Irish Examiner View: People across Europe are fighting for the ordinary

Protesters take part in a demonstration of high-school students as part of a nationwide protest movement over learning conditions in Marseille, south-eastern France, on October 6. Picture: Miguel Medina / AFP via Getty Images

A school with enough teachers. A home that does not consume the wages needed to live in it. A salary that stretches to the end of the month. These are modest expectations.

Across Europe, they are becoming demands people must take to the streets to defend. In France, students protesting poor conditions in their schools have been joined by teachers and parents.

In Spain, the country’s two largest trade unions have announced a general strike over housing for November 11. In Ireland, public servants are preparing for strikes on October 14 and 21 in a dispute over pay.

Different countries, different disputes, different political circumstances. Their coincidence does not establish a co-ordinated European revolt. But neither should their common grievances be dismissed as an accident of the calendar. Each raises a question governments struggle to answer: What does economic progress mean when people cannot feel its benefits in the ordinary business of living?

Employment offers diminishing reassurance when securing a home remains beyond reach. Spending announcements lose their lustre when pupils arrive in classrooms without teachers. A pay increase provides little comfort if rising costs have already swallowed it. Spain’s housing protests expose this problem. Workers can bargain successfully over wages and find themselves poorer once the rent is paid. The gains secured at the negotiating table can disappear into a landlord’s account.

Irish workers hardly need that contradiction explained. Governments understandably point to the limits of public finances. They must balance competing needs, and cannot meet every demand. Unions, too, have responsibilities beyond their members, particularly when industrial action interrupts healthcare or closes schools. Those consequences are serious.

Families already struggling with costs will carry much of the burden of disruption. Every reasonable effort must be made to reach an agreement before the strikes proceed. But demanding restraint from workers requires more than an appeal to their sense of duty. It requires evidence that their concerns are understood, and a credible willingness to negotiate.

Violence, intimidation, and damage to schools deserve unequivocal condemnation. So does disproportionate force against protesters. Neither disorder nor the political exploitation of discontent absolves governments of addressing the conditions that brought people out.

There is a danger in treating each outbreak of anger as a communications problem: Another announcement to make, another reassurance to issue, another week to survive. Public trust depends on delivery. People need homes they can afford, services they can use, and reasonable confidence that working will provide security. When those expectations repeatedly go unmet, frustration is neither mysterious nor necessarily extremist.

Europe’s governments should listen while that argument is being made through unions, marches, and negotiations. Dismissing legitimate grievances leaves an opening for those who offer scapegoats instead of solutions. The demands are ordinary. The warning is that so many people now feel obliged to fight for them.

Execution spectacle

Former Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan. Picture: Bell County Sheriff's Department via AP

The US government is planning a livestream in which the central event will be a man being shot dead. Nidal Hasan, the former army psychiatrist who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, is scheduled to be executed by firing squad on December 3. The Pentagon has confirmed plans to broadcast his death.

His crimes were appalling. The suffering of those he killed, their families, and the survivors requires no qualification. But the gravity of a crime cannot relieve a government of its obligation to behave humanely.

Indeed, that obligation matters most when the prisoner commands little public sympathy. The death penalty is already an unacceptable exercise of state power. Broadcasting it adds a further degradation: An invitation to spectators to watch a killing presented as an achievement.

Last week’s failed lethal injection execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, which she survived, should have prompted reflection on the cruelty inherent in capital punishment. Instead, the administration is promoting another execution as an event for public consumption.

Defenders may invoke transparency. Governments must certainly be accountable for what they do in the public’s name. But accountability requires independent scrutiny, legal safeguards, and a willingness to answer difficult questions. A livestream supplies none of those protections by itself. Its purpose must be judged against the administration’s staging of the execution at the site of Hasan’s murders, with timing chosen to echo the attack.

The political message is unmistakable: Cruelty is something to advertise. 

The victims deserve remembrance, and their families deserve support. Their suffering must not become the justification for a spectacle designed by politicians eager to display their power over a captive human being. A government confident in its moral authority would not need an audience for its firing squad.