Occupational Hazards

It’s been a little over four months since the Occupy Dame Street movement sprang up in front of Dublin’s Central Bank. Now it is being claimed that protesters are negatively impacting those they claim to be fighting for.

One disgruntled local is Frank McQuade, proprietor of the Flip/Helter Skelter clothing store adjacent to the Central Bank plaza. McQuade says his business has declined dramatically since the Occupy protestors took up residence, the traditional Christmas surge in sales failing to materialise. For a man who should be celebrating 25 years in business this April, it is instead what he calls “the last nail in the coffin”. Frank’s windows are now adorned with posters calling for his new, unwanted neighbours to pack up and leave.
“I have nothing against protestors,” he begins. “But it’s a pretty pathetic attempt at a protest. In the beginning it was fine. Before they built all these huts they just had a couple of tents and then they started putting more and more tents up and they blocked off the whole right side of the plaza. That just killed off our business because you’re out of sight and out of mind. Half of those houses don’t have doors on them, they’re just cubes. The whole thing is just for show and it’s a slow strangulation on the local businesses.”
Given that the Occupy movement strictly abstains from having a specific leader, Frank’s attempts at establishing a meaningful dialogue with the group have ultimately proven futile.
“There’s no committee, no structure,” he explains. “You meet with two or three of them and they say they’ll put it to the assembly but nobody agrees on anything so nothing gets done. From right up to Christmas we were asking for them to give us our footfall back across the plaza, to even give us five or six feet of it but nothing was done. That’s their modus operandi – they don’t have a structure so they don’t have to deal with you. They’re not bad people, but it’s bad for business. It looks terrible.”
When Hot Press visited the protest last October, we were told that the next time we wished to gain any kind of official comment it would come from someone else, in keeping with the ‘no leader’ motto. On this occasion we spoke to an amiable Alaskan named Dan, who declined to give his surname, believing such information to be unimportant. A former financial advisor, Dan says that he quit his job six years ago when he saw the writing on the wall and wished to bear no responsibility for the consequences. He insists that he is nonplussed by McQuade’s posters.
“He has as much right to demonstrate as we do,” he shrugs. “I have no problem with that. If he wishes to demonstrate against us, that’s his privilege. Of course.”
What about McQuade and his fellow shopkeepers’ charge that the Occupy Dame Street movement is a rudderless ship with no clear agenda?
“They should come down and talk with us,” he says. “We have people here with various aspects of interest and knowledge. Mine is finance; primarily financial and political transparency. I want to know what the fuck happened.
“Getting what we want isn’t a short-term situation,” he adds. “We’re completely prepared to hold out as long as we can. I want political and financial transparency. I want to see young people of the age of 13 and 17 form into a political entity that will terrify the politicians that are currently in there.”
Frank McQuade is unimpressed. “I’ve tried talking to them. The fact is that they are putting my business at risk. And from what I can see, they just don’t care.”