Budget Day Dáil Protest: More a polite knock on the door rather than a storming of the Bastille?

dublin | rights, freedoms and repression | news report

Wednesday December 08, 2010 19:09

by TD - Galway Unites Against Cuts

"Heading towards a nastier society" (Vincent Browne)

It's cold comfort that yesterday's inhuman budget was the last sting of a vicious, dying government, chilling to realise it was allowed to flourish and pass by the broad mass of the Irish people standing idly by and not engaging in mass protest.? Yesterdays proceedings outside the Dáil were mild, ultra-mild and weak when compared to the mass protests in Greece and France and the fact that the EU/ECB/IMF attacks on our poor, vulnerable, working classes and middle classes, through their willing government catspaws, are far more severe here than the aforementioned countries.?

Fintan O'Toole in his new book; Enough is Enough mentions this problem: What the great and the good really mean when they use the word is not that the financial fallout is manageable. It is that the people are manageable. The assumption is that you can squeeze health and education, do almost nothing to create jobs, lock the economy into a downward spiral of cuts and depression, and there will be no long-term political or social consequence. Underpinning all the gambles on the banks is the ultimate gamble - on the infinite masochism and/or gullibility of the Irish people.

Whether its our "infinite masochism and gullibility" or more banally and fanciful, perhaps, the opium of X Factor, TV soaps and suchlike escapist bilge that was responsible for yesterday's abysmal turnout is a moot point, but it begs the question what exactly will galvanise the survival instinct of Irish people - as in '98, pitchcaps and walking gallows, another Israeli genocidal attack on Gaza or a far worse attack on Iran, perhaps, or is it just a case of the Stockholm syndrome writ large.?

The dismaying truth is; apart from the thousands who marched against health/pension cuts and other matters the past two years and the 100,000 who marched in the recent ICTU Dublin mockery of a "protest", even though the wolf is now inside their doors, the broad mass will not be moved and through their enertia acquiese in their own immiseration and dehumanisation.?