Joe Higgins is widely respected as a sharp, witty and effective parliamentarian, although his astringent probes rarely draw blood from the Taoiseach. No such positive epithets characterise the anti-bin-charge campaign, which has detained the deputy from his legislative duties.
Nonetheless, the appearance that a conscientious objector is more harshly treated than Government deputies who have committed serious offences is neither good politics nor good for confidence in the equity of the law. It is only appearance, as the shaming of a public figure is on average far worse punishment for them.
Rarely has political martyrdom or political prisoner status been won so cheaply over as dubious a cause.
It would be hard to find the nobility of campaigns for civil rights, anti-apartheid or nuclear disarmament, which might justify civil disobedience, in the "right" not to pay directly for your rubbish and to interfere with delivery by workmen of an essential public service, collection of household waste.
Twenty years ago, the introduction by the minister for the environment, Dick Spring, of a power by local authorities to raise service charges to compensate for cutbacks in local authority funding might plausibly have been attacked as double taxation, after the transfer to general taxation of local government funding following the abolition of household rates. Taxation in the 1980s was exceptionally onerous.
Yet even then local government and the services it provides had to be carried on and paid for. Today we have moved to a low tax economy; far too low, the rigorous socialist would argue in any other context. With the reduction of the standard rate of income tax from 35 per cent to 20 per cent and VAT from 35 per cent to 21 per cent in 2003 compared to 1983, it is more the halving of taxation, not its doubling, that the Socialist Party should be complaining about.
Clare Daly has argued that corporation tax (set by Ruairí Quinn in 1997 at 12.5 per cent) must be raised. But legislation is made in the Dáil not in the streets.
Do people care about the thousands of jobs that would be lost if that happened, or would that just be more grist to the political mill?
The charge is in any case not a tax, but payment for a service ranging from €4 to €8 a week, higher in the country. With waivers for the poor, and against the background of a tax system that treats low-income earners favourably, most people are glad to have their rubbish collected at a nominal weekly cost.
And no, most people do not want their taxes raised or other services curtailed as the alternative to charges, nor are they impressed with the claim that "the rich" will pay for everyone else's rubbish collection.
The environmental arguments for encouraging individual responsibility on the polluter-pays principle, and the need for more refined systems of waste separation and minimisation, do not need to be rehearsed here.
I have no particular desire to see local authority services privatised.
Apart from the loss of employment, there is potentially less control of prices, though sometimes prices are boosted by local authorities charging more for use of dumps.
Still, private firms provide very efficient rubbish disposal services in the country. Profit is dirt, yet the anti-bin-charge campaign will deprive local authorities of the revenue necessary for them to provide the service. Private firms would never for one moment collect bins that are not paid for, nor would they be held to ransom by any street campaign. Tax evasion is practised by people who arrogate to themselves the decision on how much they will pay. Likewise, people who demand public services but refuse to pay for them except as they choose are behaving in a similar fashion.
A jail sentence is a costly and not particularly progressive punishment that should mainly be used where there is a danger of repeated offences against people or property. It is far better otherwise to collect money through fines, which is what stopped the IFA protest referred to by Vincent Browne last Wednesday, than spend money on prison terms.
One would be almost tempted to join the calls for instant release, if one were not confronted at every turn by posters, demanding that whole swathes of the "establishment" be jailed. Where is the evidence that socialist monopoly power has provided any protection against corruption?
At one level only does the anti-bin-charge campaign make sense, as an instrument of political mobilisation in advance of local elections, particularly where the authorities can be provoked into over-reaction.
In the normal way in a stable democracy, few bother their heads about the ideological fantasy world of splinter groups, whose main public visibility consists of catchy slogans and posters on lamp-posts advertising public meetings, where pocket Lenins and Rosa Luxemburgs can preach Marxism and the lost revolution to fellow activists, since the population at large are little interested.
Some support comes from the class-war element in the trade union movement that yearns to overturn social partnership, full EU membership, and some of whose best-known figures seem to regard "president-for-life" Arthur Scargill as the model to follow.
There is practically none from the mainstream trade union movement, which exercises a positive influence with Bertie Ahern's government far in excess of what its counterpart in Britain enjoys with Tony Blair.
Militant socialism has its roots in Britain, not in Moscow. Tony Blair and Dick Spring established credibility by expelling that element from the Labour Party in both countries. The British Labour government is, of course, in the militant view "a right-wing Government". The basis for a permanent solution to sectarian conflict, according to Joe Higgins's submission to the Forum, is "a voluntary, free and socialist federation of Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales".
Logically, Ireland would lose its hard-won sovereignty, and economic policy, foreign and defence policy would be decided by the far left in London. Whatever else this is, it is far from the republican socialism of James Connolly, Peadar O'Donnell or Michael O'Riordan.