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A Globalised Weekend

Last week I was wandering through the supermarket, grumbling to myself about the Tesco Imps unerring ability to guess what I'll want for dinner and remove the necessary ingredients from the shelves. As I paid for my food, I noticed that they were offering buns and tea, for a donation to charity. As I quite felt like sitting down for a bit, I took them up on their offer.

This was how I came to find myself reading the Northside People newspaper. In it, nestled amongst the articles with headlines like "Outraged!" and "Spring into Fashion" there was a small interview with Claire Taylor. She is someone who returned from living in the US and decided that she didn't want to go back to being an engineer straight away. Instead she decided to publish a magazine, called the Yoke. Much like ourselves here at tuppenceworth.ie, she wanted to let people talk about things that mattered to them. All the writers, artists and photographers contributed their work free of charge, and the end result was a very pleasing and elegant publication.

I was so pleased with the familiarity of this impulse- to let people's interests create a magazine that others might also find interesting, that I bought a copy that Saturday. I wandered out of the back of the Ilac Centre with my little paper bag and looked for somewhere to sit and read it. On a whim, I went into a small, freshly scrubbed looking, Chinese restaurant. This is part of Moore Street's row of ethnic shops, each catering to their own community, which let the curious pedestrian travel around the world in eighty paces. As the menu was entirely in Chinese, I asked the bewildered looking woman behind the counter for something small and light. Quickly discovering that I had pitched my request in rather too complicated a manner, we agreed, by pointing and smiling, that it would be best if I went upstairs. "Menu upstairs", I was reassured.

Up I went, two flights of stairs, to find myself in another fiercely tidy room, with four Chinese lads playing each other at Quake. Using the pointing smiling dialect, which remained my only communication tool, I gathered that I had climbed rather too many stairs. As I left, the players watched me go with the startled, guilty look of gamers everywhere. Eventually settled into my comfortable seat, and enjoying two dumplings (small, but not all that light, to be honest) I read the first essay in the Yoke on Ireland's position at the top of the Globalisation Index 2002. Rarely have I had a piece of writing chime so strongly with what I was experiencing as I read it.

This to me epitomised the positive aspects of globalisation- sitting in Moore St., the mythical heart of Old Dublin, eating Chinese dumplings and reading an explanation of how this came about, written by somebody out of interest, rather then for money.

With these memories fresh in my mind, I watched the reports on the anti-globalisation rally in Dublin organised by Reclaim the Streets. Here I saw another part of the move to a globalised culture. Perhaps taking their cue from Seattle or Genoa, the Garda Siochana (Guardians of the Peace, lest you've forgotten) decided to deal with a sit down protest by baton charging the sitters and coshing them until they bloody well quit acting the maggot.

Thus, in the middle of an election, the top story on the main evening News was footage of the Gardi repeatedly clubbing scruffy bearded types, and refusing to explain to impudent youngsters who had the cheek to ask why they weren't wearing their identifing numbers. The government and opposition both decried the heavy handed thumpers, and linked it with other occasions when the police seem to have had no difficulty finding themselves innocent of any wrongdoing, no matter how bad things might have looked to the untrained eye. Even the media trained Garda spokesman looked shifty as he called for witnesses to come forward. Why, the people of Ireland asked themselves, can't they just look at the pictures we just saw and take the appropriate action.

Except, whose pictures did we see? The footage was provided by INDY Media, who may have edited it, or may not have, before RTE were handed it. Amongst the sexy headbashing shots we also got interviews with bleeding teenagers talking with pride about their injuries, obviously relieved that at last they'd be able to look the other anti-globalisation campaigners in the eye at the next WTO summit. If only, they only just stopped short of saying, the Guards had used tear gas! Clearly, the lessons learned from other clashes (if Dublin's fracas could be termed in such a dramatic manner) were applied here by Reclaim the Streets. Being roughed off the streets, provided it's caught on camera, can give your cause immeasurable moral force. It is a milder version of the old Trotskyite plan to provoke the state to violence, and so reveal its true oppressive nature.

In news reports on riots, we're usually treated to the same stock shot of a faceless youth hurling a stone/petrol bomb at the forces of law and order. But we never hear from the youth afterwards, to let him explain his actions as a comment on his powerlessness in sociey. That's because, unlike all the protesters from Reclaim the Streets, he doesn't speak with a Dublin 4 nasal drone. (As the owner of one of these Dublin college accents myself, I can spot them a mile away.) Nor do rioters at Halloween in Darndale film themselves with tiny DV camcorders being beaten, and then instantly edit the footage on ibooks equipped with Final Cut Pro to give to passing television stations hungry for that evening's hot shots.

The reason the anti-globalisation movement has had such effect is that it attracts some of the brightest and best educated in every country. This is in distinct contrast to the police forces, who find themselves outmanoeuvred even when they're not outnumbered. The difference between trying to disperse a jeering group of tracksuited teenagers and a jeering group of hairy teenagers and twentysomethings isn't how tough it is to get them to break up. Rather it's the fallout you face afterwards from a media who recognise the friends of their sons and daughters in the crowd.

I'm not sure if all the protesters could have clearly explained what they were demonstrating against. And I doubt if political philosophy occupies a large part of the Templemore curriculum. But I'm pretty certain that none of the Guards have been equipped to really understand the central reasoning of an anti-materialist call to abandon the car in cities.

I'm sure the getting to grips with the beliefs of radical agitators certainly isn't paid as much attention in police training as how to correctly wield your trunchon against a troublemaker. Unfortunately the Guards working on this occasion were lacking a more basic piece of their education. Either they had forgotten, or had never been told, the golden rule of global policing- Never Cosh The Middle Classes

by
Simon McGarr
7th May 2002

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