LOOK, WHO AMONGST us can claim we’ve never harboured a desire to approximate what it must have felt like to be part of the convoy from the song Convoy by CW McCall? Lord knows it’s an impulse I feel a few times each year. But not like this. Not like this.
When discussing the direct civil action that has rocked Ireland this week, referred to by most as ‘the fuel protests’, it is tempting to rely on gross over-simplifications. And I know what you’re thinking: ‘Carl, isn’t gross oversimplification for humorous effect basically the entire mode of this column?’ Perhaps, imaginary reader whom I talk to in my head. But that’s usually because whatever I’m writing about is already simple, and I’m just making it even simpler.
At the risk of pulling an Adam Curtis on it, I fear that the matter of the fuel protests may in fact be multifaceted. It is my grave concern that there may indeed be many layers of nuance to what is happening right now. Every columnist’s nightmare.
On the one hand, fuel prices going up make it very hard for people to do things that hitherto have been essential to their way of life. That’s true, we all know that’s true. Anything that unexpectedly makes your life harder and leaves you feeling unsupported by the powers-that-be is a universally understood grounds for protest.
There is also the crazy-making contradiction of seeing prices surge ever upwards, even as Tánaiste Simon Harris insists that Ireland is unaffected by global fuel shortages. That is true in the most literal sense, but a bit misleading when you consider that oil wholesalers are increasing their prices across the board because they’re freaking out over an imminent energy doomsday scenario. It’s also, quite crucially, only true for now. I’m not looking out my window at the Strait of Hormuz at the moment, but something tells me that bad boy isn’t returning to the halcyon days of when we’d never heard of it before any time soon.
We need energy for our homes and our cars and our businesses. We have, for the most part, been structurally limited to fossil fuels through little fault of our own. When the price of fossil fuels goes up, therefore, people are upset. Some of those people have tractors at their disposal, and the will to shut down traffic to bring attention to their cause. That’s really inconvenient for a lot of people but it is, more or less, exactly how peaceful protest is supposed to work.
Now, if you’ll let me fetch my wooden spoon and dip it into this big jar of thick, sticky, dripping nuance, I’m about to ladle on a few layers. The first is this: it occurs to me that Ireland is actually a country that has many problems, and has had most of these problems for quite a while.
In the recent past, there have been major anti-war protests, anti-poverty protests, cost-of-living protests, right-to-housing protests and more, and by major, I simply mean ‘a lot of people were there’. Never, to my knowledge, have so many tractors lent those beautiful, gigantic wheels to any other cause. That is absolutely not to say that many, many farmers don’t believe in or protest these issues; of course they do. But thousands of homeless children, for example, does not summon the same volume of tractors to Dublin to shut down O’Connell St. 40% of parents skipping meals so their kids can eat doesn’t do it. Our crisis in CAMHS doesn’t do it, waiting list crises in general don’t do it, our lack of SNAs doesn’t do it. This is a protest that only farmers can pull off, and it may leave some cohorts wondering what could be achieved if further solidarity could be consolidated across causes.
The farmer and haulier blocs in Ireland have a tremendous amount of power, as evidenced by the fact that they are permitted to shut society down in a way that would not be accepted as part of most other legitimate protests. Is it possible that, going forward, they might be prepared to leverage that power for the sake of a more collective cause?
Which brings us to the second sloppy ladleful. This protest has been co-opted in part by the far-right. That does not mean everyone protesting is far-right, or that it can be assumed that any individual participating in the protest sympathises with the far-right; it means exactly what it means. Many of those who are discussing the fuel protests online are doing so with a clear far-right bent. This complicates matters, blurring the lines between those who are desperate and seeking help and those who would like oil to be cheaper but also for people to be less gay. All protests must manage these blurred lines, elements and activists whose personal prejudices get in the way of the bigger picture, and that is a very real responsibility that now lands with those protesting. In some cases, this has already been done, such as an incident during which anti-immigration agitator Philip Dwyer was firmly instructed that the protests were ‘about fuel’ when he turned up to do his thing.
Fractious moments such as this are rich with uncertainty, a veritable banquet for the cynical opportunists. Conor McGregor, who has become a prominent mouthpiece for an incoherent mish-mash of far-right rhetoric since he was found liable for sexual assault last year, is offering free food to those protesting. This post was reshared by Tommy Robinson, a long-time far-right nuisance. Some videos from the protests show protestors ranting about ‘LGBTQ ideology’, while others show protestors praising Donald Trump, as if he is not the chief architect of the conditions they purport to be so injured by.
At this point, I might as well empty the whole jar, so here’s one final layer. The government has been warned for years of the need for Ireland, like the rest of the world, to become less reliant on fossil fuels. To invest instead in renewable, green energy and help all sectors, including agriculture, benefit from the transition. We didn’t take that opportunity, and now the government is over a barrel (a barrel of Brent Crude at a price of about $97 as of Friday morning, to be specific) all because we’re running out of a fuel that we, as a species, have been running out of since we started goddamn using it.
So on the one hand, we have a government which has done so little to prepare society for this completely inevitable turn of events. It is this same government which has since told protestors that they weren’t using ‘the right form of protest’, to ‘cop on’ and threatened to send in the army. On the other hand, we have protestors speaking to a very real concern affecting much of the Irish public right now, causing problems for a government that once again looks unprepared, inconsiderate, and utterly incapable of meeting the moment with anything that looks like leadership. And on the… third hand, I guess, we have a global far-right that has become very adept at using the web and digital platforms to repurpose protests to suit their own agenda.
This government’s approach, for a very long time, has been to project powerlessness in the face of every inconvenience, to blame the ‘global megatrends’ as Leo Varadkar did in his goodbye speech. To make the public feel insane for even suggesting that the government can solve problems. By making a virtue of having no ideas, by presenting itself as the best option for falling in line with the tide of US hegemony, by pretending that stasis is the same thing as stability, this government makes itself look irrelevant, unnecessary and ultimately, probably despised by more people than not.
You can’t let society go to shit and expect everyone to be fine with it forever. At least not in a country that has this many tractors.