Yesterday, commentator Michael McCarthy posted a crowdfunder to buy a coffee for the fuel protesters. He set a target of €3,000. Within hours, it had reached €70,000.
Last night, RTÉ’s Prime Time said that the threat made by Government of putting the Army on the streets against its own people seemed to have boosted the numbers protesting. In Gorey, musicians showed their support for the neighbours and friends: tunes reverbing amidst the tractors and trucks and families gathered in support. Those scenes were replicated across the country as the demonstrations passed the night and entered their fourth day.
The quiet anger and sense of desperation amongst the ordinary men and women driving their lorries and tractors has struck a chord with the public precisely because the impact of carbon taxes on the spiralling cost of fuel impacts everyone, and the truth is that the government is being dishonest when it says it can do no more.
In fact, this week we saw government representatives swinging wildly between boasting that they are steering the best/richest/fastest-growing economy in Europe and then pleading poverty when it comes to scrapping carbon tax – a tax levied despite huge public opposition according to polling. It’s important to remember that this cobbled-together Government – the same people threatening the protesters with the Army – have no actual electorate mandate for their policy of more than doubling the price of fuel with taxes and levies.
They’ve got away with it thus far using their usual tactic: pleading the EU and ‘international obligations’, and then shouting that the world is on fire and the Irish must buckle and live in caves even as the Chinese, and the Germans, keep burning coal. And, as ever, they are now relying on the political tactics of attack and deflect to try to undermine the furl protesters. But this time, so far, it isn’t working.
In fact, if the disruption and anger this week achieves nothing else, it will have exposed that carbon tax is, as my colleague Ben Scallan put it, a punishment beating disguised as virtue.
While the Greens at least have an ideological basis for trying to force ordinary people away from fossil fuel use by effectively imposing financial penalties – even though the public have no option but to drive, and transport goods, and use fuel to grow food and heat home and build houses – Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, and many of their EU cohorts, see climate alarmism as a golden opportunity to tax people into the ground for living and breathing.
The Government isn’t really increasing carbon taxes every year to save the planet: they made that clear in their scramble to deal with public anger this week. They are penalising ordinary families and small businesses, and driving employers to closure, in order to rake in billions in taxes – while at the time wildy overspending in such an extraordinarily inefficient, wasteful way that their own watchdog, the Irish Fiscal Advisory, seems almost in despair about the whole fiasco.
The enormous, gaping, and ever-growing disconnect between this shambles of a government and the Irish people has never seemed greater. And, as ever, when the public demonstrates their entirely justifiable anger at the latest ruinous policy of the government, the response, no doubt honed by the overpaid advisers and PR companies is: smear and deflect, smear and deflect.
SMEAR AND DEFLECT
This is key to a well-thumbed and nasty playbook, usually operated to great effect by the political establishment because they have the full backing of a complicit and servile media, and the modus operandi rarely changes.
Attack the protesters’ actions, then their motivations, then their character. Smear them: accuse them of bad faith and of causing harm, then deflect from the real issues by all means possible including making unsubstantiated claims that the media allow to go unchallenged. Despicable stuff, but it was used in Covid, on immigration, and on many other occasions when the establishment wanted to stamp down on the public or force bad policy through at the point of a Garda baton, and now the threat of an Army tank.
And so Micheál Martin, Simon Harris, and Jim O’Callaghan – the Three Stooges with a pedestal and a big mic – were straight into it from the start. They weren’t going to meet with any of the deplorables who hadn’t been sanctioned by a government-approved NGO, so they weren’t, and they were going to tell us why.
The attempts to block the distribution of fuel was “a sinister and despicable attack on our economy and our society”, said His Frowniness, Tánaiste Simon Harris, throwing in that Ireland was “not a lawless country” and that “the laws of the land must be applied without fear”.
Is that so? What exactly is ‘sinister’ about ordinary people being goaded into action because of a tax policy which is making the cost of a global crisis infinitely worse at a local level? What is ‘lawless’ about taking to the streets in a perfectly peaceful fashion? In Harris-Land the only legitimate protests are the ones he approves of, which of course would probably mean they are not protests at all, but YFG joining hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’ as the marvel the good life bestowed on the lucky few by the Great Coalition.
‘Lawless’? Tell that to your fellow Cabinet members who allowed IPAS centres to set up and rake in millions without planning permission. Without fear? It’s your government that threatened the Army on protesters, Simon. What about the right to protest without fear?
Not to be outdone, the denunciations from Taoiseach Micheál Martin came thundering forth. Blockading Whitegate Oil refinery in Co Cork, he said, was an “act of national sabotage” before adding: “It makes absolutely no sense in the fuel crisis we are currently facing. It is beyond belief that people would seek to deny people around the country access to vital fuels”.
What really makes no sense in the current fuel crisis, Taoiseach, is that your government is making a killing on the increased carbon tax returns flowing into Revenue as the price of oil has spiralled again and again. Giving back less than one sixteenth of what the government is reaping from fuel taxes in terms of relief is not dealing with the issue, and you know it.
And you know what is actually an act of sabotage: closing down our peat harvesting to please the EU, and refusing to explore our seas for gas or oil, and forcing Irish people and businesses to pay through the nose for a carbon penalty when renewables aren’t working as promised and people have no other option. Ask the Germans: a decade of slavish devotion to the Green energy policies in Energiewende have led to the de-industrialisation of what was once the powerhouse of Europe.
NOT AFRAID OF WHAT RTÉ THINKS
I spoke to one small fuel retailer on O’Connell Street last night who pointed out that he and many others had been driven into a corner by the refusal of this government to listen and to understand. “All they care about is the EU,” he said. “It doesn’t matter to them if our businesses go to the wall or our kids emigrate. People feel desperate and angry and that just became this overnight movement that isn’t afraid of politicians condemning us or of what RTE thinks”.
“We’d all rather be at home with our families, but we’re going nowhere or they’ll have no future,” he said. “The TDs are totally out of touch with the people, they just keep saying the country is doing great when people are worried sick re bills and cost of living and housing. They are in a bubble and they don’t want to come out”.
I put it to him that Micheál Martin has said that “businesses and people’s livelihoods depend on this fuel”.
“Isn’t that the point we are making,” he replied. “We can’t survive while the government lashes on tax after tax when fuel is sky-high. The carbon tax has to go.”
He had much stronger words for Minister Jim O’Callaghan’s ridiculous claim that the protesters were being ‘manipulated’ by international actors such as Tommy Robinson. The Minister’s assertion – on which he later doubled down – was also noticed by Gript’s Fatima Gunning: “Is it so hard for our leaders to understand how angry a lot of people are and not accuse them of simply being “manipulated”?” she asked. Precisely.
The gache of Minister O’Callaghan was, as more than one observer noted on social media, like something from a Waterford Whispers article. ‘Too far’, his advisers may have cautioned afterwards, ‘an own goal’.
Backing up all of this smearing and deflection will be endless media articles ‘investigating’ the protesters and raising new bogeymen. And it goes without saying that ordinary working people will be labelled ‘far-right’ for doing what the left should be doing: organising the public against unfair and crippling taxation.
But what comes across clearly when protesters are allowed to speak, that they are, as this man says, hard-working people who just want fairness, and who are are being threatened with the Army by an Taoiseach. It’s a thundering disgrace.
However, this time, the usual playbook and the tactic of Smear and Deflect doesn’t seem to be landing the necessary punches. The Government is failing its people in the most basic ways: making housing and healthcare impossible to access, refusing to listen on immigration, ignoring the crisis caused by so many of our own leaving the country.
One of the protest leaders, John Dallon, says the demonstrators now have a “voice for Ireland”. They should keep using it. The politicians most desperate for power have lost all credibility with an increasingly alienated public.