Why official complacency about public rage is misplaced

The Government seems blasé about recent expressions of public unhappiness. Though that rage has been unfocused, it is dangerous to ignore it

LAST APRIL, in an unguarded moment, Brian Lenihan remarked that other European governments were “amazed” at his ability to impose harsh budgetary measures. The pension levy on public servants, he suggested, would have been greeted by “riots” in France. The touch of swagger in the Minister’s pronouncements betrayed an underlying complacency. The Government has no real fear of public anger. Its calculation is that, whatever sporadic gestures of protest may be made, the people will take the pain.

It was hard, this week, to argue with those smug conclusions. There were two faces of public anger, and neither of them is likely to have terrified the Government. On Wednesday, public service workers staged a calm, dignified and orderly march in Dublin. It was effective enough as a traditional, almost ritual, expression of unhappiness. But there was no sense that it – or the larger Ictu demonstration the previous week – had crystallised the broader sense of rage that is felt throughout Irish society.

The other face of anger was the wide-eyed, impassioned features of Alan O'Brien as he berated Pat Kenny from the studio audience on Monday night's The Frontline. O'Brien's harangue was effective enough, in the obvious sense that he got himself three minutes of uninterrupted airtime to rail against Kenny's high salary. But it was not likely to worry anyone in power. The Government, indeed, would be only too happy for Kenny – famous, always in the spotlight and known to be a very high earner – to act as a lightning rod.

Indeed, it was notable that the Fianna Fáil TD Peter Kelly was quick off the blocks with a blog post essentially supporting O’Brien and claiming that it “smacks of hypocrisy for RTÉ’s top earners, whose salaries are partly funded from the taxpayer via the licence fee, to question politicians over their own pay and expenses and the tough choices they will have to make coming up to the budget.”

We thus have two ineffective expressions of anger – one that is easily dismissed as purely sectional and one that is easily deflected into a defence of politicians in general and the Government in particular.

There is not much in either of them to shake Brian Lenihan’s confidence that the Irish will show Europe how to take pain. The wrapping-up of Nama as a fait accompli without any substantial public protest reinforces the belief that even policies that create large-scale discontent can sail through with little bother.

Yet the anger clearly exists, and complacency is misplaced. For one thing, we know from history that popular anger, if it is not given constructive expression, can be channelled into ugly politics. Alan O’Brien himself is clearly a troubled individual with a conviction for incitement to hatred, relating to an incident on Grafton Street in Dublin, in December 2006, when he shouted racist abuse against Muslims and “blacks”. But there is an obvious potential for racism and xenophobia to get real political traction.

The failure of would-be taoiseach Enda Kenny to demand the resignation of his party’s mayor of Limerick, Kevin Kiely, is a case in point. Kiely’s demand that non-Irish EU citizens be deported from the country if they cannot find work (a policy that would involve, among other things, Ireland’s withdrawal from the EU itself) is one sign of where incoherent anger might go.

If this is to be avoided, it might help to stop loftily dismissing the rage that so many people feel. “Anger,” Brian Cowen told the Dáil last week, “is not a policy, it does not provide a panacea.” This is undoubtedly true. But being told that anger gets them nowhere is not likely to make people less angry. It may in fact merely add to the sense of frustration and powerlessness that is fuelling a general, often unfocused, rage.

And if anger is not in itself a policy, it might surely be the starting point for a genuine discussion about what has happened in Irish society and what should be done about it. We need to ask why people feel such frustration and why they feel so powerless to affect policies (such as Nama) that will shape their futures so profoundly.

It might help to recognise three things about the current situation. One is that people are very tired of being told that “we” were all on the pig’s back during the golden age of the Celtic Tiger. Those years were good (and even better in retrospect), but for most people the experience of prosperity was decidedly modest. When Bertie Ahern proposed increasing his own salary as taoiseach by €38,000 in 2007, a Dáil question elected the information that that increase was greater than the entire annual salary of 1.5 million workers in the Irish economy – not exactly fabulous riches. Talking to such people as if they were spendthrift millionaires is bound to enrage them.

Secondly, it has to be acknowledged that public debate is still completely dominated by people who are earning at least three times the average wage.

Alan O’Brien’s rant was unfair in singling out Pat Kenny, but there was a core of truth in his central complaint about people on very high salaries “pontificating” about the need for other people’s wages and benefits to be cut. Almost no one who gets to be on a panel discussion on the national airwaves – including journalists and trade union leaders – is likely to feel the full effects of a drastic drop in living standards. It would surely help if the debates were conducted with a little more humility and with a much broader range of voices.

Thirdly, there is what Gene Kerrigan calls Tina – There Is No Alternative. The failure of the political system to articulate a clear set of philosophical and practical alternatives contributes to the despairing, unfocused rage. The overwhelming weight of respectable media opinion reinforces the idea that there are no real choices to be made. Everything is a predetermined inevitability.

Unless politics and the media can challenge that assumption, large sections of the public will be left with a sense of impotent rage. If it is to be a force for positive change, anger has to be allied to argument, analysis and action.