Have the water meter protests gone too far? Are they an affront to democracy? Have the water meter protesters damaged the popular mass movement against Irish Water and the austerity water charges?
What drives a person to act in such a way as to impede another from carrying out their job? to protest in a manner some might find aggressive or intimidating? to shout remarks that some would find unacceptable or offensive?
The delicate balance between Conscience and Injustice.
Whatever your opinion on how the country came to a point of financial crisis, either by negligent regulation, wanton greed, bank corruption, lack of political foresight or any other cause, we are where we are. No doubt future students of history and economics will be writing theses on the Rise of the Tiger and its eventual demise, but at the present moment in toime (as Kenny Cunningham would say), we have to live in circumstances that make ordinary daily life extremely difficult.
In 2015, families are experiencing pretty much the same quality of life that their parents and grand parents experienced in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Many have levels of income that require every penny to be budgeted with the book-keeping skills of Ebenezer Scrooge: juggling between food, heat, rent, electricity, clothes and other household bills. Poverty levels have increased to the pint where 31% of the population are living in deprivation compared to 12% in 2007.
A UNICEF report last year found that Ireland ranked 37 out of 41 in a league table of child poverty in Western countries. Homlessness is increasing daily as more and more families are losing their homes to the banks that were bailed out.
You know the rest.
Most people who are now protesting have likely never protested or been involved in any political activity before in their lives. What has ignited a spark in them to mobilise is their conscience. It prevents them from accepting that the responsibility for getting the country out of its current mess has been nailed to their backs when they had no hand or part in the creation of it.
Their conscience prevents them from accepting that they should contribute € 9,000 each to the cost of the European banking crisis while he average cost of the crash across all European nations is € 192 per head. Germans have been the next hardest hit but each German still only pays € 491 per person. The Irish cost also does NOT include € 18 BILLION raided from the National Pension Fund to bail out insolvent banks...
When you have small children, still in primary school, it is absolutely unconscienable that they have a debt (somebody elses debt!) to pay off before they begin their lives. Indeed children born in maternity wards across the country in this decade will have a debt of € 9,000 each to pay off before they've drawn their first breath.
If this situation is acceptable to you, then your priorities, your humanity, your conscience and even your national pride should be re-examined with immediate haste. If you are prepared to allow this situation to exist without any objection then you are willing to accept the shackles of debt like a beaten-down slave.
If your conscience does not allow you to find this acceptable then you are on the first steps to understanding how protesters can initially find the conviction to take to the streets and ultimately arrive at a point of such desperation as to become more vocal, more active, more inflamed and potentially more 'militant'.
It is your conscience that draws the line where your protest ends, be it venting on social media, writing stern emails to TDs, marching on the streets, obstructing social and economic policy that you deem to be unjust.
The removal of medical cards from children with serious illness and life threatening disease. THe removal of SNA support for children with learning disabilities. The indifference to groups like the people of Priory Hall. The lip-service-concern for homelessness only passingly acknowledged following the death of Jonathan Corrie. The daily suffering of hundreds of people on hospital trollies across the country. The cynical attempt to dismantle the political system and hijack democracy with the Seanad referendum. Numerous cuts to public services and newly dreamt-up ways to extract money from working families have caused immeasurable distress, the effects of which are visible in protest action now and may result in severe long-lasting implications for men, women and children in the future.
What decides whether you write a letter to a TD, vote for particular candidate, take part in a march, stand with placard, occupy a constituency office or bank, attend a meeting, create a facebook page or stand in a hole while a water meter is being installed is a matter of personal conscience.
None of the jailed protesters have been jailed for committing a crime. No law has been broken, A court order has been breached but as better men than us have said:
“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”
― Howard Zinn“An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law”
― Martin Luther King Jr.“An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment.”
― Mahatma Gandhi,“If you're not going to use your free speech to criticize your own government, then what the hell is the point of having it?”
― Michel Templet“Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger, I argued, was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public's acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it...
In such a world, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern black did, as antiwar protesters did.”
― Howard Zinn,
“Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it.” ― Albert Einstein
The "behaviour" of ALL the water meter protests has unequivocally demonstrated that peoples' consciences have been ignited while at the same time there is an amazing and inspiring respect for human rights and property. In Spain, Italy, Belgium and Greece, the countries worst hit by the Eurobank crash and the effects of austerity policy, there have been huge demonstrations which HAVE disintegrated into violent conflict. Private and public property has been destroyed, cars have been burned out, running battles with armed police and military forces have happened, rubber bullets have been fired into crowds and lives have been put at great risk.
Nothing like that has happened here as protesters continue to show intelligent, mature restraint and consciousness towards others. At the same time the Garda Siochana have demonstrated an eagerness to launch themselves into situations to either provoke violence among protesters (the Dec 10th O'Connell Bridge charge) or use protests as an opportunity to unleash their own psychotic lust for confrontation. The authorities and media have seized on every minor incident like a Minister "trapped" in the comfort of a fifty thousand euro state limousine to portray peaceful non-violent demonstrators as akin to ISIS terrorists or some other threat to the nation.
What has been lacking in much coverage of protests over the past year has been a lack of appreciation (to put it mildly) and at times a complete denial of the reality of life for hundreds of thousands of families. Added to that is a gold-fish minded ignorance of the context of these protests: where they originate; what drives them; what their objective is; and how they are conducted.
Quite simply: people are fighting for their lives.
They are fighting for their lives, literally their survival, their rights, the lives and futures of their children, the betrayal of their parents, the destruction and sale of their country, their dreams of a life worth living in the land of their birth.
Politics is a gameshow. The players compete for pay, pension and perks. They play with peoples lives. The rules are simple: anything goes as long as their power, position and pals are protected. They lie, they cheat, they embezzle, they steal, they abuse. They act with an attitude of absolute impunity in the belief that they have unquestionable authority and entitlement to their position, pissing on the very people that put them there. They say and do as they please safe in the knowledge that the media and the judiciary are their allies and co-conspirators.
This government have told the people of Ireland to hold out their hands so that they can handcuff them and their children into perpetual debt slavery in the name of the EU, the financial markets and the ECB/IMF... and many have accepted these chains without resistance.
This is the injustice of Ireland's pseudo-democracy. The is what pricks the conscience of intelligent people.
If you can't understand or don't accept that it's because your conscience draws a line so far away from what challenges the establishment that they don't see you, hear you or even know you exist.
Some of us draw our line on their doorstep. They see us, they hear us, they know us by name ... and still they ignore us.
That's why some people dare to cross the line.
A political system that is unjust is not an immovable object. It just takes an unstoppable
force to move it. That force is the people of Ireland - arisen.
