Kettle's Boyled: Tell me what you want, what you really, really want

I watched the Spanish TV news on May 1st. I’m interested in developments in the Coalition there, where a government wobble parallels our own situation. However, that story didn’t feature, it was all about Mayday, the workers holiday. The head of the UGT union was interviewed, and he was on message with three demands for more money, shorter hours, and lower prices. It occurred to me his demands were impossible; the logical outcome of workers getting more money and shorter hours is an increase in costs, something that pushes prices up. There’s no magic money tree, no matter what anyone says.

But at least his message was clear. Far too often, protest takes the form of unintelligible gibberish, with the people shouting the loudest often making the least sense. In Kilkenny a few weeks ago I dropped my wife off at Pauls, a renowned store that is the city’s equivalent of Boles of Boyle, a business that has been there forever and where you always get what you want at the right price. Every town should have a Pauls, or a Boles; they are national treasures.

I drove around to the car park and walked back to fulfil my other role of carrying home the bags. My route took me past the Tholsel, a vaulted structure on High Street that serves as a handy meeting point. It also attracts protestors, mostly because they can shout and yell while staying dry.

There was a small group there that day. Two were teenage boys, waving our tricolour and the Palestinian Authority flag as they ran up and down. There were two adults with them as well, one woman with a cheap, crackly loudhailer, and a tall man who gazed down at her adoringly, his neck kept warm by an Arab Keffieh scarf.

An elderly woman, carrying shopping bags, stopped beside me and asked what the woman was shouting about. I told her I didn’t know, it sounded like ‘Free Brits Palestine.’ The woman agreed, that was what she thought as well. Then the volume increased and the shouter began a ‘whaddya want’ chant, answered with a mutter from the Keffieh man. The next line was ‘whenda wewannit,’ which she answered herself with ‘nigh!’ Or that’s what my new friend and I figured the woman was saying; it was hard to tell. She suggested it could even be about street cleaning, as the two teenagers were by now just dragging the tricolour and the Palestinian flag along the ground.

Whatever the loudhailer woman was trying to achieve, she wasn’t going to get it by screaming at two bemused passers-by in Kilkenny’s High Street. She might have been better off sitting across a table from whoever she had issues with, and speaking calmly, while at the same time making it clear as to exactly what she wanted.

But most protestors seem to prefer the other route.