Creeping change of mindset here risks becoming anti-authoritarian

Throughout austerity, many commentators have bemoaned the loss of the ‘Fighting Irish’? Compared to the Greeks, it is said, we have accepted our fate. But is this true?

Commentators have missed the’silent revolution’, which is an insidious change in the mindset of the average Irish person (of which the water-tax protests were a symptom). The working classes and the squeezed middle are now radicalised and militant. They realise that they have been let down by bankers, politicians, senior civil servants, the Central Bank, the Financial Regulator, and the European Central Bank, and they are not happy.

We have suffered pay cuts, the universal social charge, pension levies, property taxes, water charges, and stealth taxes (like budget increases in the price of cigarettes and proposed increases in the price of alcohol).