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Graham Doyle Deputy Commissioner, and Head of Communications with the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.
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This is audio from one of the count centres in the local elections. The people ah singing are from People Before Profit who lost most of their council seats, but they’ve come across housing minister Eoghan Murphy and they’re letting him know exactly what they think of some of the proposed solutions to the housing crisis.
In case you haven’t seen the video, which was tweeted by Irish Times journalist Jack Power, there are a dozen or more people chanting, and they’re at most two or three meters away from Murphy. In between them are a handful of uniformed gardaí who make a barrier, but the incident petered out and everyone went on their way.
We don’t know how lucky we are.
Eoghan Murphy is a senior cabinet minister, one of the most powerful men in the country. We live in a time and place where people can chant their disapproval of him at full volume in the strongest terms, and then go about their business.
I’m reminded of the case of Niall Dillon, a Dublin man who was arrested and convicted for begging in 2003. He challenged the constitutionality of the law, and said that sitting outside the shop with a cup in a quiet and peaceful manner was a right that every citizen should have.
The courts agreed. They said that unobtrusively asking passersby for money was just exercising his constitutionally-protected right to free speech. The government was forced to change the law to only outlaw begging that was in some way aggressive or threatening to the public.
Just think about that for a moment. A beggar takes on the might of the state. The most humble challenges the most powerful in the land. And wins.
Take a moment to consider just how unusual that occurrence is. Take any other random time or place in human history. The chances of someone doing that and keeping their head on their shoulders are remote, let alone actually winning.
For all its flaws, for all its injustices, its dysfunctionality, its inequality, its maddening bureaucracy, its outrageous corruption, we’re lucky to be in Ireland. In many countries, in many of the countries that we consider democracies, the chances of boisterous protesters getting within touching distance of a cabinet minister are remote, and if they did, they’d be carted off to be beaten to a pulp in cells of a police station somewhere.
The Economist Intelligence Unit maintains the World Democracy Index, measuring the quality of democracy in every country around the world by objective standards, they have a bunch of them and it generates a score. Of the 167 countries on the list, only five score better than Ireland, and they’re mostly small, with a total population of less than 27 million. So get that, of the 7.7 billion people on the planet, only one third of one per cent of them live in a better quality democracy than Ireland.
This was not inevitable. Less than 90 years ago, in 1931, Fianna Fáil deputies entered the Dáil with guns in their pockets because they thought they might be arrested and shot. And that was not an irrational fear, that was exactly what was happening in many countries right across Europe at the time.
Within the lifetime of people still alive today, someone involved in the democratic opposition to Eoghan Murphy’s party had good reason to think they might end up at the sharp end of firing squad. They didn’t, but they might have. Of the peripheral European countries that came to independence and democracy in that period, Greece, Spain, Portugal, democracy failed in every single one, except Ireland, and decades of death squads, torture, repression, poverty and stagnation followed.
We don’t know how lucky we are.
So whatever you think of People Before Profit or of Eoghan Murphy, remember, this is what democracy sounds like.
