It is not especially surprising that there was a large protest in Dublin City Centre at the weekend. It is, in fact, vastly more surprising that there have been so few protests like it.
When you stop staring at the tree, stand back to take a look at the woods, what you see in Ireland is not pretty. A huge segment of the population have had their livelihoods forcibly imperilled by the Government. There are businesses that will never open again, jobs that will never be regained, mortgages that will, eventually, fall into default. A generation of children have had their education interrupted and undermined. Old people have died alone, been buried alone, and denied a last hug from a family member. Weddings and baptisms and births have gone uncelebrated, with loved ones missing.
And what, precisely, have we gained? Thousands have died anyway, and there is no definitive end in sight.
It is easy, and tempting, to simply dismiss this as the collateral damage resulting from a once in a century national response to a global pandemic. But that ignores much. It ignores, for example, the fact that Ireland’s lockdown has been uniquely harsh, uniquely long, and almost uniquely ineffective:
https://twitter.com/Ben_Scallan/status/1364873772617064450
Ireland, according to Reuters, has lost 163 business days to the lockdown. Estonia, our EU friend and partner, has lost only 45 days. And what did our 118 extra days shuttered buy us in Ireland? Well, Estonia has had 584 coronavirus deaths out of a population of 1.53 million. Ireland has had 4,300 deaths, out of a population of 4.9 million. Per head of population, Estonia has somehow managed to have half of our number of deaths, and less than a third of our time in Lockdown.
To be sure, Estonia has mandatory masks, and social distancing. But their country’s businesses are open, and their borders are open, and their schools are open.
Ireland is not, despite what our media and politicians might try to tell you, some unusually unlucky or blighted place. We’re not a special case, compared to other countries. The fact that we, and we alone, are facing such a cost on foot of the pandemic cannot be blamed on other EU countries this time, like it was in 2008 after the recession. We aren’t carrying German Banking Debt this time, or being done over by the Troika. Our uniquely bad response is our national responsibility, and ours alone.
So, it’s not surprising, then, that a few thousand people took to the streets of Dublin this weekend. It is not surprising either that they are angry. It is not surprising that they were made angrier when the Gardai tried to cordon off the area in which they had intended to protest. It is not surprising that there were scuffles. It is not surprising, or shocking, that amongst their number were some lunatics looking for trouble.
The only thing that is remotely surprising is that the protest – while big – was so isolated, and so small.
This weekend, nearly a full year after the pandemic began, a nursing home in Cork reported 25 fatalities of people in their care from the virus. This is, just to remind you, almost exactly a year to the day since we first locked down to flatten the curve and protect the vulnerable. How’s that going?
The media, this weekend, has been uniform in their view of Saturday’s protest: A disgraceful event, organised and attended by fascist far-right agitators, completely contrary to the national interest.
And that’s not really surprising. No journalist, after all, has lost a job because of the pandemic. Journalism, these days, is mainly a steppingstone on your career anyway, before you take a job with a state agency, or a state funded NGO. Not many journalists own pubs, or hair salons. Few of them have lost jobs pulling pints in a bar. At most, they’ve lost out on their planned holiday this summer, and, well, isn’t that a good excuse to put a few bob aside for a deposit.
Journalism and politics, largely, exist in an entirely different world to the people protesting this weekend. It is a polite world, theirs. Everyone in it is naturally erudite and knows the rules of the game – the correct way to express dissent, the right words to use.
If you want a successful career in the Irish establishment, it pays to put on the Green Jersey, wear it under your day clothes, and be prepared to strip down to it whenever duty calls. Few outspoken critics of lockdown can ever expect to be appointed to a state board, for example. None of them will ever get nominations to contest Cork South West for Fine Gael. Outspoken barristers, like Una McGurk, for example, will never be appointed Judges. Doctors who say the wrong things will find that they are no longer working for the HSE. Dissent isn’t officially punished, but everyone in this country knows our real national motto: Keep your head down, say nothing, don’t draw attention to yourself.
Indeed, it’s notable, in its own way, that this weekend’s protest was organised by people on the political and social fringes of Irish society. The only people in Ireland who feel safe protesting lockdown, not surprisingly, are people with nothing to lose. If you’re a sensible, professional, “decent” person, you can’t risk being seen at these things, lest someone tell your employer, or the wrong state agency.
If you want to get ahead in professional, establishment, Ireland, after all, you stick to the script: This is in the national interest, protests are irresponsible, we’re all in this together.
But it’s all bullshit. It was bullshit a decade ago, when the same yarns were spun about the essential nature of austerity and cutbacks, and it’s bullshit now, when it’s about our historic national failure during this pandemic. And what’s more: Many of us know that it’s bullshit, but are slightly too afraid to say so. Nobody sane can look at the graph above, compare Ireland to Germany, or Estonia, or Bulgaria, and say “well, that’s just our bad luck”.
It’s not bad luck. It’s bad policy.
But the correct thing for someone like me to do, to maintain my allegedly “respectable right” image, would be to condemn the weekend’s scenes, and say that they were “totally unacceptable” and “very disturbing”. That’s what’s expected of you, if you want to be taken seriously in Ireland by the chattering class.
And look: If you fire a firework at a Garda, you should go to jail, and you should expect to go to jail. There’s no foul there.
But aside from that, the only question we should be asking about the protests, and the anger, and the outpouring of rage we saw this weekend in Dublin is this:
Why aren’t there more? What will it take, for people, finally, to say “enough”?
Thousands of people turned out to protest peacefully this weekend. They’re being uniformly condemned because of the actions of a small few. Instead, they should be applauded.