The paradox of power as republican tail wags the State dog
I figured O’Connell Street would be well clear by the time I would be heading home. In the meantime, duty called.
As the day progressed, duty calls became increasingly difficult to hear and deliver on. It’s hard to concentrate on recording TV interviews when sirens from squad cards and ambulances are shrieking in the background and a helicopter overhead seems to be flirting with the idea of landing on the roof.
My clients took away DVDs of themselves sounding as if they’d been interrogated in a high street in Baghdad on a bad day. We all figured on something less than positive might be happening a few streets away, but had no idea of the scale, organisation, the criminality and the terror of the riots.
A bit like the powers-that-be, who seemed to have no advance idea of the scale, the organisation, the criminality and the terror of the riots.
While nobody would suggest that what happened in Dublin on Saturday could have been anticipated in all of its detail, the indications are that republican websites were used, in the week leading to the planned march, to stimulate riot participation.
The Taoiseach, having visited the city centre in the aftermath of the conflict, was able to say that material for the rioters had been lined up in side streets beforehand and that people in his own constituency, the previous night, had been aware of promised violence.
It was a no-brainer to understand that concrete blocks piled in the street presented ready-made weapons for such action.
Any student of urban conflict could have predicted that opportunistic looting would be a consequence of any substantial street fighting.
That adds up to an awful lot of indicative information available well in advance of the riots. It does not seem to have been picked up by garda intelligence, which, given 30 years of experience of marches in the North and unprecedented recent cross-Border intelligence co-operation, is extraordinary.
Equally extraordinary was the Minister for Justice’s reaction. By nightfall on Saturday, he was rightly congratulating the gardaí for their bravery and sympathising with those of the force who had been injured.
By lunchtime on Sunday, he was indicating that while a review of the day would have to happen, he accepted the assistant garda commissioner’s assurance that the gardaí would have planned differently if they’d had full intelligence. The issue is why they didn’t have such intelligence.
What was most interesting about his response was that he was under no pressure. In theory, he should have been. Although he neither owns nor operates the Garda Siochána, the buck, nonetheless, stops on his desk and, this weekend, the nation saw a relatively small, well-organised group make bits of the capital city centre, in marked contrast to his own optimistic expectations of the day. The reason he was under no pressure is not unrelated to the speech he made earlier in the week, about the smaller partner in a coalition owning the direction of the government in which they participate.
His comments drove Fianna Fáil nuts, created lots of climbing-the-ladder publicity for him, and distracted other political parties by the willingness of the PDs having climbed any ladder, to climb back down and then go to bed with any available political partner.
McDowell’s speech was of much more significance than any of these reactions suggest. What he was talking about is what’s called the Olson Paradox, a profoundly important syndrome, elucidated by Mancur Olson, a late 20th century American Professor of Economics. Olson’s Paradox holds that larger groups may be less successful than smaller groups in furthering their interests.
In the US, for example, the AARP (the American Association of Retired People) has 35 million members, yet the numerically smaller National Rifle Association yields far greater influence. Al Gore’s presidential campaign demonstrated this influence.
The Democrat was seen as favouring policies which made sense to AARP members. He was also seen as favouring gun control, a possibility hated by the NRA. He lost. AARP support for his candidacy was of little or no value to him. NRA opposition, on the other hand, did him damage, not least because 90% of NRA members turn out to vote in any election, whereas only a fraction of the much larger retired persons association are active voters.
IN EUROPE, the Olson Paradox was evident in the early days of the EEC, when farming groups - small, relative to the number of citizens within the community - effectively dictated European food and agriculture policy.
Individual citizens might have had reservations about the price of their butter or about vast food stocks held in intervention, but millions of individual citizens, scattered throughout the community never carried the same clout as farming groups.
Precisely the same thing happened in the US as Jonathan Rauch found out, in the early 90s, when he studied the apparently impregnable strength of lobby groups in Washington who ensured that support programmes, subsidies and agencies devoted to the interests of their clients never died. He came across Olson’s book The Logic of Collective Action.
“Olson showed with mathematical exactitude,” wrote Rauch, “that parochial groups, (such as the sugar lobby) inherently find it easier to organise and act than do larger groups (such as consumers or tax payers) that care more about society as a whole. The larger the group he showed the less it will further its common interest.”
The disproportionate power of smaller groups has something to do with anonymity and inertia in larger groups. The amalgamation of the Workers Party into the Labour Party enlarged the numbers but paradoxically sapped their energy.
Anyone who knew how the old Workers Party membership operated on the ground can testify that the “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”, passion was reduced when immersed in the larger organisation.
Smaller groups may actually gain strength from being outnumbered and unsupported. Irish history is replete with examples, the most obvious being 1916 as historian Nollaig Ó Gadhra has pointed out: “The men of 1916, as is clear from their Proclamation realised that they had no popular mandate, that they were, in fact, a minority, bitterly opposed by the entire range of establishment voices at that time.”
Michael McDowell’s speech is much more important than a smack in the kisser for Fianna Fáil. It happily underlines the disproportionate power yielded by the smaller party in a coalition and the exquisite PD understanding of the dynamic involved. It allows the PDs to do what they do best: opposition while in government.
On the streets on Saturday, a more frightening version of the Olson Paradox was in play. A small, highly-organised group set up an unprecedented violent event. And managed to outwit the much larger entity called the State.
