Ireland’s Radical(ish) woke activists

July 2021 37

and compostable coee cups.

We’re very good at ignoring important things.

Look at our housing crisis: I bet you’re sick of

hearing about it, it’s gone on so long. But take

any Irish news site and you’ll see it’s drowned out

by stories of Ukraine, Covid, Brexit – anything but

the emergency going on right under our noses.

So of course, nothing changes. Why should the

establishment change something that suits

them, if it’s so easy to brush o the unrest and

dissatisfaction of the public?

People today are politically conscious and

mean well. They recycle. They avoid fast fashion.

They post black squares on the appropriate days.

The trouble is that instagram posts are also so

easy to ignore. Being woke is a start, not an end:

it can’t replace political education, class

consciousness, and activism. And I mean real,

angry, unignorable activism – not a ‘grand day

out’ with banners.

Of course, some movement is better than no

movement at all. But ‘glacial’ is too kind a word

– glaciers may take their time but they rip valleys,

crush mountains, change the world forever. No

one can ignore a glacier.

I’m also not looking down at the people behind

these organisations from a greater height. Many

of them have been around longer than I have, are

better read than I am, are devoted and

conscientious and driven. But it does seem like

their energy is being diverted into a ‘safe’ place,

from which no real threat of change can emerge.

I don’t know the answer –I wish I did. I still

wake up gasping for a future. If a bake sale would

help, I’d be up to my elbows in choux pastry.

But our most extreme options are so

frustrating and limited, I know that they cannot

be enough.

hotel lobby and lost even that momentum once

the meeting ended. Christmas is a hard time to

get people active, even when they’re afraid of the

end of the world.

What few ‘radical’ groups we have in Ireland

are distressingly ignorable. After my disillusioning

experience with XR, I volunteered at a grassroots

leftist magazine. Still no dice: there I was

constantly frustrated by the goal of making it

quirky being held in higher regard than making it

good. It was as if they were happy to stay on the

sidelines, had no desire to convince anyone new,

were content to reach only people who already

agreed with their particular brand of politics.

I tried a Marxist political party: no joy there

either. I found their emphasis was mostly on

keeping up with trends in the American culture

war. They were as radical as I could get, and they

were still utterly ignorable.

The conclusion I’ve reached in my endeavours

is that Ireland currently has no space for genuine

radicalism. Political outrage is washed out by

trays of sandwiches and brainstorming boards.

Climate anxiety is bandaged in beeswax wraps

ike many twenty-somethings these

days, the smoking doom of the world

often closes in on me until I feel I am

choking on a solid lump of fear. I am

afraid to have children, in case there is

no air left for them to breathe by the time they are

grown. The teeth of the late-stage Capitalist

machine have chewed up my future before it’s

even begun.

In the grips of this fear, I faced a choice of

staying in bed all day and drowning in anxiety or

doing something. Maybe I could turn all my

despair into positive action. So I joined Extinction

Rebellion.

My partner and I signed up for a training day

last November. We were advised on our legal

rights, warned of interrogation techniques, and

taught methods of passive resistance. We made

a plan to take turns as ‘arrestables’ (turns out

there are other roles in XR than chaining your neck

to things), memorised the phone numbers of

each other’s emergency contacts (solicitor ﬁrst,

then mammy), and let our employers know that

we were dedicating ourselves to activism and

might call in a sick day if we wound up in an

overnight cell.

Then we were put in groups and turned loose

to organise our ﬁrst disruption. Would we

picket the Dáil? Blockade O’Connell Street?

Sabotage a ﬁshery?

I was asked to make some fairy cakes: we

would be shaking donation buckets to the tune

of ‘Jingle Bells,’ but with lyrics about rising sea

levels. I literally threw up in frustration.

We tried a dierent branch. This time we all

just chatted in circles over a tray of scones in a

The campaigners’ energy

is being diverted into a

‘safe’ place, from which no

real threat of change can

emerge.

Ireland’s

Radical(ish)

woke

activists

Faced with a planetary nightmare, young campaigners should focus

more on efﬁcacy, less on having a grand day out with banners

By Róisín O’Shea

Jingle

bells,

climate hells

Let’s

hope

we’re not annoying

anyone: your cakes

are delish

TLDR,

and

they’re

not on

Instagram!

OPINION