We have been blackmailed. A tiny number of men held the State to ransom by showing off their big hard throbbing vehicles. Imagine for a second that these were people of colour, feminists, environmental activists, anti-zionists; no matter what demographic of people shut down the country, the response would have been swift and unsympathetic. The exception being rightwing men. For this demographic is taken to be the true voice of the people and must get the white glove treatment. This is the familiar involution of Democracy subject to Capitalism: rightwing men in Power shrink from confronting the rightwing men on the street.

Let us note that the number of men involved was only of a scale that the Partitionist Elites would be quick to dismiss as easily ignorable, embarrassing even, if it wasa gathering of the Left. Their vehicles, their gall and their amplification by the media made it appear to be an action by a greater number of people than it actually was. Here Macdara struggles a little, because, in truth, this action was not even a protest exactly. There must be a better word for these men than protestors. Agitators? That word has positive connotations to this Marxist. Thug? That gets at their threat, but perhaps not so much at their grasping and pleading nature. They are the lumpen element in our society, unselfconsciously importing the absurdities of the Anglosphere to impress each other and gain the attention of foreigners.

At best, those who took part are arrogant men looking for special treatment now that they themselves have become victims of the Capitalism that they support for other people. These greedy innocents might just not have noticed that they were being represented by established creeps obsessed with all the usual culture war issues of the Anglosphere. But the craven attitude of these louder characters towards the leading Anglo-American Führer explains why they chose to blockade the Irish people and not key US or globalist interests. This is the logic of domestic abusers: picking on vulnerable people at home instead of the big bosses without. 

So untethered are these people from what we might loosely call Reality, that instead of demanding cheap energy from the most obvious source—the wind, an extraordinary natural resource, which Ireland has in abundance—they are engaging in fantasy geology. They are sure that if an oil major would only come and look, that Ireland must be full of huge stores of the stuff that might be tapped right now to fill up all their trucks by tomorrow at the latest. Of course your correspondent is missing the point here: these men want to burn things, to destroy things: there is no pleasure for this type of man in running a home or business off energy generated onsite or locally. The Destruction is the point: they must smell the fumes.

Now Macdara is perfectly aware of an Irish tendency to celebrate underdogs. So, being a gurrier, he would have liked to have seen some creativity in the Government’s response, for example, some properly vicious messaging about the selfishness of these men who would use the State as a cash machine for their failing businesses. You, the People, cannot visit your loved ones, attend school or hospital, keep your own businesses running, because they are holding you to ransom, and making you pay for it. Or perhaps some respectability politics: Government can only deal with actual unions and not men off the street, or perhaps Government might make some time to meet with some women from the movement, forcing the protestors to find some, any, women of their distant acquaintance.

Macdara would have liked to have seen the Government announce an audit by the Revenue Commissioners of all the men sitting smoking by their tractors; since they are looking for public money, the State must be clear on the finances of their businesses. A Government with a strong basis amongst the People could have announced a brief State of Emergency during which the insurance on the vehicles used for the blockade would be void, then sent in its activist base to sort out the rest.

Realistically, a cowardly Partitionist Government would be unlikely to undertake any active route to get rid of these men, but it is hard to think of a worse response than they did offer: letting the action carry on for days, then giving in. They have set us up for further abuse. 

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Meanwhile Sinn Féin and People Before Profit-Solidarity predictably fell into the trap of supporting the blockaders, the former quite sure that there are former SF voters amongst their number who might return to them if the party moves further to the Right; the latter from an automatic—this writer is trying to avoid saying moronic—urge to support anything that looks like a Challenge to the State. No benefit will accrue to either party from their collusion in this abuse.