If there's any perceived injustice in France,or any social group feels that their rights are being undermined, then out come the protest groups. Recently, huge protests took place in Paris, saying that true marriage can only be between a man and a woman; it's a view that many regard as
antiquated and outdated, that lots of other people have just as much right to get married. The organisers of this particular protest said that around 800,000 people came out on the streets, while the
police say the number was half that. Whether all this protestation will have any effect on the current
French government's policies in this area is very doubtful, but the whole episode proved once again, there's nothing large numbers of French people like more than a really good street protest. Out
with the banners and the placards and the recent bad weather was no deterrent!
Another very recent protest was by a large vested interest group, the taxi drivers. Altogether, France has 55,000 taxi drivers, of whom 17,000 are in Paris. They are up in arms over government plans to liberalise the taxi licensing regime and open it up to competition. The taxi drivers organised a campaign called Opération Escargot, which involved large convoys of taxi drivers driving at a snail's pace and holding up all the traffic, an objective which succeeded all too well. I must admit, any time
we've taken a taxi in Paris, we've always been well looked after and the drivers quite happy to chat away while driving at what seemed to us very high speeds!
French protests can involve every imaginable grievance or put-down; no cause is too insignificant not to demand a street protest. Sometimes, the protests can be for very high-minded campaigns. One
such outpouring took place in Paris just over 40 years ago. The Gare de Lyon has a marvellous
historic restaurant called the Train Bleu, that's just over 100 years old, with many fine artistic decorations. In the early 1970s, the French State-owned railway company, SNCF, wanted to demolish the whole caboodle, in a stupid decision worthy of any large state-owned bureaucratic monopoly. However, the citizens of Paris weren't having any of this and so successful was their campaign at blocking the moves to demolish the restaurant that SNCF promptly backed off and never tried to repeat the exercise. Today, Le Train Bleu still stands in all its restored glory, even if the banquettes are more than a little uncomfortable to sit on.
And as any traveller through France knows all too well, the employees of said SNCF are the best at upholding the ancient French tradition of walkouts and strikes at any perceived lessening of their rights. Deduct their weekly wages by a euro and the entire network willgo on strike! All too
often, disruptions by irate workers mean suspensions of SNCF service and the French public just
accepts these perturbations as part of the every day scenery.
This spirit of marching out to protest against any loss of rights is one that seems to have disappeared in Ireland: the spirit of the fighting Irish has really gone for a burton. Just think, 1916 and the Easter Rising, when a small minority was willing to give its lives in exchange for nationhood, or the
vast farmers' protests during the 1960s when farmers demanded and eventually got the right to a decent standard of living. There were also some great street demonstrations years ago about the high levels of personal taxation and all these protests had their desired effect; the governments of
the day had to listen to the people.
Nowadays, in the middle of a recession, it seems that everyone in Ireland is too busy busy watching soaps like Coronation Street or Eastenders (pratically all the soaps on Irish television are of British origin, although few notice the irony) to care a whit about the troubles of society or bother
doing anything about them.
The Irish government can bring in all kinds of cuts that hurt the most vulnerable in society, the poor elderly, the sick, the disabled, the unemployed, the most marginalised in society, while the rich get away scot free. Exactly the same thing is happening in the UK, where the rich get richer and the not
so rich and the poor just get done down day by day. In Ireland, the politicians, aided and abetted by the troika of the European Commisision, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary
Fund, keep throwing buckets of the proverbial horseshit over the Irish public and they just keep
coming back for more. Talk about lying down and being walked all over!
Some recent government decisions in Ireland are going to cause a lot of hardship and deepen the recession, not help end it. One is the forthcoming property tax. Every home owner will have to pay a tax depending on the valuation of their house. It never occured to the wise people who drafted
this legislation that the value of property in Dublin and other cities is far higher than in rural areas. So a family living in a four bedroomed house in Dublin could end up paying around €1,500 a year for their property tax and the forthcoming water charges, while someone who lives in a rural house
of exactly the same dimensions as one in Dublin will only pay about a quarter of what the property tax in Dublin will be,although their water charges will be about the same.
No wonder that Vincent Browne, one of the leading political commentators in Ireland, said last weekend that the present Irish government is talking baloney on every subject it addresses. But what government minister, of whatever hue in any country you care to name, isn't doing exactly the same?
Despite this, is there any sign of protest? Not at all, the great Irish public seems quite happy to let it all wash over them, the horse shit that is, without the merest murmur. The notion of people in Ireland being the fighting Irish should be quietly retired - there's no point in maintaining this myth in the face of such passivism. The troika can keep on telling public sector workers that in future, they will have to work longer hours for less money, and no-one seems too bothered at all. In the UK, the coalition government is getting away with exactly the same kind of nonsense, so it's not purely an Irish phenomenon.
Next time you're waiting for take-off while French air traffic controllers or Air France employees do their thing, just think of how the French react against the smallest perceived injustice and how in Ireland and Britain, it's all swept away by a tsunami of apathy.
However, I have a funny feeling - and I hope to goodness I'm proved wrong - but I think that the
way 2013 is starting to shape up, we're going to have a worldwide wave of blips this year. Not just acute weather events, but terrorism and political and economic blips galore. Just think of the Senkaku
Islands in the East China Sea, a tiny spot that hardly merits a mention in the western media.
The islands are owned by Japan and claimed by China and some well-informed Asia experts predict that these tiny islands could become a real hot spot this year. With so many hot spots of so many kinds bubbling away all over the world, 2013 could be a lot more dynamic than we want, for
all the wrong reasons.
Perhaps after all, keeping the finger on the snooze button and allowing apathy to reign relentlessly, may be the best way of doing things after all!