Power to the people

March 6th, 2011, marks the point when Diarmuid O’Flynn, after months of emailing politicians about the injustice of bailing out bondholders, finally got angry.

"I made a few phone calls to people I had played GAA with for years, old team-mates and neighbours, and said, 'Will you join me in Ballyhea on Sunday morning?' We printed off a few A4 signs and taped them to bits of boards, and I think it was 15 of us that Sunday morning, after Mass, and we headed up the road and down again, because there isn't even a village in Ballyhea, really."

O’Flynn has done this every Sunday since. “More people started to inquire about it, and we had 30 the next week. It kind of grew, and it has been growing ever since. There are about 1,000 in the parish, and about a quarter have marched with us at this stage,” he says. “There are a lot of parents and grandparents who march every week hail, rain or shine . . . The only way you can sustain that sort of thing is with a really deep anger.”

The Ballyhea protests against the bailout were initially isolated, ridiculed and, worse, ignored – "No one paid attention to us," says O'Flynn. The standard narrative of the recession at that point was that the Irish didn't protest. The people had apparently accepted politicians' line that we had "all partied", and were therefore all partly to blame, and had turned their anger inwards, where it became cynicism and depression.

Four Angry Men

The broadcaster

Matt Cooper

recalls touring with three other journalists – Fintan O’Toole of this newspaper, Pat Leahy and Shane Ross – as “the Four Angry Men” back in 2009. (Cooper had a book out called

Who Really Runs Ireland?

)

“We filled the National Concert Hall, and there were some questions and angry exchanges,” Cooper says. “People were angry that the standard of living they had come to expect was being taken away from them. Even before the bailout happened it was clear to most people that their economic circumstances were going swiftly into reverse. Their incomes were being reduced, jobs were being lost, taxes were going up . . . and anyone with debts was fearful . . . People wanted to understand what was going on, but I think the full enormity of what had gone wrong hadn’t really hit them.”

Cooper says people were already angry about the recession but didn’t quite know how to express it.

“Nothing made people angrier than Thierry Henry’s handball,” he says. That incident, when the goal that followed the French footballer’s unfair play knocked Ireland out of the qualifiers for the 2010 World Cup, prompted “the highest number of texts we got on any topic. That was 2009, when the recession was in full flight. It’s almost like people used that to let go of their anger about everything else . . . Brian Cowen being drunk in Galway. People were very angry about that. I think people can articulate their anger and rage more easily about stuff like that than they can about the size of the deficit.”

Outlets for rage

Dr

Rory Hearne

, a political and economic geographer at Maynooth University who earlier this year published the study

[ The Irish Water War, Austerity and the Risen People ]

, believes the public had few consistent outlets for their rage.

Protest during the recession occurred in fits and starts, he says. As well as Ballyhea, he mentions the pensioners’ protest in 2008 over plans to scrap automatic entitlement to medical cards, the student demonstrations of 2010 about bigger third-level registration fees and smaller grants, the Occupy Dame Street encampment, and the public-sector strikes and Irish Congress of Trade Unions demonstrations of 2010.

The latter “were very large and had up to 100,000 people at them, but that dissipated with the election of the Fine Gael-Labour Government and the wage agreements”.

Early in the recession, expressions of rage were largely kept at bay by the prospect of the 2011 election, he says. “The existing leadership in civil society and the left, their strategy was the one of social partnership, so while they organised some mobilisation, it wasn’t really to resist austerity: it was to get into government.”

This strategy, he says, left people “without a way to resist or institutions to resist through”. Instead they expressed their anger electorally. This led to the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition, the rise of the Independents and the electoral destruction of Fianna Fáil.

“A lot of people put faith in the Labour Party and Fine Gael, that they would stand up in relation to the debt and the promises that austerity would be eased,” Hearne says. “But then it became clear that there was no real change taking place.”

H e says that’s when a lot of people began to feel not just betrayed by the Government but by the whole political class. The cumulative effects of austerity were being felt by more and more families.

“The household-charge campaign was significant in that it involved community groups and new people involved in politics who were really angry about the cumulative effect of austerity,” he says. “Civil society didn’t have institutions to resist through, and so people realised they really had to do it themselves. And that’s where the grassroots community against the water charges came from.”

Official narrative

In 2014 protesters took to the streets in huge numbers against water charges. Mass demonstrations as well as smaller, more locally organised protests have been held against meter installation. The size of the movement conflicted with official narratives about how the Irish people had passively accepted austerity and, as a result, were heading for recovery.

To many politicians it came as a huge surprise, but for a student of protest like Hearne it made sense. The initial lack of leadership from the traditional left, he says, meant a delayed expression of anger was inevitable.

The establishment was surprised by the movement, he says, because they are in denial about the effects of austerity. “In the survey . . . we found that water was a galvanising issue . . . but what was more significant was the cumulative impact: people talked about not being able to pay rent, losing their homes, their jobs, and dealing with cuts in welfare and disability.”

Anger, Hearne says, is a legitimate response to feeling unheard by your elected representatives, particularly when it’s funnelled into constructive action. The band Rage against the Machine “said, ‘Anger is a gift.’ It is a necessary emotion. The idea that a protest shouldn’t be angry is ridiculous,” Hearne says. “The elite politicians think ‘anger’ somehow delegitimises the [underlying] politics.” He rejects attempts to present the wider movement as violent based on single instances like the sit-in protest that kept Tánaiste Joan Burton confined to her car, an incident for which some people may yet have to face charges.

Are the water protests on the wane? The mainstream parties clearly hope so. The recurring message from Government TDs is that Ireland is through the worst of the recession and that further expressions of anger, dissent or political nonconformity will lead to chaos.

Attendance at the protests has dropped since last year, but that’s not the only way to measure dissent.

“There’s a certain amount angrily protesting about the water charges, and a certain number angrily contacting phone lines and text messaging radio programmes,” says Matt Cooper. “But when it comes to the real anger, it’s expressed by not paying their bill.”

But Cooper also believes we may have seen “peak anger”. “People get bored of anger,” he says. “At the moment texters seem more aggravated by etiquette on public transport.”

Culture of protest

Hearne isn’t so sure. He says a lot of people are still suffering the effects of austerity politics – “The recovery isn’t seen by people in the way it’s been described” – and now, for the first time, they have an established a culture of protest.

Although the size of demonstrations might wax and wane, he says, “communities have mobilised in ways they never have before, and people have become politicised.” The real effects of the movement will be seen during the next election, he predicts, with a rise in the number of protest-seasoned politicians.

Diarmuid O’Flynn, who still marches in Ballyhea once a week, ran for the European parliament in 2014 and works as a parliamentary assistant to the Independent MEP Luke “Ming” Flanagan. He worries about a return to the “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” politics of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. He worries that, with a resurgent economy, the Government and media might sell a narrative of recovery and contentment over the heads of a still-suffering populace.

The big questions ahead of the next election are whether the Irish are still angry and whether they still have reasons to be angry.

“I think there is a political battle over the interpretation of reality about what’s happened and what’s happening,” Hearne says. “Basically, there’s a battle over reality.”