TIDE IN THE AFFAIRS OF MEN: Has the high water mark passed for Paul Murphy, at an anti-water charges protest yesterday, and others on the left of Irish politics? Photo: Tony Gavin

A man who boasts that he was elected "to break the law" feels aggrieved when he's subsequently arrested. Go figure.

The same man then goes on to claim that arresting him is a sign of "political policing", whereas the truth is that not to arrest a man because he is an elected representative would be the real political policing. That's what happens in Northern Ireland these days, where the police are too afraid to go after wrongdoers linked to certain parties lest they be accused of destabilising the peace process. Take your pick which is the better model.

There's a clear attempt right now to establish a narrative which says the Government wishes to "criminalise" protest and intimidate communities into not making their voices heard. The absurdity of that view is obvious - 100,000 came out onto the streets to object to water charges last year, and not a single one was arrested. People are simply being questioned right now over an ongoing Garda investigation into a protest which got out of hand in Jobstown in November and which led to the Tanaiste being imprisoned in her car for two hours and at least one brick being thrown at officers.

On last checking, those were indeed criminal offences and would likely remain so under any alternative political or economic system.

Or are Paul Murphy and cohorts claiming they would be able to prevent such arrests in future? If so, it's hypocritical to say they're against political policing, because that would be the very definition of it.

Then again, they seem quite confused about this whole issue. Appearing at a press conference last week alongside the Socialist Party TD, another Anti-Austerity Alliance representative was asked directly about Joan Burton: "What would have happened to her had she got out of the car? Could you vouch for her safety?"

"I could, actually," he said.

Murphy agreed. "Absolutely," he declared. How can the pair of them vouch for anyone's safety when the line all along has been to insist that there was no political organisation of that protest, it was merely a spontaneous community reaction to her presence on the day?

No one could guarantee her safety, especially when there are people on internet sites such as politics.ie wishing on Burton the same fate as Mussolini's mistress, or when a tape recording of November's protest, broadcast on Today FM's Last Word, features a protester shouting: "Give her sanctuary in the church, it's the only place she'll be safe."

Tellingly, no one chided or corrected him on the day. Or, for that matter, since.

Sending six gardai to arrest a lightly built TD over breakfast, rather than making a date for him to come to a station to be questioned, looks excessive, but it was explained perfectly well. The people they were arresting had a propensity for organising protests. Had they known they were to be interviewed at a certain date at a certain time, there would in all likelihood have been a protest outside to coincide with it, and that always has the disturbing propensity to turn nasty, as seen recently on a number of occasions.

The explanation makes sense, because that was Murphy's first response to his arrest too, as he tweeted: "All out - 6.30pm @ Dept of Justice".

The claim that this was some political campaign against protesters makes no sense. The protests have been waning, tailing off; economic confidence is on the up, the Government parties are rallying in the polls as an election draws nearer. The last thing Fine Gael and Labour want is another spark to set them off. If there was political interference, it would surely have been to leave well alone rather than prodding the hornets' nest and giving those on the Left another chance to paint themselves as martyrs.

And boy, did they take it. Murphy's language after his arrest was comically apocalyptic, as he accused the government of trying to "terrorise the working-class people". Ruth Coppinger went even further on Thursday at the Department of Justice rally, when she referred to what happened as a "terror campaign" by a "repressive regime", suggesting that she has little experience in the real world either of terror campaigns or genuinely repressive regimes.

Those who use force should expect to be met with a robust response, and stopping the Tanaiste going about her business was, by any definition, an illegitimate use of force, just as identifying and arresting people suspected of involvement in such activity is an entirely proper use of Garda resources.

That's what makes Ruth Coppinger's remark in the Dail about "dogs" so revealing.

The socialist TD said repeatedly during the week that she was merely referencing Mark Anthony's famous oration in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, when he prophesied that the murdered emperor's ghost, if it could speak, would "cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war" - and her notes, which she published on Facebook afterwards, partly support that assertion.

But that's not what she actually said. What she said, in the heat of the moment, was that Burton, in contrast to other politicians who'd been blockaded by protestors in the past, "went and called out the dogs and called on a repressive police response."

There was an element of exaggerated offence taken at Coppinger's remarks, but it's not hard to see how they could be interpreted as offensive towards gardai simply doing their job. To suggest that Government TDs are not "highbrow enough" to get the allusion, as she did, is disingenuous. There was no reference to Shakespeare. She may have intended there to be one, but there wasn't. There was simply a line about Burton calling out "dogs".

The irony is that quoting Shakespeare would not have made it better. It may even have been worse. Mark Anthony predicts that "domestic fury and fierce civil strife shall cumber all the parts" of the country, and that "all pity" will be "choked with custom of fell deeds." Is Ruth Coppinger seriously comparing a few arrests to such a nightmarish dystopian vision of anarchy?

If anything, it sounds closer to a description of what happened in Jobstown, or the ruckus which greeted President Higgins recently when he visited a school in Finglas, than it does to the gardai response. They're not the dogs of war. Sometimes they're the only thin blue line we have against the dogs of war when they snarl and bite.

Coppinger's rhetoric is instructive, though, because it illustrates how anti-austerity protesters manipulate the narrative to suggest that the questioning of their friends, and a few teenagers who may or may not have been involved in disorder on the day, represents the full force of the State being unleashed against the democratic right to protest.

Coppinger, growing more absurd by the moment as she quickly took centre stage in the week's unfolding drama, even told the rally on Thursday evening that Joan Burton was seeking for "the gardai to go out in large numbers and round up the first born of every child (sic) in Jobstown".

Melodramatic, much?

Adding to the comedy was a protest by the Socialist Party of England and Wales outside the Irish Embassy in London last week, which organisers predicted would spark off a "wave of protests internationally". Good luck with that. The world has its own problems. It's not as interested in what middle-class ersatz radicals are up to as their supporters might hope. It's not as if the Irish have taken to the streets to protest against the recent arrest of a Spanish cartoonist sympathetic to the left-wing opposition party Podemos.

Ultimately, a country gets the opposition that it deserves. Whether his programme of resistance to the EU succeeds or not, there's no doubt that Greece's new leader, Alexis Tsipras, is a man of substance. Ireland's left-wing opposition increasingly looks like a carnival side show by contrast, clowning around with diversions that are hardly providing a real or genuinely radical alternative.

Look into Paul Murphy's eyes. Be honest. Is this a man preparing for high office, or a man for whom what's happening now is as good as it gets and he'd better make the most of it because it's all there'll ever be?

This isn't future thinking. It's present indulgence.

To return to Shakespeare, there is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. The Left must suspect that their moment has passed. They had momentum for a while, but it's been halted and they're now desperately looking for every excuse to kickstart it again.

They spend too long listening to each other on social media, the vast echo chamber which makes them imagine that they're bigger and stronger than they really are; and the concern ought to be that the price for these games, as always, will be paid by the communities which they claim to represent.

These are the people who are being urged not to pay their water charges, and who think that Murphy, Coppinger, Richard Boyd Barrett, Joe Higgins et al will ride to their rescue when they don't, when all that usually happens is that gullible people are left footing the bill while the class warriors head off in search of the next big stage to dominate.

"It's gone well over the top at this stage," Murphy declared in an unintended moment of insight last week. Never a truer word spoken.

Sunday Independent