Brendan Ogle’s balanced insider’s guide to water protests

From Bended Knee To a New Republic: How the Fight for Water Is Changing Ireland

Author: Brendan Ogle

ISBN-13: 978-1-908308-95-5

Publisher: Liffey Press

Guideline Price: €19.95

Irish people love their history. The problem, however, is that much of it goes unrecorded for lack of time, lack of writers, or lack of resources. Events and characters thus often vanish into oblivion or become the objects of entertaining myths and legends, leaving us largely in the dark over what really shaped what we have become.

In this respect, one of Brendan Ogle's main contributions in this book (subtitled How the Fight for Water Is Changing Ireland) is to vividly document Ireland's water charges protest movement, which emerged in reaction to austerity policies implemented across the Europe. The communities, trade unions and political parties that came together to tell the Government that enough is enough created an event of historical significance – in fact, per capita one of the world's most important protest movements for social change.

Ogle has been at the centre of this adventure from its inception. His writing combines personal reflection and analysis to tell the story of Right2Change and Right2Water, the groups around which the protests have coalesced. His approach is effective, moving seamlessly from light anecdotes to more serious interpretation. It is, overall, a reliable and balanced guide to the water protests and the institutional infrastructure supporting them, told by an insider.

Self-critical appraisal

Ogle has been a trade union man for years and works for Unite. But let's discard one likely prejudice immediately: From Bended Knee to a New Republic is not a biased or uncritical account of everything on the left. In fact, it is on many occasions a candid, human and self-critical appraisal of its subject – and of its author's role in it.

For example, Ogle readily concedes agreeing with those who believe trade unions are in many respects part of the establishment and have sold out by entering social partnership, and that they have become ineffective and too close to power. What he seeks to highlight, however, is that some unions still take effective action to achieve social change, such as the six that joined the water protest movement (Unite, Mandate, the Communications Workers Union, the OPATSI, CPSU and TEEU) out of 50 unions or so nationally.

The book also contains lively and frank discussions of the difficulties in putting together a national coalition of ordinary people, left political parties and unions. In particular, Ogle tells in some detail how the pragmatic progressive approach of the unions and communities regularly clashed with attempts by the Anti-Austerity Alliance and People Before Profit to out-radicalise everybody.

To read the inside story of the water charges movement is to enter into a world that many may consider mysterious. But the journey on which Ogle takes us will be eye-opening to readers unfamiliar with the activist scene in Ireland. And what is striking is the simplicity of it all.

We meet people struggling to build a more progressive Ireland with all the pitfalls and rewards that it entails. These include Dave Gibney, the co-organiser of Right2Change, and Michael Taft, the economist behind many of the group’s budgetary proposals. There are also the numerous ordinary people who have succeeded in establishing 106 local protest groups in 26 counties, and who constitute the movement’s most important component.

We are also presented with the campaign’s 10 policy principles, including the right to a good health care system, the right to decent conditions in the work place, the right to housing, the right to equality and a sustainable environment. This shows that the movement does offer practical alternatives and is not simply a knee-jerk reaction to government.

Negative media coverage

There is, finally, a recurring theme about the media coverage of the water charges movement. News outlets have been largely in favour of water charges, so the protest movement has therefore received its fair share of negative coverage, just like other forms of resistance or reaction to the past years of austerity.

For example, every citizen must know by now that Labour Party leader Joan Burton was “imprisoned” in her car for 2½ hours, surrounded by protesters. Yet, the same sympathy has not been visible in elite discourse for the six individuals who have been jailed by the State, some of them for weeks, for protesting the water meters. Their names may even have been forgotten: Damien O’Neill, Bernie Hughes, Derek Byrne, Paul Moore, Sean Doyle and Eamon McGrath.

Given the hot temperature that characterizes the issue of Irish water charges, the book promises to generate much debate. And that’s a good thing, because the movement it describes is of historical significance.

Julien Mercille is an associate professor at University College Dublin.