The Irish Suffer Austerity in Silence

In a village in County Cork in southern Ireland, about 50 farmers and business people meet after Mass on Sundays to protest against taxpayer bailouts of bankers. They hold up a banner, wait for the traffic to stop, and set off on their march 200 yards up the road and back to bemoan the collapse of the economy. As the first anniversary of Ireland’s €67.5 billion ($91.1 billion) bailout by the European Union and International Monetary Fund approaches, organizer Diarmuid O’Flynn says the group has struggled to break the 70-person mark ever since it started in March. “Where we’ve gone we’ve met with almost universal support, but nobody will fall in,” he says. “It’s what is called the bystander theory. The more people who witness a crime, the less likely somebody is to intervene.”

Not all protests are tiny. Irish police say 15,000 students in Dublin protested the government’s reintroduction of college fees on Nov. 16. A version of Occupy Wall Street has also sprung up there. Yet the protests haven’t approached the violence and chaos in the streets of Athens and Rome. In Ireland there was only one strike in the third quarter, and it involved about 17 people, according to a statement by the Irish Central Statistics Office. Greek unions have fought the government’s spending cuts by grounding airplanes, halting public transport, and allowing garbage to pile up on Athens streets. Portugal is set to face a general strike on Nov. 24, its second in a year. The peaceful, often subdued nature of Ireland’s protests supports the government’s insistence that the nation shouldn’t be lumped in the same category as the Mediterranean states. “It is very clear that it sets Ireland apart from some other countries,” Istvan Szekely, a European Commission official overseeing the country’s bailout, said in Dublin recently.