Fianna Fáil TD Brendan Smith gave an outstanding performance in political representation on the RTÉ Six-One News last Thursday. He didn’t hold back in his unequivocal condemnation of the savages who kidnapped and tortured Quinn Industrial Holdings (QIH) CEO Kevin Lunney some 48 hours earlier. Deputy Smith is from that part of west Cavan where local people have been frozen into silence in fear because of what has been happening there. He fearlessly spoke up for them.

For many of the rest of us, last week’s attack was the first we realised the extent of this fear and intimidation. That speaks volumes. I was in tears last Friday evening listening to Fr Gerry Comiskey speak to Mary Wilson on Drivetime about what happened to his friend Mr Lunney, thinking about what his poor wife and children are going through.

Journalist Dearbhail McDonald also spoke. She told of how she’d written about this last November, making the point that if it was big corporate directors in Dublin or Cork that were being attacked and threatened in the same fashion, the Government would have been on it like a flash.

A friend of mine, living near there, intimated as much to me last week too. “Damien, this has been going on for eight years and nobody outside of here gives a damn.”

There is little a government can do to directly intervene on prices. But try telling that to those at the coalface in these mainly rural areas. They feel helpless and cut off

It may seem trite to make a connection between this unspeakable carry-on and the beef blockades, but there is a tentative connection. It’s the feeling that those outside Dublin don’t matter. The defiance by some protestors of no higher power than the President of Ireland to call off the pickets was symptomatic of this. What began as a typical old-fashioned farm protest against the big beef barons, turned into a mini revolution against the establishment by hard-pressed farmers fed up with scrimping for a living.

Right before our eyes we saw the farm lobby splinter and lose its once all-powerful authority and mandate in collective bargaining. What is more – leaving aside the predictable sprinkling of political opportunists who infiltrate events like this – we may have reached a watershed for the two main political parties too.

We have to be real here. There is little a government can do to directly intervene on prices. But try telling that to those at the coalface in these mainly rural areas. They feel helpless and cut off.

Little things matter

This disconnect is only underlined by little things, by optics, such as Leo Varadkar bragging about cutting back on red meat or comparing Micheál Martin to a “sinning priest”. You may laugh. It may not mean a whit to the urban voters Fine Gael are obsessed with pleasing. But inside their traditional rural support base, such rhetoric only serves to add insult to injury.

Politicians always expect a simmering anger and swaying of votes from election to election. But this time it’s a “simmering” in farmhouses where Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael would never have expected it before. Otherwise quiet conservative rural farming folk seem pretty fed up. Next May will tell us more.