There’s a quiet, grinding cruelty baked into the bones of modern Irish life.
You feel it in the checkout queue when the butter’s doubled in price. You see it in people’s eyes after six hours in A&E with no doctor in sight. You hear it in your child’s voice when they tell you there’s mould in their classroom and the drips start when the rain comes on.
But sure. What can be done?
It’s monstrous stuff. But there’s no big monster.
What there is are the suits operating under the auspices of “economic prudence” and “tough decisions”.
But make no mistake: this is cruelty.
Managed. Measured. And meted out through policy.
The cost-of-living crisis. The collapse of healthcare. The erosion of education. The destruction of the planet. These aren’t isolated disasters. They’re all different faces of the same shite: a system that profits off our exhaustion and calls it progress.
This isn’t failure. It’s all working exactly as it should.
Extractive Neoliberal Capitalism.
It’s capitalism weaponised by cruelty.
It believes the market is God, the state is a servant to capital, and if you suffer? Well, that’s a feature, not a bug.
It’s all about the transfer of public wealth into private hands – faster, cleaner and with plausible deniability.
The Drain Game: What We’re Really Up Against
Extractive neoliberal capitalism isn’t just a mouthful. It’s a scam.
I call it The Drain Game. Because that’s exactly what it is: a system designed to suck the life out of the many for the gain of the few. And the whole thing stinks.
- Your taxes pay for hospitals – then private investors buy them and charge you again.
- You miss a payment, you’re out. They miss a payment? They restructure the debt and buy another house.
- Your kid’s school needs to do a fundraiser to cover the cost of books and basics that used to be free.
Meanwhile, they tell you to budget better and stop complaining. But the system’s designed to drain you – and make you feel grateful for the privilege.
Mechanisms of Cruelty
OK, so if we’re talking death by a thousand cuts in any case, let’s take the scalpel and dissect the beast.
These are the tools of the trade – how cruelty is coded into the everyday:
1. Manufactured Scarcity
They tell us there’s not enough money. Not enough houses. Not enough hospital beds. Not enough help. It’s all a lie. There’s enough. But it’s hoarded at the top, siphoned off into offshore accounts and shareholder dividends. Austerity isn’t a necessity. It’s a strategy.
2. Blame Shifting
Can’t afford rent? Must be your avocado addiction. NHS waiting list too long? Blame the immigrants. Child in a crowded classroom? Should’ve voted better. Cruel systems rely on internalised shame. If you’re too busy blaming yourself (or your neighbour), you won’t rise up.
3. Devaluation of Care
Care work – mothering, nursing, teaching, community building – is unpaid or underpaid because it isn’t “productive.”
By productive, they mean profitable. Love doesn’t boost GDP. But arms sales do.
4. Precarity as Discipline
When your housing, job, and healthcare are insecure, you’ll keep your head down. You won’t strike. You won’t complain. You’ll compete with your neighbour instead of cooperating. Precarity is the modern whip—and it doesn’t leave visible scars.
This is a biggie!
5. Greenwashing the Apocalypse
They’ll sell you bamboo toothbrushes while licensing new oil fields. They’ll tax your diesel car and ignore aviation emissions. Environmental collapse is repackaged as your individual failure to recycle. Never mind that 100 companies are responsible for over 70% of global emissions.
6. Hyper-Individualism
You’re told that your choices shape everything. Health? Your fault. Debt? Should’ve saved. Overworked and underpaid? Hustle harder. It’s a brilliant distraction. If all problems are personal, then nothing is political. And nothing gets fixed.
The Crises. Reframed.
The Cost of Living Crisis
Not just inflation. It’s economic violence. It’s engineered deprivation while billionaires buy third yachts.
The Healthcare Crisis
Not just underfunding. It’s planned obsolescence of public health. A push toward privatisation by making the system fail.
The Education Crisis:
Not just budget cuts. It’s intellectual colonisation. A population that can’t think critically is easier to exploit.
The Environmental Crisis
Not just climate change. It’s ecosystem collapse caused by an extractive model that sees land as profit, not legacy.
Cruelty, Because It Works
Let’s be honest. These aren’t accidents. The suffering is the point. It disciplines. It divides. It profits. And it keeps us too tired to dream.
But here’s the crack in the concrete: we are dreaming.
At kitchen tables. On picket lines. In WhatsApp chats and community gardens.
We’re realising that home is a political space. That making soup and sharing child care is resistance. That the opposite of cruelty is connection—and that connection, not competition, is how we survive.
So What Now?
Burn down the bullshit.
Here’s what you can do from your own kitchen:
- See the cruelty. Call it what it is. Policy dressed as punishment. Don’t let language soften it.
- Name the systems. It’s not bad luck, it’s bad policy. Make it personal. Make it visible.
- Choose connection. Share tools. Share time. Share meals. Isolation is their strategy; community is ours.
- Withdraw consent. Where you can, step out of the grind. Say no. Say enough.
Because we’ve seen what doesn’t work.
And now, it’s time to build something better.
Domesticky 
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