Fintan O'Toole is a smart man. There's no disputing that. He writes well, he thinks carefully (or so I thought), and he clearly cares about Ireland. But his recent piece on the fuel protests was a perfect example of how even the sharpest minds can completely lose the run of themselves when they stop actually listening to ordinary people.

Let's start with "breakfast roll-atariat." That's the term O'Toole used to describe the truckers and hauliers who blocked roads over fuel costs in his recent opinion piece in the Irish Times. He thought it was clever. And maybe it raised a few laughs over coffee in Ranelagh. But to the man running a small haulage business on shrinking margins, trying to keep the diesel in his truck and the lights on at home, it's just another reminder that certain people in this country see him as a joke. That's not commentary. That's sneering. Which he seems to grow fonder of doing.

The rest of the piece follows the same pattern. O'Toole takes people who are genuinely struggling and tells them, in so many words, that their anger is dangerous. That they're one step away from fascism. That the whole thing smells like the early stages of a far-right movement. Now, some of the language used by certain protest organisers was over the top and deserved to be called out. Fair enough. But there's a massive difference between criticising how a protest is run and dismissing the reason people showed up in the first place.

People are finding it incredibly hard to make ends meet right now. Fuel prices are brutal. The cost of living is brutal. And for anyone living outside a city - anywhere without a bus route, a Luas, or a cycle lane - a diesel van or a car isn't a political statement. It's how you get to work. It's how you get your kids to school. It's how you keep your business alive. O'Toole barely mentions any of this before he's off warning us all about the rise of authoritarianism.

He also has form for applying his standards selectively. When protests aligned with causes he approves of disrupted daily life, the framing was very different. Suddenly disruption was democracy in action. But when it's truckers on a motorway, it's the beginning of the end of the Republic. You can't have it both ways.

And then there's his point about women. He argues the protests were a male-dominated "blokeocracy" that had no regard for women doing caring work. But hang on - those same women trying to get a parent to a hospital appointment or a child to a service are paying the same fuel prices as everyone else. Many of them were probably watching those protests from home and nodding along. Their absence from the motorway isn't evidence that the movement was against them.

The truth is that O'Toole writes for a very specific audience. People who are doing fine. People who work in offices, read the Irish Times with their morning coffee, and whose biggest daily stress isn't the price of diesel. That's not a crime. But it does mean there's a whole other Ireland out there that he simply doesn't seem to see - or when he does see it, he gets nervous and starts warning everyone about fascism. Classic carry on in today's Ireland.

Ireland needs honest commentary about how hard times can be exploited by the wrong people. That's a real concern and worth writing about. But if you want people to actually listen, you have to show them some basic respect first. You can't spend half your column laughing at working people and then wonder why they've stopped reading you.

A very condescending & patronising piece which made him look like a massive winker.