The Water Charges Rebellion 10 Years On

Headlines on March 18th 2008 spoke of a collapsing share price at Anglo Irish Bank. The stock markets had collapsed the day before in what was being called a ‘St. Patrick’s Day massacre’. At the time most working class people probably went about their day and just didn’t realise that the distant shifting of the tectonic plates in the global economy would lead to a decade of pain and suffering for them. The so-called Celtic Tiger was about to die.

Economists had boasted about Ireland’s ‘economic miracle’, with a few dissenting voices pointing out that Ireland had become a corporate ‘Wild West’ - a deregulated paradise for corporate tax dodgers, where compliant Trade Unions helped to hold working class aspirations in check while a corrupt political elite got on with the job of servicing the corporate elite. The first phase of the Tiger, rather than being the product of any ‘genius’ on the part of the Irish government, was built on attracting Pharma giants and allowing companies to set up empty offices in the Irish Financial Services Centre. That first phase fell back in 2001 - leading to a second phase that was based on a financial and property bubble. Bubbles blow up but then they inevitably go pop.

When investment opportunities in the real economy dry up the capitalists move their money to any other areas where they can make a killing. There are two aspects to capitalist money-making - the most important is the extraction of profit from the working class - everything else is built on that foundation. But the capitalists also compete with one another for a greater share of the profit pie - they gamble on the stock market to try to cheat each other out of money. They invest in housing bubbles or create bizarre hybrid financial instruments. This secondary means of capturing wealth doesn’t create any new value - it’s only about stealing already-extracted wealth.

But the bosses don’t care where their money comes from - whether they have to produce something, or sell fantastical financial products. The real economy in Ireland slowed down in 2001 - but the Celtic Tiger kept going as a credit bubble, leading to the complete collapse of the housing market and all the banks that loaned out cash to anyone who wanted it. Anglo Irish Bank borrowed massively from French and German banks, fuelling an orgy of property speculation. German banks alone had invested €135 billion in Ireland by 2008. When the whole thing collapsed the Irish government, under orders from the EU, put €64 billion into the banks. They then embarked on a massive austerity attack on the working class. But given all of this, why didn’t the austerity years lead to a revolt against Irish capitalism?

Well, they did - in a way.

First of all let’s remember that a huge economic crisis overwhelms people, who are often atomised and forced to fight ’tooth and nail’ to defend their own family or job. Fear can be debilitating and people can feel disoriented by the new situation, especially when you are worried about fighting your own corner. The ideas they’d formed in their heads to understand their place in the world are suddenly overturned, and confusion and chaos ensues.

The questioning of old certainties doesn’t automatically lead to new certainties. People require a period of adjustment to adapt to a new situation. But it’s even more complicated than that because various actors - the bosses, the political establishment and the media - move to close down the threat to their established narratives. They try to maintain their “hegemony” - their dominance over what society thinks. Even in the working class the Trade Unions, the liberal NGOs and the radical left all move to offer their own explanation of the crisis.

As austerity started to bite, it created deep bitterness and anger, but that anger needed to find a progressive outlet. Research on the issue was undertaken by the National Suicide Research Foundation that showed a link between austerity, economic factors and psychological vulnerability, leading to suicide. The anger needed to be turned outwards or it would collapse in on itself leading to destructive behaviours, including suicides.

Despite the disorientation and mass confusion, when a focus for struggle was provided people came out. In the first year of austerity there was a massive Trade Union protest that saw 100,000 take to the streets. The unions later called a one-day strike of 250,000 workers. But the focus of the leaders wasn’t to challenge the rotten set-up in Ireland but, instead, to argue for a path of ‘austerity lite’. From the platform of one of the major protests Trade Union leader Jack O’Connor called for people to ‘vote Labour’. The Trade Union leaders accepted the argument for austerity but wanted it in a less aggressive form. Since 1987 they’d been in some form of ‘partnership’ with the Irish state. Getting their feet under the state table was accompanied by an assault on the idea of ‘fighting unions’ - instead modern unions were about “brains not brawn”.

As a result the unions became hollowed-out bureaucratic machines with little or no real internal democracy and with membership figures falling year on year. There was huge potential for struggle against austerity but the Trade Union leaders pushed acceptance of the Croke Park deal instead, which subordinated everything to two goals - maintaining partnership with the Irish state and getting the Labour Party into power. The protests and strikes were just token shows of strength to get into negotiations.

After a few protests many workers started to feel they were being marched up and down the hill for no reason. People got demoralised. But the message from the top was still the same - just vote Labour. Just as the potential for struggle began to rise the main Trade Unions stuffed a pillow in the face of the working class and tried to force them back to sleep. Why did workers accept the Croke Park deal?

Because while they might agree with criticism of the deal “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” as the saying goes. Croke Park seemed like the least worst option and with the Trade Unions led by the likes of Jack O’Connor, what worker would have faith in that leadership conducting a battle against austerity? The Trade Union leaders agreed to the loss of 17,000 jobs, and to more work for less pay. The agreement took the major unions out of the battle against austerity as they sat back and allowed the Labour Party to introduce attacks on everyone from public sector workers to lone parents. Many of the Trade Union leaders were also leading Labour members. Let’s say you’re a militant in SIPTU who wants to continue the fight - how do you link up with other militants and force the bureaucracy to move?

The scale of the task overwhelmed some of the best workers, who then turned their backs on the Trade Unions. It would take a serious radical left infiltration of these unions to organise that militant grassroots to push for a fighting strategy. But such a left in the Trade Union movement would have had to have been built in the years before the crash. The irony was that just as most of the best workers in the major unions were becoming aware of the cowardice of the Trade Union leaders, they were also frustrated and often overwhelmed with demoralisation. The path forward would have to have been illuminated by the forces of the radical left.

But not all Trade Unions in Ireland were linked to the Labour Party. Some of the smaller ones joined with the left and helped to initiate one of the biggest social movements seen in Ireland since the big tax marches in the late 1970s. Unions such as Mandate and Unite were more closely associated with Sinn Féin, while bigger unions like SIPTU were aligned to the Labour Party. The right wing of the union bureaucracy in SIPTU virtually abstained from the fight against austerity. The left wing of the bureaucracy in Mandate and Unite would often protest, but then capitulate, saying they had no choice but to sign up to the government deal.

But the division between right and left union leaders opened up the chance to get some kind of wider struggle going. The socialist left never stopped fighting. From the very start of the austerity years they threw themselves into building protests against cuts to unemployment, to defend lone parents and against the household charges. When Labour went into government in 2011 it took the fight out of a lot of people and led to a wave of demoralisation. But movements like the household charges laid down important networks of working class activists who would play a role in the larger battles to come.

In April 2014 activists in Togher in Cork had started to block water meter installation. The government had set up ‘Irish Water’ - and wanted to turn water into a utility like electricity, forcing people to pay a regressive charge. Working class people, who had suffered half a decade of austerity, were already furious and had a memory of a victory over water charges in the 1990s. The anger was there, and the issue was right. It affected everyone.

In April 2014 I worked with Gino Kenny, a future TD who was a local councillor at the time, and residents of an estate in Clondalkin including Georgina O’Halloran and her son Dominick, to call a street meeting. I’d noticed that during the Egyptian Revolution small marches often began in the estates and then made their way into the city centre. I thought it would be a good idea to have meetings on the greens right outside people’s houses. They’d be more likely to come out and listen to what we had to say.

That first street meeting in Dublin was chaired by Gino Kenny and Clondalkin local Georgina O’Halloran - activist Madeleine Johansson collected names. When 50 people turned up, we knew the street meetings would work. That was mid-April - soon everyone was calling street meetings. People turned out on green spaces in Bray, in Tallaght and right across the country. Most people agreed: they’d had enough. There was an explosion of meetings and local organising.

Over the following weeks resistance to water meter installation grew on Dublin’s Northside, soon spreading nationwide. In many areas people set up Facebook groups to co-ordinate action - soon there were over 200 anti-water charges groups nationwide. This growing movement of direct action in the estates needed to come together in a show of strength. At the street meetings people were calling out for “one big protest”. The radical left People Before Profit party had called a conference under the slogan ‘Right To Water’ - the meeting on Saturday April 5th 2014 had brought together speakers from People Before Profit, the Unite and Mandate Trade Unions and Marcela Olivera from the Great Water Revolt in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Although the meeting was small, this conference led to a subsequent meeting in the Dáil called by Richard Boyd Barrett TD and attended by Sinn Féin, People Before Profit, other left representatives plus Unite and Mandate. It was agreed to form an umbrella united front called ‘Right2Water’ - I was asked to set up a Facebook page called “Right2Water” and I handed it over to Dave Gibney from Mandate to admin. We then called a wider meeting of all groups to decide just what exactly “Right2Water” would do.

From the start there was a debate about a national protest with some of the union reps thinking it might be “small and embarrassing”. I had seen the anger at the street meetings in the estates and knew that this was way off. People were itching to march together. The national protest was originally set for September 2014 but then pushed back to October to give more time to build it. A few weeks before the first Right2Water national protest the community group “Dublin Says No” called a demo that was a few thousand strong. It was smaller than the national protest, but significant, in that it proved there was a huge appetite to protest.

Richard Boyd Barrett TD and I were the People Before Profit reps on the Right2Water steering group. We all threw ourselves into distributing leaflets to every estate in the country. I spoke at rallies from Galway to Gorey in Wexford. Everywhere we gathered, meetings were much bigger than usual, and people wanted to organise to get to the big protest. You could feel the tide rising as the date approached, but even the most positive of us were saying “this could be as big as 20,000!” We were wrong. It was much bigger. Tears were streaming down the old working class man’s face as he looked over the balcony of Cuffe Street flats - he started shouting at the top of his lungs: “I’m so proud of yez! So Proud!” as thousands upon thousands streamed by on the street below.

As I arrived on O’Connell Street on Oct 11th 2014 everyone was grinning like the Cheshire cat as it became obvious that this wasn’t just another ‘run of the mill’ protest - this was going to be really big, and over the course of an hour or two it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. 120,000 people took to the streets of Dublin that day. We had to change the route to deal with the big numbers. Those smiles would harden as the old order refused to budge. Every people’s revolt begins with joy, but never ends so - the old order rarely gives up without a fight.

As socialist Chris Harman explained: “Every successful protest movement goes through two phases. The first is when it bursts upon the world, taking its opponents by surprise and bringing joy to those who agree with its aims. The longer the time since the last great movement of protest, the greater the joy. And it seems that the sheer momentum of the movement is bound to carry it forward from strength to strength. This draws its adherents together, and leads them to play down old differences of opinion and old arguments on tactics. But those against whom the protests are directed do not simply give up. Once the initial shock is over they strengthen their own defences, seek to ensure they are not taken by surprise again, and try to stall the movement’s forward motion. At this point, arguments over tactics necessarily arise within the movement, even among people who have sworn to forget old disputes in the interests of consensus.”

At the next Right2Water meeting we argued for a mass assembly of the movement - so that protest networks from all across the country could unite and take ownership of the decision-making in the movement. The Trade Union leaders were worried that an assembly would lead to a vote on the boycott of water charges - which Sinn Féin were reluctant to advocate. Their individual candidates told people they were boycotting in a personal capacity but wouldn’t tell their supporters to “break the law”. The irony should be lost on no one that a party that used to be the political expression of a national liberation terrorist movement should be so worried about advocating illegal protest actions.

Despite this the mass of working class people were way ahead of them - 57% of people refused to pay the first bill, and by bill cycle 5 over 70% of people had refused to pay. The movement on the streets fed the confidence to boycott. The second day of local protests in November 2014 saw over 200,000 people take part in actions in dozens of locations across the country. This was the biggest protest action since the tax marches of the late 1970s - it was time to escalate the movement.

We lost the argument for a people’s assembly but argued that the national protest planned for December should surround the Dáil in a show of mass peaceful direct action. The escalation of protest actions accompanied with the massive boycott of bills could push back the establishment. But the Trade Union leaders were worried about growing radicalism and started to put the breaks on. They argued that “money” was becoming a problem and that there needed to be fewer protest marches - but their decisions were inherently political. It was a difference of strategy, not just an argument about resources. There were growing arguments about speakers at marches, and who would say what. Fear led to greater control of the platform.

In this situation the union leaders and Sinn Féin - with help from some of the apolitical community groups - were happy to leave the movement more and more in the hands of one man: Brendan Ogle. He was one of the leaders of the Unite Trade Union. Ogle was a very capable speaker and represented the movement well on the national media. But the control of the meetings and rallies became completely dysfunctional. We could have taken the path to mass assemblies of the movement with empowering and devolved decision-making - but the fear of advocacy of more radical tactics led to a concentration of power in the hands of one person. They were afraid of the masses.

The Right2Water brand was still associated in people’s minds with the initial mass protests and continued to call tens of thousands onto the streets, but on a less regular schedule. As the pace of protest slowed the Trade Union leaders deprioritised the protest movement to embark on a political strategy called “Right2Change”. As a policy platform there was nothing in Right2Change a socialist could disagree with. But as a watertight contract to force the radical left to commit to supporting a Sinn Féin government - before such a government was even a possibility - it was highly problematic. The Trade Union leaders wanted an iron-tight guarantee that the radical left would silence themselves and commit to supporting Sinn Féin, no questions asked.

They ruled out discussion of austerity in the North - never mind discussion about the rotten and corrupt nature of the Irish state and the extent to which real change was possible by running that rotten machine. At that time we resisted the idea that the socialist left should support Sinn Féin no questions asked.

Most radical left parties would vote for a Sinn Féin Taoiseach over anyone on the right - there was no question about that. But the Right2Change was only short of sharing out ministerial positions and asking for a commitment to join a government without knowing the circumstances under which that government would be elected, or wihtout any debate about the politics of the leading organisation Sinn Féin. They were using Right2Change to gather support in the water movement, while Ogle was talking in the media about being open to talks with Fianna Fáil! They needed to silence the socialist left.

The message that the movement should demobilise and instead focus on getting people into parliament was disempowering. It was a message to sit back down on the couch and just vote for liberation to be handed to you from above. Things never quite work out when people devolve their power like that. The radical left stood on a platform of protest - to keep the movement going, and to return to the streets if the establishment refused to cancel the water charges. Dáil seats could be used to promote struggle, instead the parliamentary road was offered as an alternative to mobilisation.

Any disagreement with the Right2Change platform was exaggerated by the Trade Union leaders into being an attack on the movement and an accusations that the radical left were being sectarian. But sectarianism isn’t primarily defined by your relationship to other left forces - it’s about your relationship to the working class movement. When there is a strategic disagreement sometimes you have to choose a path, and hope that putting the best interests of the movement to the fore will guide you. The argument to deprioritise the streets and vote our way to victory was an echo of the argument a few years previously from Jack O’Connor to just vote Labour. Whether conscious or not - it was a strategy to bring the social movement to a safe conclusion - reconciled with the system.

The amount of people who actually signed up to Right2Change was tiny. It mostly relied on support from Independent left-wingers and ex-socialists like Joan Collins and Clare Daly. As the water movement dropped, it became less and less relevant. During the 2016 election campaign Brendan Ogle advocated that Sinn Féin and the left should support a Fianna Fáil Taoiseach in return for the abolition of water charges. Ireland had a long history of Trade Unions doing deals with Fianna Fáil. We were a long way from the initial protest march and the potential it offered.

Victory wouldn’t come on the streets, but by doing a backroom deal with the gangsters who had ruined the country for decades. In the end the establishment backed down and suspended the charge - leaving a backdoor open with talk of “excessive use” charges. The mass movement had forced water charges into the election debate as the key issue and the opportunists in Fianna Fáil had made it an issue in negotiations with Fine Gael. The establishment had been shaken. But the movement had never threatened to take them down.

The empowering nature of the protest movement had led to a big vote for the radical left with the return of TDs such as Richard Boyd Barrett and the election of new left TDs like Gino Kenny from Clondalkin. The working class had scored a victory against the establishment. But it would take a far more militant and conscious working class movement to remove that establishment from power. As long as the elite controlled the state, they could find a way to take money from working class pockets and restabilise their system. Movements were clearly also a battleground of organisations with very different ideas about how to take a movement forward. The difficulty for socialists was learning to work both with and against other forces in social movements. There are times when unity with reformist forces can help to mobilise people - but there are points where reformism becomes a barrier to further mobilisation.

As British socialist Chris Harman once explained: “Once a movement begins to make an impact, the role of the reformist leaders becomes increasingly contradictory. On the one hand they can still attract new, previously passive, people. On the other hand, their reformism implies keeping things within safe grounds for existing society (and often boosting their own position within it). They tend to want to dampen down the militancy, the self-confidence and the self-activity of those already in motion. Figures that seem on the left before there is any movement can rapidly appear to be on the right when it has taken off. At this point the movement can only further develop in so far as challenges emerge to the leadership of such people.”

The cycle of working class struggle against austerity ended in 2016 after a series of massive protests tens of thousands strong. Per head of population the water movement was one of the biggest social movements in the world in that period. The water movement has to be placed alongside the other movements that emerged globally in that period, from the Arab Spring to Occupy and from the Indignados in Spain to the rise of Syriza in Greece.

What was missing from all those struggles was a large radical left project committed to challenging capitalism rather than running it, that harnessed the creativity and potential of social mobilisations, but could also integrate those movements into a coherent political strategy to use the platform of elections to the benefit of the movement. This is especially important when the ruling class calls an election to divert a social movement, and dominate the national debate through airwaves they infuence.

But in all of this there needs to be a fight for the idea of working class hegemony - for socialism. Ignoring capitalist power structures as Occupy and the Indignados did - or capitulating to those power structures and running the capitalist state machinery - were both proven to be dead ends for workers. The social movements, the Indignados and Occupy, failed to break the system. As did the reformist path tread by Syriza, Podemos and Corbyn.

There has to be an argument for challenging power with counter power - that the working class can build democratic structures within strikes and protest movements that are explicitly aiming to replace the rotten state of the capitalists. That way the power from below can challenge and replace the power from above. The radical left has to do more than just merely express the interests of social movements - it has to fight for socialism within those movements - and point to the potentially immense power of the organised working class when liberated from the confines of reformist politics.

The water movement never entered into the organised working class, or triggered strikes against the charges. People often talk about direct action, imagining that a few dozen individuals taking action is a demonstration of power. The state just scoffs at that. Workers have the power for real direct action, mass direct action. A strike wave could have ended the charges in a number of days, never mind in two years. But the domination of the Trade Union movement by the likes of Jack O’Connor guaranteed that wasn’t going to happen. They made sure to take their organised forces out of the battle against austerity, and focus on the Labour Party. In the 1960s when there were militant shop stewards networks across the unions maybe grassroots workers could have forced their unions to act. But the union movement in 2014 was far more atomised, and internal democracy had been hollowed out by years of partnership. The hope of the radical left was that militancy on the streets would translate into militancy in the unions - the mistake the radical left made was thinking that this translation could happen automatically without an organisational transmission belt.

Who would take the militancy from the streets back into their union branch? And how would they co-ordinate with other workers trying to do the same thing? In 2016 working class areas fell back into demoralisation, the ruling class won an economic recovery, and the radical left changed front to take on the 8th amendment. The working class support for Repeal was huge - but poorer working class people didn’t participate in the movement as activists in the same way they did on water charges. That cycle of working class struggle had come to an end in 2016. In 2020 workers were locked at home for two years and the union leaders failed to mobilise on the key issue of the day - housing. We need to learn the lessons of a decade ago to make the next decade one of militant, united front struggle, where socialists come to the fore and direct truly mass struggles against the state and prepare the ground for its future overthrow.