In April the country was brought to a grinding halt by fuel protests. The Irish left was completely blindsided by this sudden outbreak of nationally paralysing civil disobedience and found itself divided on how best to respond to the protests. In the event, the protests were disarmed and dispersed within a short time frame by some cynical but effective government manoeuvring and a targeted buy-out. The speed with which the dispute was resolved saved the left from having to form a more coherent response.
Because the trigger for the protests was fuel price rises, some media commentators drew parallels with the Gilets jaunes (“Yellow vests”) protests which took place in France in the winter of 2018–19. It is therefore worth comparing and contrasting the two scenarios in order to understand the factors that might affect the left’s strategic decisions on whether and how to engage with such movements.
The French connection
To anyone who followed French politics in the winter of 2018, this April’s images of fuel protesters blocking ring roads and the streets of the capital were oddly familiar. The Gilets jaunes had also started as a revolt over fuel, similarly appearing like an eruption from outside the established political and trade-union structures, and apparently expanding outwards from an initially narrow grievance about fuel pump prices into an ever-expanding attack on a governing class seen as remote, metropolitan and contemptuous of the people who keep the country outside the capital moving. The comparison is irresistible, and several commentators reached for it immediately. But if the similarities are seductive for those sections of the commentariat who like a good analogy or historical parallel, the differences are perhaps more useful for thinking about political strategy.
The first, most obvious difference is one of scale and duration. It is not simply that France is a much bigger country than Ireland – but that the widespread, de-centred actions of the Gilets jaunes took place across hundreds or thousands of rural and non-metropolitan areas. Significantly, the movement had much more time to develop, both in its contradictions and its promise and potential. Self-organisation, particularly of large numbers of people, many of them with no previous experience of organising or militancy, across a vast terrain, takes weeks and months to build.
In the Irish case the protests broke out the day after Easter Monday, Tuesday April 7th, and by early morning of the following Sunday the blockades had already been cleared. There was barely enough time for people to react, never mind try to develop any organising potential the movement might have had.
It is on that second point that we reach one of the key differences between the French and Irish cases: the Irish fuel protests were not as spontaneous as they initially appeared. But before we get to that, we have to look at the structural differences between the responsibility of the two different governments in the initial fuel price trigger and their freedom of action in the face of the subsequent protests.
In the French case, the fuel price rise was not a product of the swings of commodity markets but the deliberate policy of the Macron government. As such, the arrogance of the government’s action in ignoring the needs of the majority of its rural and non-metropolitan population immediately connected the issue to wider discontent over the democratic deficit of the new ‘centrist’ government, intent on imposing by fiat the neoliberal restructuring that French people have been resisting for decades. In the Irish case the fuel price rise was the unplanned outcome of an exogenous supply shock triggered by Trump’s indefensible attack on Iran and the resulting closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
The other structural difference is a little more counter-intuitive, given that France is a bigger and – by normal reckoning – much richer country than Ireland. But – not unrelated to that decades-long struggle between the French people and its government over fiscal reforms – France is actually a much more cash-strapped state than the Ireland of today. Ireland’s budget surplus last year was €11.2bn (1.8% of GDP). By contrast, at the time of the Gilets jaunes protests in 2018, France had a deficit of 2.5% of GDP (€59.6bn). This has since increased to 5.1% last year. Which means the Irish government could, when push came to shove, actually afford a roughly €500m buy-out in a way that would make Macron and most EU partners green with envy.
This calculation no doubt played some role in the plans developed by the group of farming contractors, hauliers and other agrarian logistics small businessmen who gathered on the 28th of March at the Midlands Park Hotel in Portlaoise, in response to the hike in green and white diesel prices. While the fuel price increase hit the whole population, this particular economic-corporate sector’s profit margins and financial situation (given its highly leveraged plant) were especially squeezed.
The other grievance the attendees shared was frustration with the established intermediary bodies recognised by the Irish state for their sector, as part of the general social partnership framework. Out of that meeting a new breakaway group calling itself the Irish Haulage Farming Construction Contractors Amalgamation (IHFCCA) wrote to all TDs, demanding recognition and satisfaction for their grievances “or else …”. Perhaps unsurprisingly given how many such letters TDs get every day, the IHFCCA’s missive went unheeded at that stage.
A failed recognition battle
Hindsight is 20/20 and it’s now easy to see, looking back and knowing what most did not at the start of the protests, that this was not a spontaneous mass insurgency. But it was also less of a battle over immediate income than a battle over recognition, to use the trade union terminology. In effect the IHFCCA were rejecting the existing social partnership representative groups for their sector – the Irish Farmers Association (IFA), Irish Road Haulage Association (IRHA) and the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers Association (ICMSA) – and demanding government recognition for the IHFCCA as main negotiating partner around this protest. None of the left political parties calling on the government to ‘engage with the protestors’ explicitly called for IHFCCA recognition, but given they were the protest organisers it is hard to see how this wasn’t practically the same thing.
In the event, whether by accident or design, the government’s initial delay in responding to the infrastructure blockages, particularly the refinery and fuel terminal blockades, led to 500 out of 1,600 filling stations running out of fuel by 10 April, a number which rose to 600 the next day. The resulting media furore gave the government cover to effect a pincer movement of sending in the Public Order Unit to clear the refinery and fuel terminal blockades, while simultaneously opening ‘negotiations’, though not with the protest organisers but the incumbent social partners, i.e. the IFA, IRHA and ICMSA. The announcement of a sector-specific bailout restricted to diesel costs for the rural small business interests also crushed any popular hopes that aid to wider society might be on the agenda.
Class struggle or petty bourgeois reaction?
Apart from tactical considerations like whether it was wise to back the IHFCCA’s recognition battle, at least in effect, if not in words, or whether to engage with the crowds at the city centre gatherings, the bigger, still unresolved question for the left was how to categorise the movement as a whole.
This was also very much a question for French leftists back in 2018, faced with a media barrage against the Yellow vest movement focusing specifically on any far-right involvement with the movement. As one anarchist commentator put it, rather than falling into a naïve line of tout ce qui bouge est rouge (“everything that moves is red”), it was important to acknowledge the internal contradictions of the movement while at the same time recognising its nature as a genuinely popular uprising based on direct action and self-organisation, and giving expression to genuine social distress and economic suffering.
In the Irish case we can recognise the resonance the fuel protests had with many working-class people who shared the same economic pain. But the direct action tactic used in the Irish blockades was entirely dependent on the capital assets of the small businessmen running the show – the giant tractors, HGVs and coaches. This barrier to participation – in direct contrast to the egalitarian genius of selecting as a badge of affiliation the yellow vest that every French motorist must by law carry in their car – left the vast majority of the population, supporters included, as passive spectators. A tactic whose capital requirements exclude the vast majority of the working class cannot hope to scale up to a genuine mass movement.
The other side to a petty bourgeois elitist form of direct action that excludes most people was the lack of any real potential for self-organisation for supporters. Sure, you could stand around and hope for a turn with the megaphone at a town centre rally maybe. But self-organisation means the possibility of exercising real control over the direction of the movement, including its negotiating positions. And that, as the self-appointed leaders from the IHFCCA made clear to the national media and all and sundry, was not going to happen. James Geoghegan made the point forcefully to one paper saying “I would be one of the leaders … The media says no one is in charge. That’s false. That’s to discredit us.”
That said, it was clear that once the protests began the dynamics quickly escaped any fantasies of unified command. If the IHFCCA coterie had been effective in their tactical planning, their political preparation was, by contrast, utterly woeful. In an effort to retain initiative in events that were clearly spinning out of their control, loudmouths like Geoghegan, Christopher Duffy, John Dallon, et al, were forced to continually inflate their rhetoric to ever more hyperbolic and unrealistic demands, culminating in demanding the head of the Taoiseach.
These were demands which they simply had no possible means of attaining once they had been shut out of the talks and the refinery and fuel terminal blockades had been cleared. By the time the Garda Public Order Unit moved in on O’Connell Street in the early hours of Sunday morning, there was little fight left in the exhausted and demoralised protesters. In the end, they drove off their vehicles willingly rather than see them impounded by the low-loaders waiting to haul them away.
Lessons for the future
Hindsight is not only 20/20 vision, it has a bias to the winning side that can make their eventual victory look like a foregone conclusion from the outset. Similarly it is too easy to read the losing side as always having been doomed from the start by their own internal contradictions. That said, it is hard to see how the game plan of the organisers and the limitations of their own political outlook and prejudices could ever have allowed the initiative to transcend the boundaries of a narrow economic-corporate fight for preferential treatment and entitlements to trigger a movement that would have expanded into a generalised struggle around the cost of living on a genuinely class basis.
In a famous passage in his Prison Notebooks Gramsci warned against the twin perils of ‘economism’ and ‘ideologism’: the attempt to interpret crisis and movements as being either purely the effect of economic structural forces or, alternatively, purely the product of the ideological leanings of a movement’s leaders.
What leftist militant has not, at one time or another, been part of a movement dismissed by the bosses and the media as purely the effect of “outside agitators” and “malcontents”, rather than based on any genuine social need? We should take heed not to do the same to movements we initially find ourselves on the outside of; not to dismiss them entirely on the basis of identifying reactionary or far-right elements present in the contradictory maelstrom that forms around any suddenly emerging movement. Pure ‘ideologism’ would mean sitting permanently on the sidelines of most social movements.
That said, the opposite error of assuming any movement that bears some relation to genuine economic issues – whether housing, services or cost of living – is necessarily a class movement in embryo, despite visible presence of far-right figures and groups in key positions of influence, would be potentially fatal. In the end we need to take careful stock of the full picture of the ‘relations of forces’ as Gramsci put it. Behind the petty bourgeois reactionary buffoonery of the Geoghegans, Duffys, Dallons, et al, lies a stumbling rural economy in a finance-driven spiralling crisis that most urban left militants and community organisers know very little about right now. One that is going to turn up on our doorstep again in the not-too-distant future, regardless of what’s happening with the Strait of Hormuz.
Paul Bowman is an anarchist and anti-fascist living and working in Dublin. Bilingual in English and French, he aggregates the francophone anarchist press for the AInfos news service. He is a writer and independent researcher in the fields of ideology studies and social theory.