People were so docile as endless new taxes and charges were brought in after the start of the recession in 2008, but now, they’ve decided that enough is enough. There’s deep resentment at having to pay for yet another charge, while consultants and others on the inside track of Irish Water make small fortunes for themselves and seem set to make many more millions eventually, when the new semi-State company is sold off to a private investor. At the same time, half the water supplied in Ireland goes to waste because of all the leaks in the system, yet people are highly sceptical that the new system will mean all these leaks being fixed.
Bringing in water charges is seen as one tax too many, deeply unfair, because it would also be a big burden on less well-off families and people, while it would be a mere pinprick to the wealthier people in Ireland. Currently, some 40 per cent of the population in the Irish Republic is on or below the poverty line.
The planned water charges are also perceived as a way of helping people in the establishment make a lot more money for themselves. A typical example is Denis O’Brien, one of the richest people in Ireland, who was worth €4 billion two years ago and is now worth €5 billion, having added another €1 billion to his wealth while most other people still struggle with austerity. He owns the company that is supplying the water meters, the installation of which has attracted many protests, all around the country. He also supports the present Government.
Water charges have attracted huge volumes of protests and on a recent wet Saturday, protests in every town and city in Ireland drew a total crowd of some 170,000. A further huge demo is planned outside the Irish parliament in Dublin on December 10. The taoiseach (prime minister) Enda Kenny, has promised to provide the complete answer to all the complaints next week, when the final charges for water are announced.
The public aren’t assuaged and a cartoon in today’s Irish Times shows Kenny standing in a loo ready to pull the chain and flush himself away. People generally want the Irish Water company abolished, and just because of the endless series of cock-ups it has engineered, as well as water charges themselves. Local councils around Ireland are starting to vote in favour of all this happening. But if the government gives in and scraps the water charges, it will lose all authority. On the other hand, if it persists with their introduction, it will inevitably lose the next general election, which might come much sooner than anyone predicts. On present polling results, the next general election is likely to produce a government made up of Sinn Féin and independents, hardly a recipe for political stability.
The two big traditional political parties in Ireland, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, are rapidly losing public support, as people see them as increasingly irrelevant and out of touch. In other words, Ireland is becoming ungovernable.
Neither is the public putting much faith in most of the mainstream media, which is seen as being in the pocket of the establishment. Just like the Arab Spring, much of the propulsion for the anti-water charge movement is coming from the social media. The amount of adverse comment on social media is simply staggering and some of the comments are really way out. The other day, I read the comments of one woman who was complaining about Norah Owen, a former education minister and from the same party as the majority Fine Gael party in the current government. Owen had merely wondered how much all the water protesters were going to spend on Christmas presents. The woman on Facebook called Owen a “rich, frigging cxxt”.
Some of the online stuff has been funny. Someone has been busy photoshopping a photo of Enda Kenny to make him look like Margaret Thatcher and it’s a very funny pic. Yet typically, it hasn’t got a mention in the mainstream media. But the mainstream media can’t be entirely blamed. RTÉ has been running a photograph of a protestor on its website and it shows an anti-water charges protestor carrying a placard saying “I wouldn’t give this lot the steam off my PPS” (social security number).
There’s nothing new in Irish politicians being so arrogant and out of touch. Nearly 200 years ago, when Daniel O’Connell, the libertator, was crossing the River Liffey in Dublin on a ferry, the ferryman wished him well on his trip to London. He was going to an important vote in the House of Commons.
In return for this gallant gesture, O’Connell turned to the boatman and said: “You’ll still be running the ferry tomorrow”.
But despite all the public anger, the Irish public still has a heart of gold. The other day, an 83 year old pensioner living on her own on Dublin’s northside was scammed out of her life savings of €3,000 by a gang that pretended to repair her roof. Not alone did the police catch up with the gang and the missing money, but when the pensioner was interviewed on RTÉ radio, donations from listeners poured in to more than make up what she had lost.
It was the same sort of situation in Brussels last week, when a huge demo against austerity took place. Amid all the unrest, a car belonging to an electrician was torched. He needed the car for his work and as soon as the news emerged, a crowdfunding exercise soon raised enough money to buy him a new car.
In France too, the farmers are just one of the groups out in protest. Not alone are they giving out free fruit and vegetables in protest against the over regulation of their industry, and the vast increase in imports, but some of the protests are more extreme. A council building in Toulouse the other day was sprayed with manure by farmers. Come Christmas in France, specialists doctors and GPs are going on strike for a week to protest planned health reforms, so the advice to everyone at Christmas is to keep fit!
In the US, look at the advances made by the Republicans in the mid-term elections, a real protest vote, while in the English by election next week in Rotherham, a big political upset is very much on the cards.
As for the water charges here in Ireland, the government is damned whatever it does. The public anger is well and truly up on the issue and won’t go away, but it’s likely that in the longer term, over the next few weeks and months, the government will persist in trying to bring in water charges, with the end result being a resounding defeat in the next general election. The awful thing is that if the whole issue had been handled properly, which it wasn’t, people would have accepted some payment for water, but its introduction has been a political disaster of the first magnitude.