Welcome to the dictatorship of the breakfast roll-atariat! All power to the HGV Soviets!
James Geoghegan, one of the leaders of the fuel price blockades, declared on RTÉ’s Liveline the uprising “a revolution” that is “going to change Ireland forever”. Fair enough: this is arguably the most serious insurrection the State has experienced in a century.
But the rest of us are at least entitled to a little more information. A revolution against what? And what kind of permanent transformation does this truck-ulent vanguard intend to create in our lives?
There’s a point in any social upheaval when it shifts from being against the government to being against the state. The first is entirely healthy – a vigorous and disputatious citizenship is essential to a democracy. The second – and we’ve been here before through the long history of militant Irish republicanism – attacks the legitimacy of democracy itself.
It posits the existence of a superior group that is purer and more authentic than the rest of the citizenry and that therefore has the right to enforce its will. As Geoghegan crowed to The Irish Times, “It’s in our hands, we call the shots. Whatever we decide to do is what everyone else will do.”
The point at which a protest shifts from being a criticism of the government to being an attack on the democratic state is when the demonstrators declare themselves to be “the people”. They present themselves not as one interest group among many contending for public resources, but as the general will of the nation.
With the fuel price revolt, this point was passed very quickly. The protesters had every right to signal their distress forcefully and dramatically. And for two days they enjoyed a great deal of public sympathy because that distress is shared to one degree or another by most of us. Donald Trump’s violent insanity has inflicted pain not just in the Middle East but in most Irish households struggling to cope with the direct and indirect effects of an oil crisis.
But the key organisers were not content to have the sympathy of the people of Ireland – they forcibly and repeatedly insisted that they are “the people of Ireland”. And since the people are sovereign, this small group was effectively claiming sovereignty – or as one of its main spokesmen, Christopher Duffy, so delicately put it “we have the country by the balls”.
Balls certainly come into it. For membership of this sovereign “people of Ireland” has two clear conditions. The first is the possession of male genitalia – this is a nation of blokes. (I’ve watched the blockades both in the west and in Dublin and I’ve yet to see a single woman in the driving seat, either literally or metaphorically.)
The second criterion for membership is the possession of at least one very big machine with wheels. This people’s democracy is tipped in favour of those few people who can pile heavy goods vehicles on their side of the scales.
And tipped against women on whom the bulk of the burden of care always falls. This blokeocracy has no place for anyone who is trying to get a sick parent to a cancer treatment appointment or an autistic child to day care or for a home help trying to get to work – and most of the non-people who do these things are women.
So gender and class are very much in play in this revolution. The people’s chromosomes are all XY. The people’s advance guard is the men of property. Geoghegan boasts “I buy machines for €200,000”. If, like him, you have been the subject of Revenue judgments for more than €500,000, you have to have a very handsome taxable income in the first place.
Even without Duffy’s history of inflammatory online statements (such as his attitude to the environmental activist Greta Thunberg: “I couldn’t care less if she got raped or beaten and I make no apologies for saying that”), anyone with a stim of wit would know where these revolts of the disaffected middling business class always go: to the far right.
Geoghegan’s rhetoric is that of endless grievance: “the people of Ireland are sick and tired of being bullied and robbed for years and it ends today”. This is the infinite self-pity that fills the tanks of all contemporary and historical far-right movements.
“Bullied” means having to abide by laws made by people we freely elect. “Robbed” means paying taxes to sustain a decent society. But in this hysteria, democracy is intolerable oppression and the duty to pay for the common good is theft.
It was astonishingly naive of the Government not to have anticipated some kind of large-scale revolt. And even more naive for some of those on the left of Irish politics to embrace the blockade as a harbinger of progressive change. Did nobody pay the slightest attention to what has happened even in the last few years in Europe, from the gilets jaunes in France to the BoerBurgerBeweging in the Netherlands?
Most of those who took part in the blockades will go home and return to normal life. But a significant number will have been radicalised by the intoxicating experience of power: taking control of the streets and motorways and ports, getting to say who comes and goes. How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm after they’ve felt the elation of having a country by the balls?
From these days, a serious far-right movement will at last emerge in Ireland. Trump’s war has doomed us all to a long period of high inflation and economic instability. The price of diesel will fuel a revolt against taxation, against environmental regulation and against immigrants. More people will acquire the taste for dictatorship.
There is no excuse now for not knowing what this looks like: big wheels being driven over democratic norms. A complacent, lazy Government drifted into this crisis. If it has not woken up to the realisation that its fragile authority can vanish overnight, there will be many more to come.
