This week and over the weekend, I was in Hungary observing and monitoring the elections, and looking back home at the fuel protests here in Ireland, I was thinking about change and how change happens. Protest, by its nature, is meant to be disruptive. If it is not disruptive, it risks becoming little more than State-sanctioned gatherings. Real protest unsettles things. It draws attention and forces people to look. At its most powerful, it directs that pressure upwards toward the State and its institutions rather than downward at those who are already struggling.

I was thinking about two books this week, both with the term "the dispossessed" in the title. The first is by Ursula Le Guin, who writes about people with empty hands, who own nothing and therefore have nothing to lose, and how there is a kind of freedom in that, a freedom to imagine change and to challenge what exists. There are also huge limits to that, but it is a worthwhile concept to think about. The second is by Christopher Galloway, who reminds us that, in the real world, the people with the least often feel the most constrained and it is hard to organise when you are stretched just trying to get by. It is hard to be heard when you are invisible. The working class, including all those who live side by side in communities, are constrained by daily survival.

That is why the protests in Dublin have stayed with me. People are under real pressure but they also have something others do not: they have visibility, they have organisation and they can disrupt in a way that gets noticed. What stood out to me was the response. Ordinary people were showing up and standing alongside roads, supporting farmers, hauliers and truckers. There was a sense of shared frustration but also a shared recognition. That recognition should be built on and should be reciprocal from those who stood there back towards those who have less.

It made me think about where real power lies, and moments like this can be more than reaction. They can be a starting point where people begin to connect their experiences of the cost of living, housing, homelessness and insecure work and begin to see these are not separate issues but are part of the same system. If that energy is organised, it does not have to stop at protest. It can move into something more lasting. Protest, disruption and solidarity matter, but what matters most is what we do in the moment after, whether we let it pass or build on it.

To opt out is to hand over legitimate desire for change to somebody else. Empty hands on their own are not enough, but when people come together and stand side by side to use both their voice and their vote, they can become something much more powerful. Governments respond to concentrations of voters because that threatens their power or position and how they can make decisions.