Are we rich or are we poor?

Are we rich or are we poor? That's the conversation that has dominated Irish political life in the weeks since the fuel protests, with many on the left of the Irish political spectrum lambasting the organisers and participants for ‘looking after’ their own interests, and those on the right keen to see it continue and fester to include matters beyond the cost of living.

What is increasingly clear since those pivotal protests is that, much like the Dublin riots in 2023, it has been a turning point for politics in Ireland. Whether you agree with the sentiments of either is irrelevant.

The Irish people voted in 2024, we got our government, the Greens were kicked out for gene-pool independents, but our leaders failed to change operations.

The Greens were canny, wise and aware of the future. A reliance on fossil fuels isn't just daft when we have abundant natural renewable resources - the Greens were prescient and legislated to keep Ireland on course to meet its climate goals.

This has made any subsequent government tied to their goals. But it proved unpopular.

The people voted and the Green Party went from kingmakers on the crest of a green wave in 2020 to a single TD in 2024. That's democracy.

Nowhere have the Greens been more maligned than in rural Ireland, the long-standing battleground that can be made to mean anything if you want to make a point.

Despite the fact that rural Ireland rightly gets a fair hearing, what it means has changed in modern times.

The OECD report on rural Ireland identifies housing as the biggest issue facing the area, not the need for more short-term lets or nitrates derogation. It is the simplest thing to say but seemingly the hardest to fix, and it remains the biggest stumbling block in Irish political life, uniting urban and rural alike.

The people voted, but what did they say? The Green Party was removed. Independents came in alongside the two major parties without any true direction, ideologically or policy-wise, beyond increasing foreign direct investment.

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil appear to be empty husks, satisfied to be rid of those pesky environmentalists with focus.

Now they could get on with doing what was needed, but instead they were left resembling the John Travolta meme from Pulp Fiction: smartly dressed but utterly confused, finding themselves with free rein but with nowhere to go.

The fuel protests have served as a lightning rod, signalling a further shift to the right in Irish political life. Jim O'Callaghan understood that with his tough rhetoric on migration and the publicising of deportation flights.

Now, in the aftermath of years of tumult, the compassion that existed for Ukrainians fleeing war has also come to an abrupt conclusion. A hurried plan to expedite their return to a nation still at war, and a reduction in the ARP rental allowance, sees the Government move to quell populist anger.

Indeed, much like the irony of the Green Party, which campaigned to end direct provision in 2019 and 2020, only for their minister to oversee a proliferation of public money directed towards the very sites they had campaigned against.

Indeed, those on the left, during the onset of the Ukrainian war and when support packages were announced, complained that a double standard was being introduced: one for direct provision asylum seekers and another for Ukrainians fleeing war. Four years later, that looks to be ending, on a phased basis.

It was a major talking point among those involved in the fuel protests, the Ukrainian support system, but not out of humanitarian concern. It was anger that people were receiving public money that they, as Irish residents and lifelong taxpayers, were unable to access themselves.

Again, as with HAP or RAS, these measures only served to increase the wealth of private interests, inflating an already overheated rental market even further.

Speaking recently to a well-known local businessman in the bar and restaurant sector, he described to me employees refusing to work full-time hours for fear of losing out on HAP. This is surely a retrograde policy, one that not only increases the cost of renting but also prevents willing and able workers from maximising their labour.

Why is it that a landlord class, no matter the crisis, always comes up trumps?

That is the final crux of all this. Government has decided to attempt to quell public anger by discontinuing Ukrainian benefits, by speaking about migration as a driver of increased homelessness, and again, by design, pitting people who are struggling against people who are struggling more.

It is the cowardly politics of the last hurrah: devoid of vision and utterly unwilling to stop taxpayers' money flowing directly into a rentier class.

Until that is solved, we will never see public satisfaction in this government’s performance increase and, most worryingly for both urban and rural Ireland, a conclusion to the housing crisis.