in that instance were as heavy-handed as the casting of Tánaiste Joan Burton as a fragile lady OAP was overblown and melodramatic.
Anyone who saw the footage from Jobstown could see that while the Tánaiste looked rightly fed up being stuck in her car, she didn’t appear in the least bit frightened or intimidated by the uproar around her.
The 28- and 56-day sentences of Je Suis Derek and his buddies could be seen as more of the same – a symptom of a police state that had gone to war on the little people, while proving itself wholly impotent to bring the high rollers and the miscreants from the banking fraternity to book for their role in the financial catastrophe.
The ingredients were there for turning those who had defied a court order to stay away from water meter installers into folk heroes or martyrs, for glorifying their aggressive tactics and ugly posturing as a noble David versus Goliath battle.
But for all Murphy’s describing the sentences as a ‘shot in the arm’ for the campaign, Joe or Josephine Public didn’t take the bait.
For whatever reason –work or family commitments or a growing aversion for the seasoned antiwater activists – there was no mass
Tmobilisation. The charges of political policing fell on deaf ears because people realise that the campaigners were being punished for breaking the law, not for campaigning. HEY also realise that the charge is a nonsense because if the Government could pull strings in the courts, it would do so in order to deprive the anti-water charge protesters of the oxygen of publicity.
The public also knows that if the Government had its way, it would see a few bankers join Seán Quinn in the ’Joy, just so they could say: ‘I told you so.’ But as the saying goes, the wheels of justice grind slowly but exceedingly fine. We might have to wait for a very long time for satisfaction from the banking establishment.
People Power does not create a movement that alienates mainstream opinion by open displays of contempt for the democratic institutions of state and intimidation of ordinary workers. People power created the mass protest of early October when thousands upon thousands of people converged on the capital to shout their opposition to water charges.
There was a carnival atmosphere, the marchers were good humoured but it put the Government on the back foot.
The uncertainty about pricing, the bloated quango that is Irish Water, the bonuses paid to executives, the fears about privatisation, the PRSI numbers, the disastrous handling of the new charge were laid bare and Alan Kelly was forced back to the drawing board.
The memorable day was compared with the mass protests against the PAYE system in the 1980s which forced the Government to look at the unfair tax burden of the ordinary wage earner.
The uprising of the elderly against the withdrawal of their universal medical card is another instance where real people power, non-violent and non-threatening, won the day.
When people from all backgrounds and all walks of life come together in a spirit of optimism and peace, anything can be achieved. The water charges have not been scrapped – only made more palatable.
More than one million households, or close to 60% of eligible homes, have signed up to Irish Water, despite their huge reserva- tions. A significant proportion of the country is prepared to abide by the law rather than support a protest that is becoming more unruly by the day.
The next general election may present a chance to abandon the new charge and many people are prepared to wait and see.
They may vote for whatever party or politicians make that promise – and that will be the ultimate expression of people power.