Electoral ‘bloodshed’ of 2016 will mimic Easter Rising in changing little
Intended to be a catalyst to renew the Republic, it will be that, but more. Next year can be the forest fire that leaves little more than ashes. Eventually, there may be renewal; but first destruction; then disappointment.
Today’s marchers, protesting about water charges, are part of the dismantlement. Embalmed in a same-system for years, the dismemberment of our political architecture is frightening, for some. But there is more to fear in the expectation than in the experience. If the prophecy of opinion polls is fulfilled for 2016, there will be the crashing of an edifice that has morally, if not constitutionally, lost its authority.
There are coincidences between our decade of upheaval, now, and the decade whose centenary we are commemorating. On the verge of Home Rule, then, much was promised, but nothing delivered. The prospect of imminent political change crystallised into extra-parliamentary belligerence. The territorial unity, subsequently sundered by partition, was already deeply fractured.
The failure to pursue promised reform unwittingly combined appeasement of forces at home with a fatal misunderstanding of events abroad.
The HH Asquith British government had a world war to fight. It was a crisis so great that change had to wait. But the status quo couldn’t hold and events did not delay. If that government unwittingly forfeited its moral authority in Ireland, the leaders of the Rising only found theirs in the conflagration they ignited. Legitimacy came first in their execution, then at the ballot box in 1918.
What is most important about today’s marches against water charges is not their size. The significance is that more than half the Irish electorate, albeit in myriad disguises, has walked away from so-called establishment parties. Even to talk in terms of an “establishment” is to undermine a basic premise of Irish politics since 1922. If “classless” politics was a myth, it was a widely believed one and a continually recited narrative. Now, the myth is no longer believed, and the narrative no longer shared. There are no common prayers in our Republic any more. The significance of today’s event is that discordance is more intense than unity. The centre cannot hold. It has earned the derogatory names of an “establishment” and an “elite” because general adherence has dissolved. The name-calling is the sentence of expulsion from the tribe. It took a century, but an Irish establishment has belatedly replaced the British establishment as the object of popular ire. It is a centenary celebration of sorts, I suppose.
The reason 2016 will be successful as spectacle is because it will re-enact, as a puppet show, the visceral upheaval of the original Rising. In decimating establishment parties at the ballot box, the new political nation that emerged nearly 100 years ago will be permanently denuded.
If, by an irony of history, what emerges from the general election planned for 2016 is a bedraggled coalition of all that remains of an establishment once so grand as to embody the political nation, it will, in a sense, be a final reckoning. By default, not design, 2016 is set to fundamentally reset our political order. Conceived as a triumphant finale for a government again embracing its own people, the 1916 centenary increasingly resembles the 300th anniversary celebration of the Russian Romanov dynasty in February, 1913. The Tsar got as warm a welcome in St Petersburg as King George V got in Dublin that July. It was magnificent make-believe.
There is no Bolshevik revolution in the offing here, however. There is no shared unity, either, among the opposition or today’s marchers, beyond discontent and disillusion. Not paying water charges isn’t a policy for anything. It is a protest with a limited life-span.
The greater the delay in paying-up for necessary new water infrastructure, the more we will all pay, one way or another, in the end. But water charges and sundry issues are a means to an end. That end is the definitive conclusion of a largely stable, usually predicable tour-de-table of political power.
Ultimately, the strongest differences between political parties were not policies, but personalities. But now they are a breaking wave that will never come in on the high tide again.
Pulling down the edifice, and replacing elected politicians, who largely served rather than led our existing system, should not be mistaken with achieving meaningful change, however. There will certainly be a passing moment of mass public satisfaction at the accumulated electoral gore. But pass it will and rapidly.
A coalition of all that is left of what went before will only delay the inevitable and will likely intensify the urge for the ultimate end. The alternative is to foist responsibility on those who would lead the crowds today, but who hitherto have never exercised responsibility.
Disunited, deeply suspicious of one another, scrambling for advantage and bound by little except a shared sense of opportunity, what they could offer in government is unknowable.
The prospect of such a government lasting is unlikely. Uncertainty will bring a price. In any event, there is a context to be reckoned with.
We have an annual deficit of €6bn. That is borrowed money, repaid with interest, simply to sustain the status quo. No Irish government can lose the confidence of international money markets without incurring dire consequences. And no government is worthy of the name unless it can muster a majority to pass a budget. We have a government, now, that rode a wave of public anger into office, but the wave has turned back and is carrying them out again. Their successors should expect no less. Increasingly, the only constant is anger. There comes a point when it simply must run its course.
Government is complex. It must promise a brighter future at home, while maintaining credibility abroad.
Rusting water pipes won’t win jobs; neither will higher taxes in lieu of user charges. One upward pressure not factored-in is a 2015 renegotiation of the Haddington Road Agreement, likely to be paid for in 2016. Together with modest reductions in income tax this year, and more promised next year, a pay increase for an essentially unreformed public sector is the final part of the public buffet planned to coincide with our centenary celebrations. Any pay increase north of zero will add significantly to the cost of services, and the debt required to fund them. Chanting “we won’t pay” may be therapeutic. But remember the Easter Rising. It delivered independence, but changed little else. Today’s march is an unstoppable force bound, sooner or later, to meet an immovable object. In Ireland, the unruliness of our revolutions and the consequence of their results have an inverse relationship.
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