If I was inventing a protest movement, I wouldn't start here

IF YOU WERE starting a mass protest movement, you’d be unlikely to base it around people who are only passing through. You’d not decide on a regular change of leadership, or protesters who can mobilise only at certain times of the year: not summer; Easter isn’t good either; weekends can be tricky. You wouldn’t, in other words, put something together on the student-protest model.

And yet, there are certain advantages. At optimal times, the cohort can be quickly and effectively mobilised; it is a group that expects to march every now and again, sees it as integral to the experience of being a student, and does so with colour and noise and some excellent sloganeering. (Sign at Wednesday’s march: “First Westlife and now this . . .”)

The rest of the country also expects students to march, however, as if it’s something the student population needs to shake out of its system every now and again. It means it must pick its battles very carefully, to aim for effectiveness rather than routine. But if Ireland is to change, the global Occupy movement may offer an ideal opportunity to shape that change.

Student protests have been core to so much social and political change across the globe that it would be foolish to write off their power. Wednesday’s march can be considered a moderate success – although a €500 rise in student fees seems to have been well flagged in advance of the budget.

Despite the march, it was notable how little of that day’s political discourse bothered with the issue itself. Instead, Dáil and Seanad debates focused on Labour’s pre-election pledge not to reintroduce fees. The ethics of reintroducing fees as a way of resuscitating our ailing third-level system were drowned out by the shouting.

Contrast that with the senior-citizen marches, which were sudden, ferocious and came from a group with little history of insurrection. Here was a section of the population considered genuinely vulnerable, a generation which could argue it had done its duty for the country and deserved to be looked after by those following behind. And there was always that undercurrent of the parent-child relationship writ on a national level. The protesters’ verbal ferocity was a scolding. It followed the natural order of discipline.

Besides, those were in range of an election. We’re maybe four years away from one now, and the difficulty for the USI president Gary Redmond, who claimed that students won’t forget broken promises when they get to the ballot box, is that many of them won’t still be students by the time they next cast their vote. A more unfortunate truth – and one of the central complaints on Wednesday – is that many of them won’t even be in Ireland by then.

Anyone’s time as a student is a vital one, but it evolves into a new set of priorities, based on working (or non-working) and family lives. Even if the demands are broadly the same from protest to protest, students are only ever passing through, often in and out of college in less time than the life of the government. It makes it easier for a government with a healthy majority to play a long game; it also means that its focus will be on the parents as much as on the students themselves.

The introduction of student loans – already ruled out, it would appear, for various reasons – would certainly impose a collective long-term memory on students (and not in a good way). The burden of such loans has long been an issue in the UK, and contributed to protests and subsequent riots a year ago.

In the US, meanwhile, the student loan issue has become enmeshed in the wider Occupy movement, a protest that will truly define 2011.

In fact, Occupy offers an opportunity for the student movement to invigorate itself and, potentially, this country.

We are living through one of the greatest upheavals in the State in a century. It is ripe for a student movement which looks beyond itself and towards the wider society.

Instead of simply inheriting the society, of becoming graduates in a rotten system, they are being handed a megaphone and a platform and a chance to demand an alternative.

It would be wonderful to see students sidestep accusations that students’ protests too often look routine, their concerns too self-interested, to mobilise in a broader protest against the system that created the broken country they’re graduating into.

They may only be passing through, but they have a chance to Occupy the future.

shegarty@irishtimes.com

Twitter: @shanehegarty