Making protest pay, Irish style

IT’S JUST PAST 9PM on Thursday night, and the two streets that make up Ballingarry in south Co Tipperary are deserted. A thick fog is beginning to blanket the village. There’s the slightest whiff of slurry in the air. But there’s nothing else to report. It seems as dead as the showband era, unless you know where to look.

If you go to the back lounge of Jimmy Meagher’s bar you’ll find about 20 people clustered around the pool table. The action isn’t taking place on the baize. There’s not a cue or an eight ball to be seen. Instead, all eyes and all ears are directed at the person sitting on the banquette on the far side, Independent TD Mattie McGrath, who’s holding forth on the Water Services Act, or “the septic-tank law”.

The small crowd, which is predominantly middle-aged, male and from farming stock, listen as McGrath makes his case with a mixture of dry fact and bazooka bluster. He has the spiel off pat. Rural people are being scapegoated. The Government has given no detail of costs, penalties or guidelines. “Big Phil” – a reference to the politician formerly known as the Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan – won’t say what the guidelines are; what financial aid, if any, will be given to those whose tanks fail. Replacement costs could reach €25,000, McGrath claims.

On the change of tack last Monday, when the fee was dropped from €50 to €5, McGrath tells the crowd that “Big Phil the Enforcer caved in”. But, he warns with a finger wagging in the air, the lower charge is still “trickery” designed to get people to register, because the real cost will come further down the line. “It’s like buying a car, then finding out it has no engine and the brakes aren’t working either. It’s outrageous.”

There’s a collective intake of breath when potential fines of €5,000 are mentioned. And although the meeting is largely low-key and undramatic, it’s clear that at least some are put out by the new laws and that emotions are running high.

By itself the meeting hardly seems earth-shattering. But then you find out it’s the 10th McGrath has convened in the past few weeks. If you look at the local papers you’ll see dozens of similar meetings being held around the country: in Longford, Meath, Donegal, Kerry, Waterford, Galway and Limerick. They are dragging entire communities out. Seven hundred people came to a meeting in Templeglantine, in Co Limerick, last Monday night, and hundreds more were at meetings in Connemara. And when, also on Monday, Hogan announced what amounted to a climbdown on registration fees, campaigners were able to claim that their protests had attained critical mass.

FOREIGN JOURNALISTS sent to Ireland to report on our economic woes often ask why there are no riots on the streets. A host of explanations are offered: it’s because this is a small, socially cohesive country; it’s because our political system is not really ideological; it’s because we don’t have civic organisations to mobilise mass protest; it’s because we whinge about laws but rarely defy them.

At the same time, as in Ballingarry, you’ll find protests if you look for them. In the same way that Patrick Kavanagh could see Homer’s Iliad in a local row over a half-rood – or eighth of an acre – of rock in Co Monaghan, the protest phenomenon in Ireland has been less epic than the big affairs of Greece, France or Iceland. Here they have tended to be more rooted in the community – and more widespread and more effective than has been generally recognised.

There have been big protests in the past. A PAYE protest in 1979 attracted 700,000; 100,000 marched against the Iraq war in 2003; and 90,000 against austerity in 2009. A spontaneous protest of more than 15,000 over-70s in 2008 saw the government quickly scrap its plan to withdraw medical cards. But that was a one-off, revolving around a specific issue and age group. Generally, the impact of such big affairs has been limited.

Over the past month there has been a huge surge in protests against a range of measures associated with austerity: the Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools scheme for disadvantaged areas; a potential reduction of teachers in rural schools; septic-tank registration; cutbacks in community employment schemes; and the new household charge. In the past week alone you could have found reports of more than 45 meetings, some attracting dozens, others hundreds of people.

This is a typical sequence. A Government backbencher, compelled to attend, gets it in the neck from constituents. That anger is relayed to colleagues at the weekly parliamentary meeting. If it has happened to a biggish group of TDs, lobbying the relevant Minister can lead to decisions being softened and even reversed.

In March last year Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn began a review that may yet mean closure for some small schools. It alarmed a number of principals in west Co Cork. “We faced a a huge problem,” says Clara MacGowan, principal of St James National School in Dunmanway. “Ten two-teacher schools and 23 other schools here in Cork would have been affected.” She was part of a small group that set up Save our Small Schools locally. In January 800 people showed up for a meeting in Dunmanway. Meetings sprang up in Galway, Kerry, Clare, Waterford, Mayo and Donegal. Now it is on its way to becoming a mass movement, with a national day of protest pencilled in for the spring. “We started as a ripple and are becoming a big wave. Hopefully it will turn into a tsunami,” says McGowan.

The emergence of the anti-septic-tank-charge movement followed a similar pattern. Last autumn a group of locals casually discussed the issue. Pádraic “an Táilliúra” Ó Conghaola then declared on TG4 that he’d rather go to jail than pay the fee; 150 people showed up at a meeting the following week. Éamon Ó Cuív, the deputy leader of Fianna Fáil, and Seósamh Ó Cuaig, an Independent councillor, also said they would not pay. A movement was born.

There was a demonstration in Galway, featuring the “poohmobile” – a lavatory mounted on wheels – a protest outside the Dáil and a sit-in of a Galway County Council meeting. These spawned similar meetings around the country. The real test of the strength and efficacy of the movement will come on the last day of this month, when a mass protest is planned for the Dáil.

For Government TDs the effect is real, as Brian Walsh, a Fine Gael deputy for Galway West, confirms on the septic-tank issue. “They have an impact in that we end up bringing it up with the senior Minister,” he says. “The announcement has been made. It has been watered down considerably. In that respect the protest had some dividend.”

Ciara Conway, the Waterford Labour TD, says she cannot recall so many mass meetings about a single issue in the decade she has been politically involved. “They are a new phenomenon – a pity that we did not have it before things were allowed drift,” she says. She has taken flak at meetings, she adds, but as a TD “part of my job is to relay that anger”.

It’s clear that some Opposition parties regard the meetings and causes as Trojan horses for their own electoral advancement. Conway resents Fianna Fáil’s involvement in the protests. “I take umbrage at Fianna Fáil councillors stirring things up. They are the people who brought the IMF into the country . . . Eaten bread is soon forgotten.”

David Farrell, a professor of politics at University College Dublin, says the rural and community nature of our protests shows “the high degree of political localism in Ireland . . . It’s almost under the wire and not apparent on a national level. In the main it is a very rural phenomenon. When you see a Minister reacting so dramatically to the difficulties caused by septic tanks, it shows how powerful is this localised politics. When TDs’ jobs are on the line, they do apply pressure on the Minister in a way that parliamentarians in other systems do not have to do,” he says.

ON THE FACE OF IT, a protest meeting on Wednesday night in the Liberties in Dublin is not dissimilar from the meeting in Ballingarry. About 50 people are in the room as part of the campaign against household and water taxes. But this campaign is different. It is not spontaneous in the same way as the small-schools and septic-tank-charge movements. The three people sitting at the top table are members of left-wing parties, in this case Dave Meehan of the Socialist Party, Tracey MacVeigh of the Socialist Workers Party – aka People Before Profit Alliance – and Damian Farrell of Éirígí, a hard-line republican party.

Of the 50 people in the hall, roughly half are left-wing activists; the remainder are local residents.

The sentiments and anger they express are akin to those at other meetings. MacVeigh argues that the funds raised by the charges will be used to pay speculators and bondholders. “We have a really strong choice to say ‘No! Hump off!’ ”

The campaign seems very centralised, very organised. It has a website, a hotline, posters. Dozens of meetings have been organised around the country in an attempt to build up a mass campaign to boycott the taxes. Critics say left-wing parties are using the campaign to stir up civil disobedience as a springboard for future elections. Campaigners say that the charges are an attack on the “homes of ordinary people” and that the only way to combat them is by refusing to register or to pay. “If we can get 700,000 or 900,000 or a million to say no, then it’s a powerful political message to the government,” MacVeigh tells the meeting.

How effective has the campaign been? Nine TDs, all left-wing, have signed up. But will it attract the hundreds of thousands of householders needed to reach a critical mass? It seem unlikely, although it will do well where its TDs are strong.

Occupy Dame Street is the only Irish protest that can be easily compared to protests in other countries. The numbers camping outside the Central Bank of Ireland have fallen to no more than 20, but that is partly to avoid antagonising local traders and to comply with fire regulations.

The survival of the encampment over the winter – it has been there since October 8th – provides a daily visual reminder of the issues involved. One of its activists, Claire Leonard, worked in Tanzania in the 1970s when the IMF intervened and “saw at first hand the impact of the international monetary system on poverty”. She says the same is happening in Ireland now. “They are not looking after the interest of citizens but of banking and the international monetary system. It is a global fascism. Wall Street is dictating to the government in the US.”

Her fellow activist Cillian Roche says that Occupy Dame Street is a work in progress. “Its impact is far greater than is visible. The mainstream media have largely ignored the movement. We got through a grim winter and are showing signs of turning a corner.

“There have been different Nama occupations in Cork and Dublin. At least they can be questioned and called to account in a way that is specific to Ireland. And we will have this physical structure as long as we remain here.”

BUT CAN THE movement ever gain traction or win wider support? Brian Walsh, the Fine Gael TD from Galway, says “big-ticket” protests such as those against the household charge and the banks are bound to fail.

“Generally the protests are succeeding in areas where there is not a huge requirement on the exchequer. On bigger issues, like student fees, burning the bondholders and household charges, there has been no budging on that. I still think it’s the smaller protests that will have the greatest impact. There will be disquiet about new charges, but most people understand tough decisions have to be taken.”

Or, as Patrick Kavanagh put it in Epic, "Gods make their own importance."