“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
Mario Savio‘s words ran through my mind when I first heard about the events in Dublin two weeks ago, when a march by 25,000 students turned violent. I’m sure some version of these sentiments were also running through the minds of the 30 or so protesters who attempted to occupy the Dept of Finance or those who took part in the sit-down protest outside, until the Gardai deemed it necessary to employ tactics that would be more at home in Burma or China.
The second thought that ran through my mind was “It’s about time.”
Two years ago, when I graduated, I had spent the previous four years training for a career that suddenly didn’t exist any more, my friends and I were faced with the choice of either wasting away on the dole, or take whatever you could scrimp together from the social welfare and buy a plane ticket to somewhere, anywhere, possibly never to return. I took the only choice I had and left, first for the south of France and now to rural Thailand. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not unhappy; I haven’t seen rain in over a month, right now I’m in an outdoor café where I can buy a beer for under a Euro and nobody is talking about Christmas shopping (one of the perks of a Buddhist country), but I’d rather travel for pleasure than for work.
The vast majority of my friends have had to make similar choices; taking their chances on the dole, working for free in internships and fighting for jobs tat won’t exist in six months, or escaped to Canada, America, Japan, London, West Africa, Barcelona, Paris, Pakistan, Bahrain, Sweden and so on and so on, the list is endless. These people were the best and brightest that Ireland had to offer and now they’re giving away their talents to whoever will take them in.
Anyone who read Morgan Kelly’s article last week in The Times knows how truly fucked we are: “Every cent of income tax that you pay for the next two to three years will go to repay Anglo’s losses, every cent for the following two years will go on AIB, and every cent for the next year and a half on the others. The Irish State is insolvent: its liabilities far exceed any realistic means of repaying them. For a country, insolvency is the equivalent of death for a person, and is usually swiftly followed by bankruptcy, the equivalent of a funeral.”
Now the mortgage defaults are landing on the hallway mats, people are having to make hard choices and those choices will affect you most of all, the young people of Ireland, and it’s up to you to make sure that you have a say in some of the choices that are made. Young people are among the least represented people in our society and yet will have to endure the worst of the hardships.
The increase in education fees is just the beginning of it, next month’s budget will determine your future; whether or not the dole is enough to live on, whether or not you’ll have to move back home, whether your local shop can afford to take you on part time, whether or not your parents will have to sell their house…whether or not they can still afford to send you to college. You can’t rely on the opposition government, you can’t rely on the Green party to suddenly grow a spine, you can’t rely on the left to suddenly get their act together and provide a realistic and sustained alternative, you can’t rely on USI in its current form to ever be more than an ineffective mouthpiece who are just happy that they even have a seat at the table. A 90 minute march around the capital is all well and good, but that’s been done before, all it did was delay the inevitable. 25,000 people is a loud voice, revolutions have been won with far fewer. I’m not suggesting violent action like we saw two weeks ago, if we want to live in a peaceful democracy we have to accept that the state has the monopoly on violence, beating up Gardai isn’t the answer, there are alternatives. What if you all registered in Galway and voted for the same person? What if those 25,000 people simply sat down in the street instead of marching? What about 50,000? They couldn’t arrest you all, their horses and dogs would tire sooner than you, their batons would break before you, their voices would go hoarse before yours and their will would bend before yours. What if you left Ireland? What if you had to?
I started with Mario Savio, so I’ll give him the last word: “You can’t disobey the rules every time you disapprove. However, when you’re considering something that constitutes an extreme abridgement of your rights, conscience is the court of last resort.”
[Article published in this week's Sin Newspaper]
