Gavan Reilly: What to do about the mob outside the Dáil gates?

“Traitor!” roared the angry man in the heavy grey jacket from a few yards away. “Traitooooor!” I wasn’t sure what I’d done to ire him. I was merely standing outside Leinster House speaking to a colleague from the BBC, as part of a report he was doing on the ongoing stalemate at Stormont and the views from Dublin of how the logjam might be broken. Yet I don’t think the voice across the street was specifically objecting to anything I might be saying.

Then, of course, the penny dropped. I was a “traitooooooor!” merely because I work inside Leinster House. Presumably, therefore, I’m part of whatever conspiracy is being concocted to replace the white Irish, or sexualise children, or whatever other horseshit was being peddled by the group outside the gates last week. Political protest is a part of any democracy, and has to be tolerated. Any push towards marginalising those who object, or not giving them the chance to express concerns in an open forum, is a recipe for disaster.

I wrote on these pages in January 2021 that those who gathered outside the Kildare Street gates – and who have been there for years, merely in smaller numbers than now – demonstrate little by way of objective logic. “They spend their days communicating only with each other, trapped in an echo chamber with others who only reinforce the most conspiratorial fringe beliefs. It’s easier for them that way: the world only makes sense to them when they’re the ones who decide the truth.

“These people are simultaneously very vulnerable and very dangerous. Vulnerable because they’re the victims of the biggest con of all; the one that suggests everyone is out to fleece them and pull a fast one. It’s a notion they cannot scrutinise because they have never been empowered to. They have been encouraged to question everything they hear from official or respected channels, but are incapable of querying the conspiracy put to them.

“They’re also dangerous because their worldview means there are no real problems (other than every politician being corrupt, obviously) and therefore no consequences to their own actions.”

It was true then and it’s true now