Abstract
The fiscal crisis of 2008 led to severe recession and hardship in Ireland, yet there was relatively little civic unrest and public protest until the autumn of 2014 when, paradoxically, economic conditions had improved significantly. Sociologists often explain such patterns by invoking a social mechanism based on perceived ‘relative deprivation’ among a population sub-group. We show that these processes cannot explain the temporal pattern of protest in Ireland and argue instead that events should be understood through the interaction of two different processes: first, the development of an ‘incidental’ grievance which framed popular discontent about the ‘structural’ grievances brought about by the wider fiscal crisis and recession. Second, the early absence of, and later emergence of coordinated political opposition with effective ‘strategies of contention’. We use a mixed methods approach, drawing on seven waves of the European Social Survey combined with qualitative interviews.
Keywords
Introduction
On the morning of 30 September 2008 the people of Ireland woke to the news that overnight the Irish Government had issued a blanket guarantee of all deposits, senior unsecured debt, securities and dated subordinated debt in Irish banks. The housing market had been slowly falling for a year and unemployment had been rising for nine months but the bank guarantee was perceived as the official start of Ireland’s financial crisis. In the summer of 2009 Ireland was the first European country to enter recession and the following five years were marked by enormous hardship and financial stress across the country.
Despite the deep cuts in public services, social protection and salaries which were a result of the ‘great recession’ in Ireland, Ireland did not experience the same level of civic unrest and public protest as Greece, Italy and Spain (see Power and Nussbaum, 2016). Although trade unions organised several large public rallies in 2009, street protest was small scale and orderly. This changed quite dramatically in the autumn of 2014 when widespread social protest erupted across Ireland. As Figure 1 shows, by the autumn of 2014 unemployment had been continuously falling for two years and Gross National Product (GNP) had returned to levels not seen since the end of 2007. How can we explain this pattern of muted protest during the depths of Ireland’s fiscal crisis followed by mass demonstration and social protest just as all the indicators suggest that the economy was returning to some semblance of normality?
Gross National Product and unemployment rate, January 2007 to December 2014.
The lack of social protest in Ireland during the fiscal crisis has led to much academic and popular discussion both in Ireland and internationally (Cannon and Murphy, 2014; Pappas and O’Malley, 2014; Power and Nussbaum, 2016). Sociological explanations for why improving economic conditions are associated with social protest often invoke ‘relative deprivation’ (Coleman, 1990) as the underlying process. In contrast, we suggest two interlinked social processes: first, we differentiate between ‘structural’ and ‘incidental’ grievances and the role the latter play in creating an ‘injustice frame’ which focuses the ‘structural’ grievances brought on by the fiscal crisis and the retrenchment of Irish Government policy. Second, we argue that the development of opposition groups in the period after 2008 and their ability to wield effective ‘strategies of contention’ also contributed to the extent and timing of popular protest in Ireland during this period.
Mobilisation and Grievance Theories of Social Protest and Rebellion
Social movement studies from the 1980s onwards have focused on what Giugni and Grasso (2016) call ‘mobilisation’ theories of protest. These concentrate on how social movements frame grievances and construct their own identities as well as the balance of power, resources and political opportunities they face. However, ‘the great recession’ and its impact on popular protest has renewed interest in the explanatory role of hardship, deprivation and crises in the distribution and explanation of social protest (Della Porta, 2015; Giugni and Grasso, 2015; Shefner et al., 2015).
Mobilisation theories focus on the factors that enable those protesting to mobilise: how they use external resources and political opportunities as well as how they build up group identity and frame issues to encourage mobilisation. In Political Process Theory (PPT) social movements are seen as forming in the nexus between political opportunities and constraints (Tarrow, 2011: 121). PPT focuses on resources external to social movements that lead to success such as electoral instability, presence of allies and so on, while Resource Mobilisation Theory (RMT) examines those resources that the movement itself can mobilise.
These approaches emphasise the immediate contingency of political protest and social movements, as well as the centrality of strategic thinking on the part of movement actors in determining the course of the movement. Within the PPT framework, movement actors are not responding blindly and emotionally to structural conditions or political forces, but rather as rational beings responding to external opportunities and threats and seeking to achieve, and build up the preconditions for a successful outcome. PPT is criticised as being deterministic in the sense that social movements are seen to emerge mechanistically when objective political conditions are right (Goodwin and Jasper, 1999). However, opportunities and constraints are constructed through reasoning and belief. Actors do not respond to ‘objective’ opportunities as much as to the perceived opportunities and often the two things do not coincide (Meyer and Minkoff, 2004).
Social movement research has therefore increasingly focused on movement identity, group cohesion, framing and discursive repertoires: how movements construct the field of contention. A movement’s collective identity is a process rather than a given that ‘defines their capacity for autonomous action’ (Melucci, 1996: 73). This enables us to understand social movements as accomplishments or action systems that take place within fields of conflict.
Movements construct themselves and their field of conflict through the process of framing. These ‘emergent action-oriented sets of beliefs inspire meaning and legitimate social movement activities and campaigns’ (Benford, 1997: 416). They are more than cognitive frameworks; their purpose is to change the world. A key element of any collective action frame is the identification of an injustice to be remedied: ‘Collective action requires a consciousness of human agents whose policies or practices must be changed and a “we” who will help to bring the change about’ (Gamson, 1992: 8). Frames need a perception of agency and identity as well as a sense of injustice. Another element of effective collective action framing is successful adversarial framing with the ‘correct’ type of target that will ‘successfully bridge the abstract and concrete’ (Gamson, 1992: 33).
However, it could be argued that these theories ignore the wider pressures at play; that is, the external social conditions which create strain and grievances and thus drive participation in social movements (Buechler, 2004; Smelser, 1962). Individuals who perceive themselves to be disadvantaged relative to a reference group may experience psychological tension leading to an increased likelihood of protest and collective action. Brinton (1965), using this mechanism, has argued that revolutions are more likely to occur when circumstances are improving because expectations of improvement often run ahead of objective conditions creating grievance and social protest.
More recently, Hechter et al. (2016) have offered a useful differentiation between structural and incidental grievances. They argue that individuals are often resigned to poor living conditions because these are associated with a given role with concomitant expectations. They use the example of sailors in the British Navy during the 18th and 19th centuries to show how poor, seemingly intolerable living conditions do not result in mutiny because these were the accepted norm. However, if a captain provided what they call ‘incidental grievances’, say through the excessive use of flogging or the outbreak of disease through mismanagement, this could precipitate mutiny: ‘Structural grievances derive from a group’s disadvantaged position in a social structure, whereas incidental grievances arise from wholly unanticipated situations that put groups at risk’ (Hechter et al., 2016: 167). Incidental grievances are more likely to be loss-providing grievances than structural grievances, or the normal workings of oppressive systems. They are also more likely to involve acts of commission rather than those of omission. These factors in grievances, involving commission and causing losses, in turn, increase the likelihood of social movement mobilisation (Bergstrand, 2014). Incidental grievances can then be seen as the spark that ignites the tinder of structural grievances. This categorisation enables us to understand the interaction between material deprivation and the incidence of social protest, without assuming that there is a deterministic relationship between the two. An approach based on grievances offers a number of useful theoretical mechanisms to explain the emergence of social protest. At root though, grievance theory is essentially a theory about the cognitions and emotions of individuals rather than a theory of how social protest emerges as a group or coordinated activity and thus we examine both aspects of movement emergence (Benford and Snow, 2000; Walder, 2009).
Understanding Social Protest and Fiscal Crisis in Ireland
The question of why social protest in Ireland was so muted compared to other states in Europe such as Greece and Spain has been the subject of two recent articles, both of which rely on a theory of grievances, broadly conceived. Pappas and O’Malley (2014) examine the theory that the relative lack of protest in Ireland compared to Greece reflects the fact that the Irish state continued to provide basic social services whereas the extent of cuts in expenditure in Greece fundamentally undermined Greece’s capacity to deliver services in areas important to the population. They start from the premise that states are stable precisely because they provide their citizens with basic goods and services such as security, justice and welfare with the consequence that citizens do not question their legitimacy or threaten their integrity. However, where the state can no longer provide such normalcy its legitimacy is undermined. This primary process was augmented in the case of Greece, Pappas and O’Malley (2014) argue, by what they call ‘political Luddism’. This refers to the long running strategy among Greek political parties of gaining support through the use of public resources to maintain sheltered and privileged positions for many in the population. Such ‘auction’ politics meant that:
when the economic rents could no longer be paid, those who had previously benefited had little reason to maintain loyalty to the state. It was different in Ireland, where the state was able to manage declining incomes by continuing to provide services, thus helping keep the Irish, to a large degree, acquiescent. (Pappas and O’Malley, 2014: 1595)
Cannon and Murphy (2014) argue that populations need to be motivated to undertake protest (i.e. there needs to be adequate grievances) and, second, they must believe that they have the capacity to succeed, either because of internal resources or the external weakness of the state (or neo-liberal forces in this case). They conclude that both motivation and capacity in Ireland have been lacking so large-scale social protest did not emerge.
Both the articles by Cannon and Murphy (2014) and Pappas and O’Malley (2014) were written before the upsurge in social protest which occurred in the autumn of 2014 and so were unaware of the intriguing temporal pattern that protest took in Ireland. Before we turn to the empirical analysis, we briefly set out an explanation for the temporal pattern of protest which draws on both the frustration and power/resource theories outlined above.
An Incidental Grievance – the Establishment of Irish Water
Our hypothesis is that mass protest against the programme of reform and austerity undertaken by the Irish Government only emerged once adequate grounds were available around which protest could take place allied with the development of the necessary infrastructure to organise protest. Protest was then ‘ignited’ by the incidental grievance of the establishment of Irish Water (a public utility company which was established in July 2013 to charge for water and oversee the development of Ireland’s ageing water supply system). Water charges have served globally as a major touchstone for political contention and the new utility attracted a great deal of critical media comment. Throughout 2014, negative stories about Irish Water appeared in the media and a narrative of mismanagement, possible corruption and entanglement with private business interests emerged. Though wholly publicly owned, the new utility was also widely seen as preparing the water system for privatisation, evoking further popular outrage. We propose that the establishment of Irish Water acted as an incidental grievance which focused the considerable existing grievances associated with the various privations wrought by the fiscal crisis and subsequent recession.
We also hypothesise that the rise in protest occurred because of a change in the opportunities open to oppose the Government’s austerity agenda which was occasioned by the specificities of Irish Water and the growth of oppositional networks. This has two dimensions. The first relates to the opportunity which Irish Water offered protestors to effectively protest against austerity through deploying new and more effective ‘repertoires of contention’ or tactics and activities (Tilly, 1986). Groups challenging power adopt modularised repertoires of contention both to advance the cause, realise internal solidarities and reinforce group identity. However, activists could only take advantage of these changing opportunities because of the growth of oppositional networks during the previous five years.
When Irish Water was established, few expected that the small numbers of anti-austerity campaigners would be able to mount a serious campaign. This scepticism was well founded because of the earlier failure of the campaign against the ‘household charge’, a property tax introduced in 2012. There was extensive mobilisation by left-wing groups against this tax and an attempt at organising nationwide non-compliance. However, the Government responded firmly, enacting powers to take the tax directly at source from wages and social welfare. The campaign failed to respond to the Government’s new tactic and the boycott of the tax collapsed with mutual recriminations from those involved.
However, the issue of water was something people could mobilise effectively and continually against. In September 2014, the umbrella group, ‘Right to Water’ was founded by two trade unions as well as left-wing political parties in order to coordinate a national demonstration against Irish Water. The demonstration was planned for 11 October 2014, and although organisers hoped for an attendance of 10,000, in fact about 80–100,000 turned up in a chaotic demonstration which paralysed Dublin city centre and inspired attendees to organise their own local campaign groups. In the next demonstration on 1 November, an estimated 150,000 people took part in hundreds of local actions and marches around the country. In response, the Government issued a raft of concessions on the issue, the most important being a cap on water charges of €260 for families and €160 on individuals, with an initial ‘water conservation grant’ of €100 to all who registered. However, this did not blunt the campaign, with tens of thousands marching against water charges on 10 December (65–80,000), 31 January, 21 March and 18 April, as well as a smaller march on 20 June 2015, and a demonstration of 8000 who marched on 21 February 2015 to protest the arrest of water charge demonstrators. To prove the continued salience of the issue, 50–80,000 attended a demonstration on 29 August 2015, where the organisers announced their intention to turn the Right to Water campaign into a broader ‘Right to Change’ anti-austerity campaign.
It would be wrong to speak of one campaign against Irish Water; rather there were hundreds of local campaigns – some operating in the same area – loosely interlocked with each other. As we discuss later, the use of innovative tactics or ‘repertoires of contention’ by the campaign was a key feature of its success. In addition the use of social media which enabled sharing of information and ideas without the need for established organisations was essential to the campaign’s achievements.
We have two interlinked hypotheses about the processes that led to the temporal pattern of protest witnessed in Ireland from 2008 to 2014. First, the relative deprivation hypothesis of Merton and Rossi (1950): protest occurred when it did because improvement in the economy was differentially distributed. The second involves the incidental grievance hypothesis of Hechter et al. (2016): the campaign against Irish Water provided an incidental grievance that focused existing structural grievances and provided groups with a practical mode of contention at a time of Government weakness. We adopt a mixed methods approach to examining these two hypotheses as outlined in the next section.
Data and Methods
The European Social Survey 2002–2014
We use data from seven waves of the European Social Survey (ESS): 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014. The ESS is an ‘input harmonised’ international social survey which collects information on a large range of attitudes, beliefs and behaviours as well as detailed information on social demographic status (e.g. gender, age and marital status), employment, education and income.
Achieved sample sizes varied across years; sample size varied from 1764 observations in 2008 to 2628 in 2012. Response rates averaged 55 per cent and were lowest in 2006 and 2008 at 50 per cent and highest in 2014 at 61 per cent.
The Dependent Variable
The ESS questionnaires contained an item on public demonstrations in all seven waves:
There are different ways of trying to improve things in [country] or help prevent things from going wrong. During the last 12 months, have you done any of the following? Have you taken part in a lawful public demonstration? (Response: yes/no/don’t know)
In 2002, the ESS also asked respondents whether they had participated in ‘illegal protest activities’ but the item was not repeated in subsequent waves. Less than 1 per cent of the sample reported attending an illegal demonstration in 2002. Our analysis is based on responses to the item on attendance at a lawful demonstration.
Predictor Variables
Sense of grievance has its roots in the experience of deprivation or hardship at the individual level, be this absolute or relative deprivation. But deprivation is not enough to create a sense of grievance if it is perceived as ‘just’ or ‘deserved’. Deprivation needs to be accompanied by the perception that the situation is unjust, that is, be framed as an injustice in the mind of the individual (Hechter et al., 2016). The ESS contains information on the perceived financial strain of the individual: ‘Which of the descriptions on this card comes closest to how you feel about your household’s income nowadays?’ Answer codes are ‘living comfortably’, ‘coping’, ‘finding it difficult’ and ‘finding it very difficult’.
Throughout the period the trade union movement organised demonstrations around Ireland’s main cities against the cuts in public sector workers’ pay and conditions. We would expect that trade union members would be more likely to protest because of this. To prevent any possible confounding of the relationship between grievance and protest, we adjust for trade union membership.
Our analyses also control for the age (five categories), sex and level of education (five International Standard Classification of Education categories) of the respondent.
Qualitative Interviews
The ESS data provide representative information on the pattern of protest and the drivers of this at the individual level in Ireland but they cannot provide insight into the rationalisations of political activists and the role that these played in structuring the extent and timing of protest in Ireland. For this we draw upon qualitative research carried out with 13 leading activists in the water charges campaign across Ireland. The sample was selected using stratified purposeful sampling and rich response sampling (Pidgeon and Henwood, 2004). One of the authors had prior involvement in a Dublin community group in the campaign, and so we were able to access trade union officials involved in establishing the Right to Water campaign, key members of active community groups around the country, as well as members of political parties involved in the campaign. The interviews sought to understand the rationale for their participation in the campaign, particularly their attribution of threat and opportunity, as well as the internal dynamics of the campaign. The interviews discussed a wide range of activities that the movement was engaged in, from local civil disobedience and street protests to coalition building and strategising. In analysing the interviews, we adopted both a realist and a narrative approach. This seeks to understand the actions of the campaign as well as the interviewee’s interpretation of their actions and how they understood the relationships between various elements of the campaign. We examine the reasons given for involvement and the dominant framing of injustice used by the campaign. This enabled examination of the meso-level mechanisms of the campaign, such as how repertoires of contention, attribution of threats and opportunity and resource mobilisation affected the form and intensity of the protests (McAdam et al., 2001).
Results
The Pattern of Protest in Ireland after 2008
In autumn 2008, the Irish Government implemented an austerity budget which increased personal taxation, reduced welfare benefits and cut health and education services followed by further taxes and cuts in an emergency budget in April 2009. These changes precipitated trade union led demonstrations in spring 2009 and spring 2010 as the governing coalition slowly disintegrated leading to the general election on 25 February 2011, and a lull in the level of demonstrations as the new political landscape took shape.
Figure 2 shows how this is reflected in reported protest in the ESS. After an initial increase in reported protest in 2008, the level fell in 2010 as the country prepared for the general election before, rising in 2012 and again in 2014 as the reality of the new Government’s austerity policies sank in. There was a rise in reported protest across older age groups in 2008, particularly among those aged 55 to 64. The fieldwork for the ESS in Ireland was carried out in autumn 2008. In the October budget of 2008, the Government introduced changes to eligibility to free healthcare among those aged 70+ in response to the growing economic problems. This led to large-scale street protests among older people. The Government were forced to reconsider their position and diluted the changes that were finally introduced.
Proportion reporting taking part in a lawful demonstration or illegal protest by age group and year.
Figure 2 also shows that the fall in the level of protest between 2008 and 2010 was not common to all groups with the proportion continuing to rise among the youngest age group. Overall, the proportion protesting increases among all age groups after 2010 and rises again in 2014 in all, except the youngest age group. This pattern tracks our expectations of the political timeline with initial austerity leading to the defeat of the incumbent political coalition at the general election of 2011 (and a lull in protest) followed by a renewal of political protest later as general economic conditions improved but incidental grievances emerged. Our primary question is whether this pattern of protest supports a theoretical model based on grievances alone?
Descriptive Results
Figure 3 shows the pattern of economic strain in Ireland from 2002 to 2014. The proportion of respondents who report that they are finding it ‘difficult’ or ‘very difficult’ to live on their household’s level of income triples between 2004 and 2010 (10% to 31%) with the largest changes occurring between 2006 and 2010. The proportion finding it ‘difficult’ or ‘very difficult’ then falls by a fifth between 2012 and 2014 as the economy began to recover. There was an increase in perceived economic stress but the subsequent drop would suggest a fall in the severity of the conditions that could lead to grievance overall. A ‘relative deprivation hypothesis’ would suggest that the reason for the surge in protest in 2014, despite the improving economic situation, was the perception among those under the most economic strain that conditions were improving for others but not for themselves. This hypothesis does not appear to be supported by Figure 4. The proportions experiencing ‘difficulty’ or ‘great difficulty’ for groups defined by their highest level of education show that while the lower education groups experienced more difficulty overall, the pattern of improvement in 2012 and 2014 was largely proportional.
Reported economic strain by year.
Proportion reporting ‘difficulty’ living on present income by level of education and year.
If perceived economic stress was declining in 2014 and with it, we assume, the sense of grievance, what then explains the upsurge in protest in that year? In fact, what we see is a changing relationship between the experience of economic strain and propensity to protest in 2014 as shown by Figure 5 which gives the proportion attending a protest by year and level of difficulty coping on current income.
Proportion attending a protest by perceived economic strain and year.
Before 2014, higher levels of economic strain were associated with a lower propensity to protest as indicated by the fact that the line for those reporting they are ‘comfortable’ is the highest until 2012; that is, the extent of perceived economic strain was inversely related to the probability that the person would become involved in protest before 2014. But in 2014, the proportion of those ‘living comfortably’ reporting attending a demonstration falls while the proportions continue to rise for the other groups. More difficulty in economic terms and, by extension, more grievance, becomes associated with a higher likelihood of protesting even as the ‘objective’ economic conditions of all groups continued to improve. It would appear that a new relationship between the variables emerged in that year for reasons other than grievances around economic conditions. We suggest that this other reason was the changed framing of structural grievances by the incidental grievance of Irish Water.
Multivariate Results
Table 1 gives the results for three models: a base model (Model 1) which adjusts for the year of the survey plus confounding characteristics; Model 2 introduces the individual’s experience of economic strain; Model 3 introduces the interaction of year with the extent of difficulty experienced coping on current income. The latter term measures the change which occurs in the relationship between economic strain, year and the odds of protesting. All three models adjust for the age, sex and educational qualifications of the individual and trade union membership.
Odds ratios and significance for a logit model of social protest in Ireland.
Significant key: ***p < .001; **p < .01; *p < .05; #p < .1.
The results for Model 1 confirm the descriptive pattern found for year: an initial increase in protest in 2008 (relative to 2002–2006) followed by a fall in 2010 just prior to the election in Ireland leading to a steep increase in the odds of protest in 2012 and 2014. Across all years, the odds of trade union members protesting are around 1.85 times higher than non-trade union members. Higher levels of education and being male are also associated with a higher odds of attending protest.
Model 2 introduces the variable representing the individual’s level of difficulty coping on their current income. Those who report that it is ‘difficult’ or ‘very difficult’ living on their present income have 1.31 times the odds of attending a protest than those living comfortably. The introduction of this variable in Model 2 reduces the coefficients for the effects of year but does not remove it. Protest remains 1.93 and 2.41 times more likely in 2012 and 2014 respectively than prior to 2008.
Model 3 introduces the interaction between level of difficulty coping on current income with the variable representing year of survey to examine whether the relationship between extent of economic strain and attending a protest varies by year. Model 3 shows that it does, albeit with marginal significance with those reporting ‘difficulty’ or ‘great difficulty’ on their present income 1.68 times more likely to attend a protest in 2014 than those with similar ‘difficulty’ levels prior to 2008.
Clearly there was a change in the relationship between the experience of economic strain and protest in 2014. It may be that the incidental grievance of the establishment of the Irish water utility, ‘Bord Uisce’ was sufficient to bring about this change in behaviours. On the other hand, it may also be that what was also crucial was the role which the establishment of Bord Uisce played in spurring on the oppositional activities of political activists. This grievance was not only likely to gain support among the population but offered protestors the perceived opportunity to effectively protest austerity through engagement in ‘disruptive repertoires of contention’ such as blocking the installation of water meters in homes. Here the Irish Government was in a weak political and logistical position. The next section provides evidence of how this happened using evidence from qualitative interviews with activists.
Qualitative Findings
Water was, in the words of several interviewees, ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’, the incidental grievance that provided the spark for people to protest against the structural grievances of austerity. It did so, first by providing an issue that could be framed to appeal to a wider populace, and second, by enabling protestors to develop effective action repertoires. While other changes in taxes and charges during the recession impacted on one sector of society and not others, water charges were levied on all householders and so offered a broad base for support. This meant that campaigners could, from the beginning, use the resonant human rights frame in their campaign – successfully framing water as a universal human right which everyone was entitled to. This framing was consistent across interviewees whether from unions, community groups or political parties and constantly present in campaign literature. 1 In addition, the grievance was framed not only as an unjust imposition, but as something that people should mobilise around. This suggests the nature of the grievance was important. While social movements have the ability to devise and construct legitimating frames, their independence and agentiveness in doing so should not be overstated (Crossley, 2002). Rather than seeing social movement leaders as free-floating entrepreneurial grievance-mongers, both they and their framing processes are embedded in and tied to the material conditions which produce them (Steinberg, 1999). As discussed earlier, certain grievances, such as those that produce loss and are due to acts of commission rather than omission, lend themselves more easily to effective frames, understood as those having wide resonance, clear targets and straightforward solutions (Benford and Snow, 2000).
As campaigners themselves recognised, there had to be a successful adversarial framing of the issue (Hunt and Benford, 2004). The demonisation of Denis O’Brien, a wealthy Irish businessman, one of whose companies was given the contract to install water meters, enabled campaigners to successfully frame the campaign as one of the ‘ordinary people’ against the ‘rich elites’ and to personalise the technical arguments around water privatisation. As one campaigner, seeking to explain the popularity of the campaign stated, ‘I think that’s one line I throw out at every meeting. “Lads, sooner or later Denis O’Brien is going to end up owning your water supply.” And that always gets a reaction.’
As well as attribution of threat, there also has to be attribution of opportunity. Water charges were considered to be an issue that both threatened participants and which they could win. The consistent framing of the campaign can be contrasted with the constantly shifting narrative coming from the Government. Water charges were originally ‘the last austerity tax’, then a means of conserving resources and finally simply a service which people needed to pay for. This shifting narrative was referred to by several interviewees as ‘proof’ that they were winning and that the Government was vulnerable. The perception of Government weakness, fuelled by concessions made after the initial demonstrations added to the belief among activists that they were going to win this campaign, providing an incentive to continued campaigning. This accords with Giugni and Grasso’s (2016) discussion of anti-austerity protests, where they highlight the importance of public perception of Government weakness in mobilising social movement actors.
Irish Water also provided protestors with the opportunity to engage in disruptive repertoires of contention, developing group identity and broadening opposition to austerity (Tarrow, 2011). Previous opportunities to protest had used contained repertoires such as protest marches or petitions. In contrast, opposition to Bord Uisce took the form of local actions in early 2014 in working class suburbs to stop the installation of water meters. A central plank of water policy was charging for water usage and without meters this would not be possible. Political activists realised early that stopping the installation of meters would make this policy unworkable. The act of resisting water meters made the campaign visible to people in the locality. As one interviewee said.
Now probably one of the reasons why this did take off as opposed to any other campaign around austerity is that there was something physical in your community that people could organise around. Household Tax, there was no physical thing you could organise around. There was ‘don’t pay the bill’ and then they obviously bypassed that. In this case you had vans driving into people’s estates, outside people’s doors, installing austerity effectively into your footpath. To put it crudely that there was something there that people could physically organise around.
The tactic of blockading meter installation also spread due to its perceived effectiveness. Water meters appeared to be a perfect target for the campaign – a concrete way to attack austerity. In addition, the local nature of these actions enabled those involved in blocking the installation of water meters to regard themselves as defending their community from invasion by meter installers, police and private security guards. The trope of defending the community remains the most resonant in Irish political campaigning (Naughton, 2015). The form of campaigning allowed the water protests to engage people on a local basis in between mass demonstrations and to build up a network of neighbours who could be activated when the campaign moved onto the phase of non-payment of Irish Water bills. For one interviewee, this was the main result of the campaign; he now knew people on every street in his area who he could call on to mobilise on other issues. The ability of the campaign to engage in ongoing and extremely local campaigning helps explain why the mobilisation over Irish Water did not fade but remained at a high level, as evinced by seven major demonstrations over the course of a year.
The diversity of tactics adopted, as well as their novelty, were central to the movement’s success. While presenting a broad front to the media under the Right to Water umbrella, different groups in the campaign adopted different repertoires, depending on their position on the field of power and their ideological approaches. This sometimes caused tensions within the movement. The trade unions, heavily institutionalised and necessarily representing a diversity of opinions, were unwilling to undertake or openly support overly contentious actions while simultaneously distancing themselves from some of these actions (Ogle, 2016). They concentrated on building a broad-based campaign involving mass mobilisations, media campaigning, petitions and, eventually, with building an alternative electoral coalition that opposed water charges. They also, crucially, provided material resources for these demonstrations and the electoral platform, as well as providing educational and organisational resources to encourage the development of local groups. The left-wing parties and many of the local groups concentrated mainly, but not exclusively, on encouraging non-payment, due to their familiarity with this repertoire of contention from earlier campaigns, their suspicion of a purely electoral approach and also their belief that ‘the boycott of the charge was the absolute bedrock for the defeating the charges’ (O’Brien, 2016).
There was no common denominator in determining which repertoire of contention local groups adopted. In largely working class areas, obstruction of water meters was popular, while other areas concentrated on non-payment or simply awareness-raising. Often local groups would adopt different tactics in different estates or even streets, depending on the strength of feeling against the water tax. It would be incorrect to pinpoint one tactic or strategy as providing the lever for success. In common with studies showing that movements that adopt a diversity of tactics tend to be more successful, it would be more correct to highlight the overall toolkit the movement deployed which allowed it to reach multiple constituencies as well as maintaining disruptive repertoires of contention (Morris, 1993).
Resources for Protest and Government Weakness
The belief that the campaign was winnable was enhanced by the emergence of resources supporting the campaign. The previous Government (1997 to 2010) had used ‘national partnership agreements’, a type of corporatism, to negotiate with unions and community groups. In return for national wage agreements, falling income taxes and a consultative role, the unions maintained industrial peace. Community groups received generous Government funding turning them from claimants on power to providers of services to the state. It could be argued that one of the primary explanations for the lack of protest in Ireland following the advent of fiscal crisis was this co-option of civil society organisations and trade unions by state governance structures. At the beginning of the recessionary period oppositional social networks simply did not exist and had to develop over the course of the recession. Qualitative fieldwork from a small Irish town outside Dublin showed how a group had originally come together to campaign against the Household Tax. Subsequently, they campaigned to get a member elected to the county council and, inevitably, got involved in the water charges campaign.
In common with other anti-austerity movements (Della Porta, 2015), the increased use of social media was an essential resource for these groups in terms of enhancing their public reach, for organising and for learning new action repertoires. However, it is not only the nucleus of online-connected local campaigning groups which the water charges campaign could call on. A crucial element explaining the growth of contentious politics was the enhanced role of unions who had not been seriously involved in previous anti-austerity campaigns. The shift of some unions from partnership to opposition was crucial in providing brokerage, certification and resources for the movement (McAdam et al., 2001).
On 2 June 2014, representatives of two Irish trade unions met with political parties to talk about what to do about the upcoming water charges. Disagreements at the meeting among the politicians meant that they allowed the unions to take key decisions concerning the ‘Right to Water’ campaign and engage in a crucial brokerage role (McAdam et al., 2001) between elements of the campaign. As one interviewee from a trade union remarked:
The people involved in the unions are not in parties […] so there’s a bit of trust from the political element, to a point that we’re not going to turn this into a Shinner gig or an AAA gig or a People before Profit gig.
2
The smaller parties, they’re happy to let us run it. I think it’s been successful because we’ve got the whole lot of them working together, to a point.
The decision, made by the unions, that only local groups would be promoted by the national Right to Water campaign was important in ensuring some unity between otherwise squabbling political groups. The level of trust in the unions as political brokers was a key theme in the qualitative interviews.
The role of trade unions in providing ‘certification’ or legitimation to the campaign among a wider cross-section of civil society was also important. Certification by an institutionalised body enables contentious politics to move beyond radical circles, broadening the campaign’s appeal. Union ‘certification’ broadened the water campaign’s appeal. For example, unions framed the campaign in terms of water as a human right rather than as the narrower, ‘fight austerity’ campaign, ensuring that the campaign remained open to a multiplicity of campaigning tools rather than the narrow approach of boycotting or meter blockading as advocated by some radical left-wing groups. This all helped keep the campaign mainstream. Finally, the unions directly provided tens of thousands of euro to the campaign as well as providing indirect resources such as the time of union officials. One answer to the question of why the first demonstration on Irish Water was so big lies in the half a million flyers printed by the unions to advertise it.
Conclusions
The temporal patterning of protest in Ireland between 2008 and 2014 offers something of a paradox to sociologists. Common sense would suggest that the desire to protest would be a function of the underlying social and economic conditions and the population’s sense of grievance with these. Yet the level of protest was at its lowest in 2010 when economic strain was at its highest and reached its peak in 2014 when conditions had improved considerably, even among the most vulnerable. There appears to have been a change in the relationship between economic strain and protest between 2010 and 2014: all groups became more likely to protest, but particularly those experiencing the most difficult economic conditions. This change in the probability of protest was a result of the ‘injustice framing’ of the situation around the incidental grievance of Irish Water in combination with the coordinating activities of political activists and unions.
The situation in Ireland between 2008 and 2014 underlines certain important features of all mass movements. Large-scale socio-political and economic processes can explain the form of contentious politics for protests: there needs to be a constant background of grievance and the political system needs to be perceived as unresponsive, incompetent and weak. Giugni and Grasso (2016) have argued as much when they say that social protest is dependent on the interaction between material deprivation with the perception of political opportunity. But equally, we show that these elements were necessary but not sufficient. We would caution against seeing a direct correlation between material deprivation and social protest as some have done and argue that contingent events or incidental grievances can precipitate protest. The establishment of Irish Water and water charges were an incidental grievance par excellence as the issue connected to wider structural grievances but was simple and related to something (water) that everyone could relate to.
Our article also points to the importance of political skills and networks in explaining the incidence of protest. The forms and intensity of contention were the meso-level mechanisms which were not present earlier in the recession: networks established over the course of the recession and able to draw on new and important allies. These networks took advantage of an incidental grievance which aroused deep anger across many groups in Irish society. Networks were able to engage in innovative repertoires of contention, which had the double benefit of both targeting and disrupting the activities of the opposition and mobilising their own supporters. In so doing they changed the balance of power in the dispute and provided themselves with the all-important sense that they might just win.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.