The Irish government is obsessed with implementing plans and unable to create any vision - Dublin City needs a radical, creative, accountable visionary - not another overpaid retiring civil servant.
The protestors made this point ……….. never!
The European Commission copied, almost word for word, a proposal from Microsoft and the lobby group DigitalEurope. The result: every data centre's annual sustainability report is locked under complete secrecy. Ten leading legal scholars told me this breaches existing EU law.
Great to finally see a report on the protest that contains a gender analysis - and what a gender gap there was at these protests
So the guards finally got the finger out and the protesters folded like origami at the first sign they might suffer consequences
Why did we spend a week letting them run riot? This could have been resolved much earlier
Was cycling through town last night and it really hit me how much damage this O'Connell St blockade has done to the authority of the Gardaí. It's pretty clear that law enforcement in Ireland is _entirely_ arbitrary and the idea that justice is delivered without fear or favour has been proven false.
Imagine being a protestor and knowing this is the calibre of your leadership -
Be in no doubt who is running O’Connell street in Dublin at the moment -
a little later I passed up Grafton Street and saw two guards who had just moved along a rough sleeper who was, guess what, obstructing a business
So can the ‘protesters’ planning to have their day out tomorrow listen to what people who actually work for the betterment of the country think
This is who we are dealing with as a nation
200 people holding the city to ransom
Where are the clampers when you need them?
“WE ARE GOING to put a gun to the government’s head” -a fuel protest organiser
A price cap is an unquantifiable state subsidy in perpetuity
Lots of interests want state support
We can’t decide our national finances based on who has a gun - on who owns 15 ton truck & can hold the country to ransom
If only they took their demands turned them into a manifesto and ran for election - nope that would be actual work - much easier to just park up and do nothing.
Indeed this is great reporting but the stand out paragraph for me is this. So Geoghegan is framing this as rural versus urban - and those of us needing to get to hospital are liars - what a hero!
You’d really wonder to what extent the ‘protestors’ can be trusted when they break their first promise - also do they understand how representative democracy works?
Someone put this on a billboard on O’Connell Street and
If only we knew who their representatives are? Farmers organisations and haulier organisations say it’s not them - or are we missing something? #IFA #ICMSA
To all the MEN protesting on O’Connell Street and the surrounding area - any chance you could consider the WOMEN your are endangering?
Any mainstream media like to add to this analysis - do some investigative journalism instead of telling us what they ‘feel’ about the situation and what ‘people on the ground’ are telling them. @virginmedianews.bsky.social @irishexaminer.bsky.social @independent.ie @irishtimes.com @news.rte.ie
Looking forward to the weekend papers and the gender analysis of these protests - I suspect instead they’ll take the usual lazy rural/urban divide as their hot take.
So now they're not content with buses being able to move at all, these 4 men, and the 2 in front of the white van have blocked all traffic moving down the quays at the Capel St. junction
Peadar Toibín trying to carefully make his way from 'Main stage attraction on O'Connell Street' the day before yesterday to 'Responsible mediator' today is some excellent sleeveenery. But I'd expect nothing less from him.
As someone from rural Ireland I am aware of that - but I currently have a sister in law trying to get to her maternity hospital and being questioned by teenagers in tractors in Dublin City centre who are by their own admission conducting a moving protest to stop people moving around the city
Clearly not the case right now - just two examples
Easy to support protesters when you’re not very inconvenienced by them - how many people in rural Ireland couldn’t get to work today compared to their urban counterparts? And imagine if they did this when the schools were not on holidays - I wonder how much support they’d get in rural Ireland then!
A take away from these so called ‘organic’, ‘spontaneous’ and ‘local’ protests is that anyone who thinks Sinn Fein is a party of the left is clearly mistaken. They’ve hitched their wagon to Independent Ireland and Aontú - the progressive left should remember this in any future dealings with SF
