LETTER: Sack of Spuds?

Horizon Magazine operates under an open letter policy

Thanks are due to Kim Ní Chonaill and Ryan Lynch for their respective assertions of orthodoxy and theorising of leadership movement off historic precedent; here I would like to make the effort to concretise a bit more.

We can dispense with the notion that those protestors on O’Connell Street are undergoing proletarianisation. Opportunities for self-employment and access to credit are two of the most significant blockers to this process in advanced capitalist societies. One of those present had custom jackets bearing the same logo of the multiple trucks in their fleet; another has an Instagram account devoted to his novelty truck, these are not people being thrown back on their labour power. However neither should we be so assured of the availability of a defined class cleavage here. The dynamic between boss and worker in an SME is different from one located in a more labour-intensive operation such as a beef processing or a producer / grower / distributor operation. In addition these guys are highly leveraged; moving their vehicles on so quickly on being threatened with fines and penalty points was an exercise in averting the very real risk of an increased insurance premium.

I am interested in pulling at the evidence that the protestors, contrary to some online commentary, may have enjoyed significant support from the Irish population and large majorities in the left and soft-left parties.¹ Rather than calling for a touch-me-not attitude, we could take seriously the idea that Paul Murphy, Roderic O’Gorman and Sinn Féin, are in touch with the anti-government convictions of their constituents. 

The cohort which turned out seems to fit a pattern we have seen in Europe over the past decade; self-employed, beneficiaries of subsidies, in or related to the agricultural logistics sector signalling their hostility to decarbonisation and demanding insulation from higher costs arising from geopolitically-driven supply shocks. In an Irish context though this is distinct; the extent of our imports render us immediately vulnerable to rising fuel costs. There are a number of indicators that this crisis will be uniquely severe, its duration is indeterminate and the twenty-six counties are already a high-cost economy with an infrastructure underdeveloped relative to headline figures regarding wealth and wages, a distortion which has only become more pronounced since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Since 2022 food prices have gone up ~25%. Energy and housing utilities are up 37%, insurance ~22%.² 30% of households are estimated to be in energy poverty, ~320k (~1 in 7 electricity customers) are in arrears at the end of last year and up to 26% of gas customers.³ The majority of these arrears are long-term, signalling a deepening crisis of inability to pay, which is of course skewed towards the unemployed and those who are suffering from illnesses keeping them out of work. Wages have risen ~11 – 12% but these increases are concentrated in IT and professional services, pulling the average up.⁴ Those working in accommodation and retail are also coming from a lower level, meaning their disposable income is hit first, and harder. None of this will be news to those with experience of Ireland’s k-shaped economy in which aggregates conceal the divergence. 

Vincent Bevins would tell us that under present circumstances — an effectively leaderless campaign with inchoate objectives organised around social media, a weak left — we should prepare for this to rebound to the benefit of a populist right. The danger is even greater than in those case studies Bevins offers, given the radicalisation which the right has undergone in the past decade and the concentrated character of hybrid warfare waged by American tech oligarchs and their algorithms. This seems to me to be the likely outcome, but I do not think it is inevitable and the crucial question to answer is why PBP’s years old cost of living campaign has failed to resonate in the same way. 

It is great to see so many expressing their position on the protests via a commitment to Marx’s writings, but his most important concept in an applied analysis is contradiction; the non-identity of social forces and the means they adopt to pursue what they collectively intuit to be their interests. That support for a movement which opposes a carbon tax movement pulls in 50% of the Green Party might tell us there are serious and growing numbers of people squeezed to the extent that they will accept short to medium term discomfort such is the strength of their anti-FFG sentiment.

Yours etc

C.F. Uí Néill

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1. Depending on a poll from the Sindo could be a dodgy proposition, this is this letters’ hostage to fortune. https://www.businesspost.ie/article/more-than-half-support-actions-of-fuel-protestors-poll/ ↩︎
2. https://data.cso.ie/table/CPM20 ↩︎
3. https://www.thejournal.ie/energy-bills-arrears-electricity-gas-6969259-Feb2026/ 
   https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41800784.html
   https://threshold.ie/advocacy-campaign/energypoverty/  ↩︎
4. https://data.cso.ie/table/EHQ15 ↩︎