The French farmers’ protests have loomed wide in public imagination and conversation in recent weeks, perhaps because of the vivid imagery of farmers spraying manure on government buildings. While profiling a French protest group recently, one of its organisers claimed, “We are pursued almost like domestic terrorists.”
However the French feel about their states’ response to their own protests, it pales in comparison to the reaction of the Irish Government to the much milder disruption of last month.
Macron never considered deploying the army to deal with protesters, he never refused to negotiate with organisers outside of preordained “representative” groups, or complained to media regulators over journalists’ coverage of events.
As a group, Breaking Point does not take collective positions, something reflected in the wide array of speakers from opposing ideologies that we have hosted. Of course, as individuals we all have our own opinions. In fact, there was much disagreement over the protests themselves. Despite this, we formed Breaking Point to help cultivate a healthier civic life in Ireland, and we chose to organise an event to platform protesters specifically because we felt the reaction to the recent protests demonstrated key weaknesses in Irish civic institutions.
As pointed out by Sinead O’Sullivan earlier this month, the right to peacefully assemble is protected in European law, as is the right to non-violent civil disobedience. While the state does have a right to restrict protests, this is only allowed under strict conditions. The blanket response by the state to all the various protests demonstrated a weakness in Irish civic life that is almost unparalleled among all comparable European countries. It reflected a broader institutional instinct to manage and contain discourse and dissent rather than confront it openly, and we believe this is holding Ireland back from meaningful progress.
In my 8 years of organising events on various topics, including events with much larger capacities and with arguably more “controversial” speakers, the reaction to our event on the fuel protests was completely unprecedented. Hotel staff were contacted and threatened with protests for the crime of hosting a discussion, column inches accused speakers with a litany of ad hominem attacks, and there were various attempts to disrupt our website.
I suspect this is because there were many, of various political stripes, both in our political establishment and on the left, who perceive a threat from the urban and rural disaffected finding a common ground and language. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Varadkar’s recent comments on rural Ireland was a haphazard attempt at driving a wedge between these two demographics.
The problem is that even if our media, government, and radical pressure groups seek to silence dissent and drive a wedge between Citywest and Whitegate, it does not change the underlying reality: they are fundamentally protesting the same issue. The Irish people are taxed at immoral levels under legacy Green Party policies—policies that were decisively rejected at the last election. These measures are deliberately designed to make life on our island more expensive, yet in return, Irish people receive comparatively little in the way of public services for such a high tax burden.
As pointed out by Laszlo Molnarfi, the complaints of communities protesting against the imposition of IPAS centres were not rooted in racial hatred, but the lack of public services in those very communities. Similarly, fuel protesters’ grievance is not abstract or ideological, but rooted in a lived reality, the state continues to demand more while delivering less.
Those that have sought to disrupt our event over recent weeks would know this, if they had just attended it or even listened to what the farmers and protesters themselves were saying. We even leave room at the end for attendees to challenge the ideas that speakers present.
Yet, once again they treated the protesting of fuel prices the same as the protests at IPAS centres, classist condemnation before ultimately falling back on the tried and true method: call them “far right”
If political actors are worried about various demographics that they could traditionally rely on drifting from them, this is a problem they themselves have created by trying to create a moralistic cordon sanitaire around engaging with ordinary people with genuine concerns.
Our event will go ahead in Dublin this Saturday. We look forward to hosting a conversation with individuals with varying perspectives on the fuel protests and cost of living crisis.
DÉAN CÉITINN –