“THAT ANGER THAT WE FEEL WILL FIND ITS TARGET”
Apr 29th, 2010 by Conor McCabe
[Below is the text of Michael O’Boyce’s planned speech to the Garda Representative Association’s annual conference. Photo from the Irish Times.]
I welcome you to the 32nd Annual Delegate Conference of the Garda Representative Association. I accept your non-attendance last year was due to circumstances beyond your control, but was disappointed you did not make greater effort to fulfil our invitation to attend the conference dinner.
At conference last year I called for the embargo on promotions to be lifted. I thank the Minister for Finance for heeding the call and I’m glad to say that practically all the members of the Garda Representative Association who should have been promoted last year now are.
At conference last year I said, “This government is driving experience out of An Garda Síochána. A rising number of members of all ranks who could and who want to continue to serve this country are considering retirement.” Sadly my words proved to be correct. In one garda division alone, numbers are down by 20 in recent months.
At conference last year I spoke about the mothballing of the Garda College. Disgracefully, there are no students in the college – for the first time in its history. Due to government policy there will be no students in the Garda College for a long time to come. An Garda Síochána is contracting by the direct action of the government; experience is being driven out and no new blood coming in. This is pushing the Force to the brink of disaster.
An effective police force needs continuity, a principle tried and tested the world over but ignored in Ireland. In these uncertain times the public needs to know that there will be adequate frontline gardaí for them. Garda numbers will fall again by the end of 2010. The people of Ireland should rightly demand garda recruitment is taken away from government because it is misused as an election gimmick. It is far too important for that. The Garda Representative Association will continue to campaign for an end to this obnoxious trick.
For the past year and a half, gardaí and other public sector workers have endured an unrelenting, distasteful and vitriolic attack from the government and their wealthy cronies. This was distasteful and unbelievable considering the role garda take in society. It most definitely verged on incitement to hatred. The attacks were orchestrated to demonise and marginalise public sector workers. They were designed to drive a wedge between public and private sector workers.
But the ancient tactic of divide and conquer did not succeed, except with those misguided souls who contact daytime radio talk shows. They were primed to deflect attention away from the ‘national saboteurs’.
We are angry, we have been betrayed and we are disillusioned. But I do not believe it is yet understood just how angry we are. And that anger will find an outlet, the anger that we feel will find its target.
We are angry at being portrayed as self-serving, overpaid, under-worked and dishonest people with overly generous pensions that we don’t pay for. Yes, there are public servants who fit into that category; they are represented by you and your colleagues, not us.
We are angry that we, our children and our children’s children have been sacrificed by this government to protect the people who bankrolled your party and robbed the Irish People. Men like Fingers and Seanie were held up by government as examples of entrepreneurial skill and business acumen but who were nothing more than ‘gombeen’ men.
We are angry at the arrogance of a government corrupted by years of power has lost touch with the reality of life on a modest salary; if they ever knew it at all. A government whose only agenda is to protect the economic traitors.
We are angry at being lectured by government on the need to be patriotic. A patriot is ‘a person who vigorously supports his country and its way of life.’ This government is misusing what it means to be Irish as they support a new aristocracy created in their image. This new aristocracy chooses whether to retain state pensions while still working as public representatives, using all means to spend vast resources on the few, while taking pay from the majority. This government have created a new class system; one that does not value our service and dedication.
We are angry about NAMA. No, not the entity set up by government to bail out developers and speculators who reneged on their debts, the cost of which you have placed on the shoulders of generations of Irish workers to come. Yes, we are angry about that, but, I am talking about the NAMA that the government is, The National Assets Mismanagement Agency.
The government of which you are a long serving member has mismanaged the wealth of this country for more than a decade by allowing our assets to be plundered and robbed by bankers and speculators and you are making generations of Irish workers pay the price for this treachery. You did this because bankers and speculators have bought your party, and in return you have sacrificed the greater good and prosperity of the Irish Nation for the benefit of the few – the few who have now taken their ill-gotten gains and secured them in tax haven around the world. Truly, a government of national sabotage.
In the face of the unwarranted attack by the government on the workers and unemployed of this country the Garda Representative Association has stood head and shoulders above other trade unions. We have shown leadership, temerity, tenaciousness and courage. We have lead from the front.
The Central Executive Committee picketed Dáil Eireann. No government minister or TD had the courage to come out and meet us. We led 4,000 of our members on a march to the Dáil. Once again no government minister had the courage to come out to us. We joined the 24/7 Frontline Services Alliance. No minister had the courage to tell us we shouldn’t be part of that alliance. They knew the answer that we would have given them.
On the 7th December 2009 we announced that we were going to ballot our members on industrial action. I have no doubt the announcement saved our allowances from the hatchet.
You Minister came out fighting, saying you were going to arrest and jail the CEC, and forgetting that you hadn’t the power. Then you threatened to seize the assets of the GRA; believing your own frenzy you went on to threaten to arrest the printers and the postal workers. As we know none of this happened – except the issuing of the ballot.
What the GRA said we would do, we did. What you, Minister, said you wouldn’t allow, you couldn’t stop.
An ‘away win’ for the Garda Representative Association.
The GRA has now set forth on a course to become a full trade union. Minister, you have said that we will never achieve that status. That is the second leg. And when, in the near future, the GRA achieves trade union status, it will be the home win.”
The text along the front of the podium at the GRA conference was very strange: these things are nearly always upbeat or in some way affirmative, but the Gardai went with ‘Angry, Betrayed and Disillusioned’
The speech is one of the most succinct and accurate accounts of the situation that I have read. The anger may not be covered by the media, but it is there, it is focused, and it is not going away. At the heart of the speech is a class analysis of the present economic crisis, and this is the guards we’re talking about. Oh interesting times indeed.
Was talking to somone last night who suggested that when you see the Gardai getting political you will see blood on the streets. While I demurred, there’s no doubt that its very significant when one of the enforcers of state authority challenge that authority, so who knows where it will lead.
I have some documents on an aborted Dublin police strike in I think 1919 or 1921. I must dig them out and put them up.
I agree that it’s extraordinary, but, as I think Jim Monaghan said on the CLR, it also remains to be seen if the cops and the prison officers are simply looking for for special treatment for themselves and whether the solidarity with other public service workers would survive if they do win some concessions.
The police aren’t a vanguard, but the issue here is that the economic crisis is so large that even the guards are protesting. If the guards go their own way with concessions, does that mean that the structural problems within the Irish economy have gone away? And if they haven’t gone away, what’s next?
The guards are doing this because they don’t have a choice. The reason why they don’t have a choice, that’s the issue.
And if all of this tells us anything it’s that a lot more people know that the Irish media is talking cock than is acknowledged by left bloggers and commentators.
People know that they are being fucked. Irish people may not be on the streets as in Greece, but this is still a fluid situation, one that is going to get worse, and if nothing else the GRA and O´Boyce’s speech show that the Sindo and Irish Times message of TINA is NOT getting though.
Well, you should never underestimate the self interest of a union using its collective power to seek special treatment. But the thought struck me as I walked past Copper-Faced Jacks after going to see The Fall last night, that level of solidarity is also based on the fact that Gardai are often married to other public servants. The cliche goes Nurses. It was Jim who mentioned it, as someone else wasn’t familiar with what Copper-Faced Jacks was like. He said if you’re a member of the Gardai and you want to meet a nurse…
But the attack on the public sector, and the cuts in wages means that both incomes are being cut which affects the family income. That is where the class element comes in I guess. Because they can see that the government’s economic policy is being dictated by a desire to ‘placate the markets’, that is, those who are speculating on bonds now that everything else has dried up. From a bankers point of view (for which read the governments) in the EU only austerity placates the bond markets. And we can see how swimmingly that is going.
One other thing on the guards. I have had some contact with them in recent months at different levels, and many of them are a lot more progressively-minded than, say, your average Irish Times editorial. Then there are others who are reactionaries. But there must be plenty of guards who in their dealings with the public could not help but see the effects of the recession first hand. And it must be pretty easy to deduce, when you’re in that position every day, that the idea that more domestics, more violent attacks, burglaries and so on is primarily the result of public sector workers making the country uncompetitive, which is what the government and its media cronies have been saying, is an utter lie. And then you hear the same people saying, and now we’re going to slash your pay. I reckon you’d need to be be pretty fucking thick-headed not to see from this standpoint that the real crooks and thieves are the ones at the top.
I think that when push comes to shove the State will make a necessary concession to the army and the Gardai and they will act on the streets to protect the state. I don’t remember a cop raising any demurs about the “heavy gang”. I think people should get a grip. We are a long way from a revolutionary situation. You would thoink from the back clapping over days of protest that soviets were about to be formed.I, alas, think that many adapt in a simple way Trotskys adage that “it a matter of leadership”, a sort of oust O’Connor, Beggs and co. and we will take power. The road will be a lot longer.Across Europe and now in the neighbouring isle the far left is no where. While not the only indicator of Class activity it is at least an objective barometer.In fact the awful right whether National Front in both Britain and France and the serious racists in Hungary who are making the running.
Time for the left to wake up from sectarianism and point scoring and help the creation of a serious force
Sorry I meant to refer to elections as a barometer and a mobilising tool.I will do my usual moan for a left front here.
It was a good speech, and it was also significant. It’s certainly not the revolution (who said it was) but it does show that there is a reservoir of bitterness about the government’s handling of the crisis, and the media’s campaigns in support of it. Jim, the majority of public sector workers are never in conflict with the Gardai: most would see them as preferable to criminals.
the majority of public sector workers are never in conflict with the Gardai: most would see them as preferable to criminals.
The choice between criminals and government politicians might be harder to call.