2014: The Year of Recovery, or the Year of the Water Uprising?

It is difficult to give a title to the political year 2014.

The Government no doubt would have hoped for 2014 to be called The Year of Recovery. All the indicators point towards a real recovery. Growth is estimated to be 4.6 per cent in Ireland this year, making it the fastest growing economy in the European Union. The unemployment rate at the end of November was 10.7 per cent; there were 359,000 people on the Live Register compared with 391,500 at the same time last year. The balance of trade is healthy and tax returns are buoyant.

All that statistical data however is failing, it seems, to have an impact on most people’s own sense of whether there is an economic recovery. There is a clear geographic as well as socioeconomic unevenness to the upturn, at least up to this point, and this has political consequences. Such is the disparity in recovery perception that large job announcements in Dublin and its hinterland are having the peculiar impact of generating resentment in other parts of the country.

The disparity is apparent in the retail sector for example. Shop owners in provincial towns will tell you they feel no pick-up in business; some even suggest the trading climate is more difficult this year than in previous years. Meanwhile the streets of the capital are thronged with pre-Christmas shoppers. Perhaps 2014 then could more correctly be described as the Year of Recovery for Some.

There is an extent to which it could also be described as a Year of Political Change. This has operated at the two ends of the political process.

At or near the top of government there have been some dramatic changes in personnel. We have a different Tánaiste and a different leader of the Labour Party from this time last year. We have no fewer than six new Ministers.

Big beasts

This time last year James Reilly, Phil Hogan and Alan Shatter were the big beasts of the Government’s political line-up. One year later Reilly survives in power, if diminished. Hogan has been elevated to the European Commission. Alan Shatter is also gone from Cabinet. His magnetism for controversy was obvious to many this time last year but few would have predicted the pace and manner of his demise.

Collaterally we lost a Garda Commissioner in 2014 in circumstances yet to be entirely explained and which may return to haunt the government and the Taoiseach in particular early in 2015.

2014 has also of course been an election year, albeit those elections were of second order. Ireland’s representation in the European parliament changed dramatically this year: more than half of our current MEPs are first-timers. We have also had a dramatic change of personnel in local government.

Above all else this year could be described as the Year of Water or more accurately, the Year of the Water Uprising. The changes in political personnel described above arguably had little impact on public policy. The people power of the water protests did change policy however and quite dramatically so.

Nasty elements

There were nasty elements to some of the anti-water campaign. The bulk of it however was a popular spontaneous response which saw hundreds of thousands of people peacefully come on to the streets on a scale without much precedent in Irish political history. It arose in reaction to the very concept of charging for water, uncertainty about what the level of charges would be and from public anger and fatigue at enduring austerity.

There were some large-scale protests when the current economic crisis began, most notably from pensioners in 2008 when some of their medical cards were threatened and from workers who protested in 2009 in response to pay cuts.

When historians come to examine 2014 it will strike them as curious that the most intense Irish popular reaction to the recession came just as the recovery began to take hold. To explain why water charges became the tipping point in our politics they will need to appreciate the debt and trauma of the recession and the shift in expectations which came when the troika left.

Those future historians will also be better placed to assess the extent to which the water charges controversy and the economic crisis generally will have had an enduring impact on Irish politics. The political shifts reflected in this year’s local and European elections and even more dramatically in opinion polls this autumn will fascinate students and teachers of Irish politics for decades.

It is difficult to predict whether and where the current tumult in Irish politics will settle. We may look back at 2014 as the year when, after initial tensions, Ireland shifted gently from civil war politics to a more typically left-right divide. Such is the volatility however that 2014 may mark the start of a period of precarious political instability.