Seeing through the Jobstown spin

Has Ireland always been such a divided, class-based society?          

Protesting against Irish Water in
Galway city centre two years ago

Or is it only in recent times that people are beginning to wake up to divisions and prejudices which have existed for generations?

For centuries, our people were united by colonisation. It was far easier to band together when we had a common enemy as subjects of the British Empire, when virtually all of our ancestors were treated as second class citizens in their own land.

It’s easier to unite against your rulers when they bind you into a life of poverty, persecute you for your religious beliefs, kill your language, deny you land ownership rights or force you into exile.

Far more difficult if the “enemy” is within.

A century has passed since the martyr James Connolly warned the Irish people that their struggle for freedom would be in vain if they replaced the British Empire with a new set of landlords, financiers, and capitalists.

God knows what he would make of the Irish Labour Party in 2017.

It’s far more difficult to unite when the corrupt politician up the road is securing jobs for the boys, the dodgy Garda Sergeant is deleting penalty points for the chosen few, or your local banker throws money around like confetti because he’s on a massive bonus for handing out unsustainable mortgages.

It’s the double standards people find most sickening.

We didn’t see bankers being hauled out of their beds at dawn for bankrupting the country or teams of Gardai raiding their homes and offices to find evidence of illegal or immoral practices which cost the country billions less than a decade ago.

It took a protest movement over water of all things, specifically the privatisation of water, to open people’s eyes to the divisions among us.

People asked, rightly, why it took Irish Water to mobilise so many people to take to the streets after years of witnessing the bank ‘bailout’, the IMF-EU ‘troika’, cuts to health and mental health services, a rise in homelessness, or the imposition of the unjust Universal Social Charge.

Celebrating the Jobstown acquittals in Dublin on Saturday

For many, though, Irish Water came as the final straw. They were sickened to see the people at the top on such massive pay scales, the perception that metering contracts were being allocated to the ‘golden circle’, and that yet another unfair tax was being imposed on ordinary people who just couldn’t take it any more.

It was amazing to attend the huge Irish Water demonstrations across the country, even in conservative Galway, and to see people who had never been galvanised before come together at street protests for the first time.

Nobody expected the campaign against water charges to attract such huge support and, clearly, it was troubling to the people at the top of Irish society to see so many people travel from all over Ireland to bring our capital to a standstill.

By the time a group of protesters sat down in front of a Minister’s car at Jobstown, in West Dublin, the State had become alarmed. Irish Water was in a mess, the State wanted a way out, and the Government was looking for ways to smear the protest campaign.

By blocking a Minister’s car or hurling abuse at the President, protesters could be denigrated and labelled as the “sinister fringe”.

And there’s no doubt that some of the abuse directed at politicians damaged the protest campaign as well as scaring more moderate protesters away.

Videos were circulated of people using foul language against politicians which should have no place in the political sphere. Tensions were high, as people accused the Irish Labour Party of betraying the working class in a way which would have had James Connolly spinning in his grave.

There was no excuse for personalised abuse against the then Tanaiste, Joan Burton, but did Gardai really need to raid the home of a democratically elected politician in the dark of night?

No matter what people think of Paul Murphy, he has a mandate to serve the people who elected him and he could easily have been called in for questioning as he made his way to the Dail. It’s not like the Gardai didn’t know where he worked.

A stark warning from James Connolly,
heroic leader of the Easter Rising

Did the Gardai really need arrive in a fleet of cars to haul a 15-year old boy out of his bed at dawn?

They could have talked to him on his way home from school, but they wanted to make some sort of statement in front of his family, neighbours, and friends.

That boy spoke brilliantly about his right to protest afterwards and about the perception among his neighbours after witnessing the blue flashing lights descend upon his home.

Did Gardai really need to hype up the evidence, when it was clearly contradicted by so many people who had video cameras at the scene?

Did they really need to charge people with “false imprisonment” when in fact they just sat down on a road in front of a Minister’s car and caused her some inconvenience for a few hours?

Much has been made since of the fear experienced by Joan Burton and her adviser Karen O’Connelly when they were allegedly trapped in two Garda cars for three hours in Jobstown in November 2014.

People talked of the “terror” they experienced, which seemed to be in stark contrast with the reality captured on photos and videos at the scene.

With some honourable exceptions, few people in the media have asked about the fear experienced by people who took part in a sit down protest and ended up facing a charge which had a possible penalty of life imprisonment.

Few have asked about the inconvenience and cost involved in a ten week trial when the evidence seen by the jury was clearly so at odds with the claims of some witnesses on behalf of the prosecution.

With Chas Jewett, one of the leaders of the
Standing Rock protest in the United States

Few have defended the legitimate right of people like Paul Murphy TD to protest against what they saw as an unjust charge, even though there was no excuse for banging on the Tanaiste's windows or the foul language used.

“There are lots of ordinary people around the country who are delighted by the verdict,” said Deputy Murphy at a meeting in Galway this week. “The establishment cannot take it when they are beaten by ordinary people.

“Ordinary people have been able to see through the lies. There has been no reference to us as victims, the fact that ordinary people were arrested and handcuffed at dawn in front of their own children.”

He pointed out that the defendants were fortunate others had filmed the protest, because it was video evidence which undermined the prosecution case.

“I think the mainstream media response to the Jobstown trial has been helpful because it shows how out of touch they are. It’s a case of ‘them against us’ and we live in a completely divided society.”

There clearly were some unsavoury elements to the protest which caused Ms Burton and her adviser to be detained against their will for three hours.

But charging people with false imprisonment – and threatening them with life in prison – was so out of kilter with what really happened that afternoon at Jobstown that the jury did not need to be swayed by social media or anything else to see through the smoke and mirrors.

Had James Connolly been around to accompany Joan Burton to Jobstown, there is little doubt as to which side he’d have been on.

Burying Irish Water during a protest in Galway city centre
a couple of years ago

“I thought the Brits were bad but, I’ll tell you what, that lot in the Dail are worse,” said Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six when the Jobstown defendants celebrated their acquittals with a rally in Dublin on Saturday afternoon.

A simplistic slogan, perhaps, from a man who knows far too much about injustice, but doubtless he is not the only Irish person to feel like the impoverished animals looking in on the pigs at the end of ‘Animal Farm’.

Have Connolly’s dire warnings come true, a century on from Ireland’s uprising against our own version of Farmer Jones?



Blog post from 2015: Protest has a vital place in a healthy democracy http://ciarantierney.blogspot.ie/2015/02/protest-has-vital-place-in-healthy.html


Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and digital storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. Find him on Facebook at http;//facebook.com/ciarantierneymedia

Find Ciaran's website: http://ciarantierney.com

Fear of mass protests and the 'sinister fringe'

“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

― Malcolm X

They still don’t get it, do they?

With all the bickering there has been over the water charges in recent weeks, leading to today’s virtual u-turn by the Irish Government, it seems that the true anger of a mass movement of people has still not been fully understood by our leaders.

Yes, they do realise that 250,000 people marched against the charges, in what used to be one of the most passive countries in Europe. That sent fear through the ranks of back-bench TDs who were already worried about holding onto their seats in the next General Election.

And, today, the new Minster for the Environment admitted that mistakes were made. Alan Kelly is from the Labour Party, who once promised they would not bring in water charges.

Minster Kelly could not even get the u-turn right, as he ran out to a press conference instead of hearing the views of the opposition TDs in the Dail. He reduced the charges, instead of realising that people wanted the entire quango to be abolished, for him to "rip it up and start again".

What the Government don’t seem to get is that people have had enough of austerity after eight years. People are sleeping in cars or crowding out homeless shelters because they can’t afford to pay the rent any more.

Two weeks ago, I experienced for myself what it's like to lie in a hospital trolley for more than 24 hours. There is something seriously wrong with a country which prioritises bankers over the health of ordinary people.

People have faced job losses, losing friends and family members to emigration or suicide, and had their pay packets decimated by the property tax and the wonderfully named Universal Social Charge (USC).

Even though we all know that these new taxes were invented because the Irish Government did not have the balls to burn the unsecured bondholders.

We have seen the bonus culture of the chosen few with the right connections who have risen to the top of Irish Water.

Thanks to social media, we have seen videos of Gardai and contractors confronting peaceful protesters in their own driveways.

These contractors are not looking for leaks in the system, they are installing meters for a private company without the consent of the landowners. And guess who owns the company which is installing the meters?

So a couple of protesters have thrown bricks or abused Gardai and an entire movement has been denigrated in the mainstream media. Thousands of citizens who marched in opposition to the charges have been associated with a “sinister fringe”.

But nowadays people have Facebook and Twitter and You Tube. They can see the kind of footage which does not make it onto our TV screens.

They can see that people are angry, but mostly peaceful in their protests, up and down the country.

Malcolm X lived in an era when there was no access to social media, when elite corporations could control the access to information of virtually the entire population.

When people see that the news on their TV screens or in the papers does not reflect what they have seen on YouTube or with their own eyes, they have a right to be angry.

It’s the injustice of charging people a new tax for water – something which they are already paying for through other taxes – which has galvanised people a lot more than the prices which were reduced by the Government this afternoon.

People attended the water protest in Galway on November 1 who were never previously at a protest march in their lives. And that's what is really scaring the FG-Labour coalition, who are not too bothered when a few hundred march in solidarity with the people of Gaza or the victims of sexual abuse.

These water charges appear to be the final straw for many people who have been fed up paying for the sins of a tiny elite for six years at this stage.

While the people at the top are contriving to make a mockery of the 1916 commemorations, they have done everything in their power to discredit a mass movement which, to them, must seem quite frightening.

The Taoiseach has claimed that democracy is under threat from the “sinister fringe”.

Others might argue that the real threat to democracy we have seen in recent weeks has come from Gardai pepper-spraying peaceful protesters, hurling a young woman to the ground, or contractors “squaring up” to protesters in their own driveways.

That’s not to excuse those who have engaged in violent acts against the Gardai, Government Ministers, or contractors. It was simply wrong to trap the Tanaiste, Joan Burton, inside her car in Jobstown, just as it was wrong for one teenager to throw a brick at the Gardai afterwards. 

But it's ridiculous to blame a huge protest movement for the misdeeds of a few.

Social media posts and videos have shown us the real truth about the Irish Water protests, in a way which would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. 

Unfortunately for Malcolm X, there was no Facebook or You Tube in his time. Unfortunately for Enda Kenny and his Government, videos which have gone viral have exposed the truth in a way which makes people question the "spin" they have been exposed to for far too long.