Event: MRER Lecture: The ‘Sinister Fringe’ – Political Fear, Working Class Activism and the Irish Anti Water Charges Campaign (2014-2017)
Date: 24 May 2022
Time: 17.30
Venue: Faculty of Education Boardroom (Room 326, Old Humanities Building)
Speaker: Dr Michael Murray, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
This paper offers an examination of the use of political fear by the Irish government and supporters during the Irish Anti Water Charges Campaign, with a specific focus on the ‘deviance framing’ of working-class communities – the chief site of opposition to government plans to introduce domestic water charges as part of austerity measures introduced as a result of the 2008 economic collapse. Based upon interviews with activists, this paper seeks to examine how various fear narratives were received and interpreted by the campaigners themselves.
Adopting aspects of Gaventa’s conceptualisation of power and powerlessness (1980), this paper traces how the government sought to target working class activists by recourse to historical-based tropes – working class activism as irrational, violent, extreme, hateful and ‘populist’ - in order to create the conditions for quiescence through non-participation and to set the public agenda on the campaign itself as one of protest spectacle rather than a focus on the substantive issues of austerity, privatisation and corruption. Crucially, the ‘sinister’ narrative served to make working class communities both the subject and object of fear – in the latter case, this was achieved through the threat of criminalisation.
Despite a mobilisation of bias involving sections of the news media and the police, the sinister narrative failed to meet the conditions outlined by Debrix and Barder’s argument (2009) that fear operates at a micro level when people’s expectation of normal living is in question, as the fear claims were not viewed as authentic and instead, the real threat to everyday living emanated from ongoing austerity, rather from locally-based activists opposed to the introduction of water charges.