Riot police re-impose uneasy order on the streets

EVENTS appeared to be slipping from the Government’s control at an alarming rate.

Blood-red protests rapidly replaced the suddenly quaint-looking red paint variety that hit Mary Harney as the roads around the Dáil compound teemed with student demonstrators while riot police unleashed batons to clear them.

The message from the High Court was just as defiant as the one from the streets as the Government was accused of “offending” the Constitution with its refusal to hold by-elections — and all the while the bond market sharks circled the state menacingly once more, sending borrowing rates to yet new highs.

While mounted riot police made a show of force at the gates of Leinster House, the Garda dog unit patrolled inside as the Battle of Merrion Row raged around the corner where gardaí moved in to force scores of demonstrators from the lobby of the Finance Department.

Bricks, eggs and placards hit the building as around 2,000 people massed in the small side street. Violence soon flared as gardaí put the blame on hard-core demonstrators and demonstrators railed at Garda heavy-handedness.

The scenes will have done nothing to allay increasing international fears Ireland is in free-fall and about to default on its debts — fears that push the cost of borrowing ever higher and the threat of an IMF takeover ever nearer.

But the bottles hitting the gates of Leinster House were as nothing compared to the blast of anger from the High Court.

From the opening salvos of the Civil War through to the Offences Against the State Act, Sinn Féin is unused to victory at the Four Courts. But not any more.

Few people thought the Shinners’ judicial appeal against the lack of a Donegal South West by-election would succeed — and no one expected the ruling handed down against the Government to be so damning.

Leaving the seat vacant for 17 months was an outrageously cynical move to try and keep this Government afloat and destroys Brian Cowen’s oft repeated mantra that his mandate does not depend on popular opinion but numbers in the Dáil. He has deliberately stacked those numbers in his favour by leaving Donegal, Waterford and Dublin South without full representation. The fall of Jim McDaid means the four vacant seats now outnumber the Government’s technical majority of three.

By manipulating the democratic protest to such an extent, the Government has created a situation where increasingly ugly displays of anger will inevitably erupt outside the Dáil in the run-up to the bloodiest budget in the history of the state.

The EU’s monetary commissioner Olli Rehn — effectively Ireland’s new viceroy — arrives in town on Monday to oversee the Brussels-ordered four-year austerity plan besieged Finance officials are scrambling to put together.

It was clear how quickly Irish economic sovereignty was dissolving in the rain as the reign of the riot police was re-imposing an uneasy order on the pavements surrounding Government Buildings.