Fuel Protests: We need workers’ action to win concessions for the majority

Following the Government’s concessions to the famers and hauliers, we need organised workers to take a lead in fighting the energy hikes that affect us al

The government’s attempts to buy off fuel protesters are pathetic.  They consist mainly of ‘temporary measures’ and are geared to support small businesses.

There is a ten-cent reduction in excise duty on petrol and diesel, but that does not bring prices below the level when Trump and Israel launched their war on Iran. The government refuses to impose a price cap on these products.

The increases in carbon tax have been suspended until October. But, as People Before Profit has consistently argued, there should be no carbon tax. The whole tax should be scrapped – not just the annual increase. Instead, the government should develop public transport and make it free to get people out of cars.

Most of the government’s package focuses on buying off the small-business element that led the protests. There is a special scheme for haulage and coach operators, with back payments to further sweeten the deal. There is a special fuel subsidy scheme for farmers, fishermen and contractors.

No concessions for majority of workers

We should not begrudge them these concessions – they pale into insignificance before the tax breaks given to multinationals. But where is the scheme to benefit the mass of working people?

Take kerosene, for example. 700,000 households use this fuel to heat their homes, often because it is the cheapest to install. It rose from €495 for 500 litres to a staggering €800. But nothing has been done to reduce it.

Or look at the cost of living for working people. As economists keep telling us, the blocking of the Straits of Hormuz stops the flow of fertilisers, and that will affect food prices. But this government is doing nothing about food or rent hikes. Instead, it wants to keep a cap on wagers – not prices.

Government on the ropes

The fuel protests show how brittle Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael’s hold on government really is. You can see this in the snarling voice of Michael Martin as he quickly inflates the protest into an attack on parliamentary democracy itself. He denounces opposition parties like People Before Profit for supporting the protests, stating that ‘they are not fit for government’ because they broke the norms.

This, by the way, is why Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael insisted on only talking to ‘representative groups’. Martin let the cat out of the bag when he claimed that ‘these understand the framework’ in which the government operated. To decode: The favoured social partners agree with the government in staying inside the undemocratic rules set by the EU commission and wider market forces.

The Irish ruling class’s method of rule is to demand that all grievances be channelled through social partners – after obedience is first shown to Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, whose legitimacy is sustained only by horse-trading after elections.

They only get away with this charade because some parties of the left, for example, Labour and the Social Democrats, respect these same rules. Ged Nash, for example, attacked the government for making concessions to the protests, arguing that ‘This is dangerous territory for any government to be in’.

Far-right influence

No doubt Nash and others will point to the presence of the far right on the protests. And clearly, they were there, deliberately trying to push away the radical left and Sinn Féin. In Waterford, for example, a speaker from the fascist National Party spoke from the platform to attack the local Sinn Féin TD David Cullinane.

Instinctively, the far right knows that the small business leadership of the protests create a natural audience for them. The farmers, hauliers and contractors who once voted Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been driven into a fury by the price rises. But rather than blame Trump or big businesses, they find it easier to focus on migrants.

This is why figures such as Tom McDonnell, who think women should be at home breeding, tried to deflect the protests into an attack on IPAS centres.

Yet the protests were far more mixed, and this is why the majority of people supported them. In some areas, the far right was told that they were about fuel, not immigration. 

It is noteworthy that both the government and the leadership of the protesters failed to mention the cause of the price hikes: Trump’s war on Iran. The Government certainly spoke of ‘ the war’, in the passive tense, rather than taking any real action to stop US planes using Irish airspace, which even NATO members such as Spain did. The protest organisers simply stayed silent about Trump.

Building a workers’ fightback

The real issue, however, is where to go from here.

We should hold onto the key lesson that we face a weak government and that protests do work. Unless we breathe a sigh of relief or, worse, back government repression, we should seek an escalation through a change in its class character. To put it simply, we need the organised workers to take a lead in fighting the energy hikes that affect us all. That will involve an attack on Trump and a linking of the issue of the cost of living to his new imperialist agenda, which is causing havoc around the world.

The UNITE union has taken an important step by demanding that the ‘ongoing cost-of-living crisis facing workers be front and centre of any new package of measures developed by the government’.

It is now time to turn words into deeds – and there is an historic precedent,

In the 1979 budget the Fianna Fáil government introduced a two per cent levy on farm produce as an attempt to widen the tax base. The Irish Farmer’s Association organised protests against the levy and forced a government climb down.

Following the reversal of the levy on farm produce, PAYE workers began to take spontaneous industrial action and called for other workers to join the strike action. At CA Parsons engineering in Howth approximately 250 workers stopped work. The thirty-two unions representing workers at Dublin airport began to plan a demonstration. The ITGWU organised a march on 11 March 1979. Over 50,000 workers marched through Dublin calling for a general strike. But, the leaders of ICTU refused to back strike action.

We need to build up rank and file pressure for something similar today.