BY late yesterday afternoon it was blindingly obvious that the fuel blockades crippling the country had ceased to be legitimate protests about energy prices and had tipped over into anarchy and sabotage.

Like most people, I have every sympathy with people whose livelihoods depend on the affordability of fuel, and can certainly understand why they believe the Government could do more to alleviate their pain – even if that’s an entirely unsustainable demand.

But blocking the capital’s main thoroughfares for three days in a row, and boasting about turning O’Connell Street into a ‘car park’, felt less like an outpouring of frustration by people who’d otherwise have been gainfully employed, and more like some recreational blackguarding by welfare-addicted layabouts with nothing better to do.

Barricading fuel depots and obstructing commuters is as valid an expression of discontent as the looting of Footlocker in November 2023. It is sinister, subversive and clearly orchestrated by shadowy forces with agendas profoundly at odds with the public good.

Right now, Iran is hanging teenagers who protested peacefully against that monstrous regime last January – lawful protest is essential and healthy in a functioning democracy. 

But parking a truck on O’Connell Bridge and walking away is not a legal act, especially in a city where your car will be clamped, and a swingeing fine imposed on you, if you overstay by five minutes at a parking space on any street in the capital.

Punishing your fellow citizens for circumstances entirely beyond the country’s control is no way to win support for your cause, and on the contrary is likely to harden public sentiment against it. 

Nobody wants a Government that caves in to bully-boy tactics, and yet thuggish behaviour has been rewarded, rather than punished, in the past.

The then-tánaiste, Joan Burton, was trapped for several hours in a car by water charge protesters back in 2014, but instead of declaring those outrageous scenes to be a Rubicon that the malcontents had crossed, the Government instead rolled over and scrapped the charges.

More recently, they gave in to the farmers over the Mercosur deal, squandering valuable political capital in Brussels by voting against a free trade agreement which Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary, who is also a beef farmer, has argued will benefit this country’s agriculture sector in the long run.

At the time of the water protests, Joan Burton caused liberal vapours when she wondered how so many who couldn’t afford a fiver a week for water could still stretch to expensive smartphones and tablets to film the protests – God forbid anyone should be expected to live without the latest technology, no matter who’s footing the bill.

A similar sense of entitlement has informed much of the response to the idea of ‘personal rationing’ to offset fuel price rises. 

The Taoiseach’s reasonable advice to drive slower so as to conserve petrol was scorned, even as speed-related road deaths spiral.

On radio last week, a motorist complained that he’d been forced to car-pool with workmates to share fuel expenses, but how did it ever make economic or climate-conscious sense for colleagues heading to the same workplaces to travel alone in five- or even seven-seater vehicles?

That’s basically like hauling your three-piece sitting-room suite to work every day, and wondering why your commuting costs are high.

This is not Siberia. Nobody is going to die of hypothermia in April if we turn off the radiators a few weeks early, or expire from exhaustion on a walk to schools or offices.

Last week, former Green Party leader Eamon Ryan recalled the taste of petrol, from the oil crisis of the 1970s, when motorists siphoned fuel from their own cars to bail out strangers stranded by empty tanks. 

We have more options these days, with remote working now a possibility that didn’t exist back then, and increasingly sustainable and renewable energy sources – wind power was the stuff of sci-fi half a century ago – prove that we didn’t entirely waste that particular crisis.

As Tánaiste Simon Harris has pointed out, our national finances are in a far healthier state than they were when the banks collapsed in 2008.

Common sense, resilience, obvious economies and, most of all, pulling together, as the motorists of the 1970s did, are the measures required to get us through this emergency.

But blocking other citizens from getting to their work, their studies or their hospital appointments under the guise of legitimate protest is a very ominous development indeed.

Charlie's Angels may have run headlong into danger... but the danger of looking your age? Not so much...

It’s all of 50 years since Charlie’s Angels first hit our screens – a sort of crime-fighting Spice Girls outfit, for those too young to remember – and three of the original Angels got together this week to mark the occasion.

Considering that Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Cheryl Ladd, who replaced Farrah Fawcett-Majors, have a combined age of 231, they’re eerily youthful, despite looking as though someone took their faces apart and put them back together in a hurry, and not necessarily in the right order. 

Jaclyn, 80, hailed the show as ground-breaking because it was about ‘women chasing danger instead of being rescued’. 

That seems to have been a hard habit for Joanna Lumley, who played their UK equivalent Purdey in The Avengers, to break: a thief who tried to nick the 79-year-old’s car in London this week was chased from the scene by a dressing-gown-clad Joanna commanding him to ‘f*** off’.

How Meghan egged on the conspiracy theorists with THAT Easter family egg-hunt video

To mark the Easter celebrations, Meghan Markle released a video of her children Archie, six, and Lily, four, running through a meadow on an egg hunt at their California home.

At least, we have to take her word for it that they were her kids, since they were filmed from behind and their faces were obscured, to protect the privacy that the near-reclusive Meghan values so much.

Once again, the conspiracy theorists were out in force, with some wondering if the pair were twins since, despite the two-year age gap, they seemed to be the same height.

Still, given the irreparable meltdown in the Beckham clan, which estranged son Brooklyn has blamed on his parents’ relentless oversharing on social media throughout his childhood, it’s hard to blame any celebrity for wanting to keep their children out of the spotlight as much as possible. But if Meghan really wanted privacy for her family, then why release any images of the nippers at all?

I reckon it’s more likely that she’s deliberately cultivating interest in her children with these teasing shots, so that she can eventually sell the first official pictures to the highest media bidder for a king’s ransom.

Banned Kanye takes flight with festival millions 

Kanye West had already pocketed his $15 million (€13m) fee for playing at the Wireless Festival in London before he was banned from Britain this week over his antisemitic antics. He’s described himself as a Nazi, released a song called Heil Hitler last year, and sells T-shirts emblazoned with the swastika, but has blamed his behaviour on bipolar disorder.

His erratic behaviour in the past few years, including trashing a €60 million house that he never lived in, seem to suggest a genuine mental health problem. Then again, there was little sympathy from many black celebrities for John Davidson, the Tourette sufferer who shouted the N-word at the Baftas in February, so sauce for the goose and all that.

Sources suggest West will refuse to refund his fee – not quite mentally disordered enough, then, to hand back $15 million without a fight?

How Michael O'Leary is lightening his load 

Ryanair’s decision to increase cash bonuses for staff who catch passengers with oversized bags seems to be paying dividends, Michael O’Leary said this week. Even though the €2.50 that the staff get for ruining some poor sod’s trip is a fraction of the €75 charge, it’s been incentive enough to reduce the number of outsize bags dramatically.

The more people whinge on social media about being caught for the charge the better, he says, pointing out that ‘the more PR you get, the more the numbers go down’.

While it’s not like him to celebrate a drop in revenue, lighter planes mean less fuel, so it probably balances out. He boasts he’s never been fined because ‘I’m the most compliant passenger ever’, and having seen the RTÉ documentary Turbulence – he charged Tony Ryan’s aunt €3 for a drink – I reckon he’d fire any employee who didn’t penalise him for an outsize bag.

These storm names sound like the cast of a soap opera

Ah, here. We’ve only just seen off Storm Dave and now it seems that the next storm on the calendar is called Storm Eddie.

It is surely time to review the wisdom of inviting the public to suggest names for the annual alphabetical roll call of weather events, because they’re beginning to sound like the cast of a soap opera, or the guest list for a stag weekend.

At least Storm Chandra, which struck in January, struck a suitably ominous and unpredictable note, and even in real life you’d give anyone called Éowyn a wide berth.

Still, they might not have had a great selection to choose from – what’s the betting that at least half of the suggestions were Stormy McStormface?