I don't know about you but I find that a most troubling development for a democracy. If you have forgotten the incident, the Tanaiste was in attendance at a school right beside a planned water protest and the mere sight of her, (The leader of the Labour Party), was enough to incense the crowd who surrounded her car and they chanted anti-water slogans at the deaf politician.
I heard that lying woman on radio shortly afterwards maintaining that she felt in fear of her life. It was no such thing of course but merely a frustrated crowd of citizens and voters who had been ignored and vilified by Dail Eireann for exercising their democratic right to protest.
If this court action is successful though, even if they give suspended sentences or paltry fines, a precedent will be set in this country and the right to protest bad political decisions in the Dail will be removed. We will be darkly threatened against protesting anything in the future.
If I look back now to the inception of this Government I remember Enda Kenny coming on TV one night, (pre-election of course), to address all of us commoners. His message that night was that we didn't do anything wrong and it was delivered in the style of a gentle understanding fatherly-figure insinuating that he had a plan to fix everything if we voted for the bastard.
Weeks into office and the tone changed dramatically. Ministerial voices were heard daily warning us commoners that they were going to get tough with us. At the birth of Irish Water, Phil Hogan even went so far as to say he intended to, "Put manners on us." The new-look fatherly-figure was now the one with the clenched fist. In their newly elevated positions of power, these self-important so-called leaders were rubbing shoulders with powerful bankers and influential industrialists, paving the way for a soft landing for these people.
To do that though, they had to financially rape the rest of us. You can think of the myriad of taxes since then as a set of fines for being innocent of any wrongdoing in the "crash." They have been applied to all of us of to bail out the greedy profligate wealthy in our society.
It is true to say that today, our Government operates in a vacuum of its own choosing. The electorate is not consulted about anything because they, (the rulers), have decided not to ask us. They just do as they please. It has become apparent that they see getting elected as a carte-blanche to do as they wish for five years regardless of their pre-election promises and manifesto's. This is not Government by the people by any stretch of the imagination.
In response, the only weapon we four and a half million citizens have is to protest. Now to get us out on the streets in the first place is no easy task. We Irish have become quite shy about marching in defense of our rights. So for hundreds of thousands of us to have marched consistently against Irish Water shows just how deeply incensed we are at this latest punishment for doing nothing wrong. Irish Water is not the worst thing they have done to us, just the final straw.
As I see it then, if the Government and the DPP get away with charging the water protesters, then protest as a tool to express our anger or dissatisfaction will be banned. The most alarming aspect of that is, that in the absence of our protests to new laws by the Government, they will loudly claim our silence as a sign of support for them.
When that happens we will truly have become ENSLAVED to a plutocracy.