An escape to the city of Irish hopes and dreams

New York offered hope to so many distressed and impoverished Irish

In a crowded hall in Queens last week, it was hard to avoid the feeling that Ireland was a repressive place – a place to escape from – for so much of our island’s recent history.

A hushed silence had descended over the New York Irish Center in Long Island City as an audience of mainly elderly and middle-aged people gathered to watch a documentary about the harrowing scandal of the ‘Tuam Babies’.

And, then . . . the anger, the questions, and the disbelief. How had this happened to ordinary Irish women and children within living memory?

How had 796 babies and infants been discarded like rag dogs, and perhaps even dumped in a septic tank, in a 20th century Western society?

From the 1920s, when the Irish State was founded, to the 1990s, Irish women had been imprisoned for the terrible ‘crime’ of giving birth to a child outside marriage. Their children were branded as “illegitimate”, many taken from them often against their will, and the women themselves were shamed for life.

That’s why they needed to escape, not just from the institutions themselves but from an island which labelled and judged them, and seized them from their family homes in the dead of night.

Where was the justice? Where were the fathers? Why was such cruelty inflicted on these women and these children?

I watched in awe as Galway man Peter Mulryan and his wife Kathleen fielded their questions and told them what it was like to find out, as Peter did in his seventies, that a younger sister he never knew he had could be buried in a septic tank.

Or, for all he knows, Marian could be alive today and walking the streets of New York, Boston, or Chicago, completely unaware of who she really is or where she really is from.

Nobody has any idea yet about the scale of adoptions of Irish children of babies to the United States in the 20th century or the number of women who escaped from 'laundries' and 'baby homes' in order to move there.

Because the story of the ‘Tuam Babies’ is a story of (illegal) adoptions to ‘good’ Catholic families in America and a generation of women who emigrated to America to escape from the shame.

The documentary screened in Queens and Boston, ‘Mother & Baby’, looked at the harsh lives of 20th century Irish women and children . . . and the survivors’ valiant efforts to rebuild their lives.

A packed house at the New York Irish Centre in Queens

In the United States last week, it was astonishing to hear the children of these women stand up and tell their stories. How they knew they had left Ireland, but only found out after they died that they had been imprisoned for having babies long before starting new lives.

One man told me his sister lives just down the road from me in Galway. His mother never talked about her, or the horrors she experienced as a prisoner in the Tuam Mother and Baby Home before she escaped to America.

Where would his family be without America?

And, indeed, where would the Irish be without the great Irish cities of New York and Boston?
They offered hope, a refuge, and a fresh start for so many of us that we take our connections with America, and the Big Apple, for granted at times.

I arranged to meet Peter and Kathleen at the Irish Hunger Memorial in the financial district of Manhattan a few days before the screening of the ‘Mother & Baby’ documentary in Queens.

It felt like the perfect place to ponder on how our little windswept island in the North Atlantic had failed to provide fulfilling lives for so many generations of our people over the past couple of centuries.

The incongruous stone walls and little cottage under the gaze of so many skyscrapers and the One World building was a little reminder that, for so many Irish, this place offered the chance of a life which was impossible back home.

A family from Co Mayo transferred the entire stone cottage across the Atlantic to educate the people of the US about the Great Famine.

Peter and Kathleen Ryan at the Irish Hunger
Memorial in Manhattan, New York, last week

It makes for a remarkable image, and a wonderful quiet haven in the middle of the hustle and bustle of Manhattan.

At the memorial, there's a quote from Loughrea, Co Galway, a few years before the famine about people who had pawned off all their clothes and were unable to go to Mass.

It brought home to me how close the people of Syria today are to the Irish, and those from Connacht in particular, who fled oppression, conflict, and famine.

The simple, but beautiful, memorial in New York reminded me of our own simple seaside memorial in Salthill, to remind people of the 100 ‘coffin ships’ which set sail from Galway Bay to America between 1847 and 1850.

Thousands of our people set sail for the great cities of New York and Boston at a time when a million people died of starvation.

Without the hundreds of thousands of Irish who found new lives in the Americas, the scale of the disaster back home would have been unthinkable.

Without the money they sent home to loved-ones in Ireland throughout the 19th century, the deprivation experienced would have been off the scale.

Many of those who were “lucky” enough to have a ticket to America never even made it to the other side.

When they poured off the boats and into the crowded slums of the Five Points, they may have encountered criminality, murders, and discrimination, but they had power in numbers, they organised themselves, and they built new lives.

At the Irish Hunger Memorial in Manhattan 

At the wonderful Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side, our informative young Italian-American guide marvelled at how an Irish family had improved their lot by moving out of the ghetto in the 1860s.

She showed us around the small yard they would have shared with 22 other families and showed us the picture of Daniel ‘The Libertor’ O’Connell and the map of Ireland on the wall.

They worked hard to make decent lives for their children and in many respects the impoverished Irish back home had no idea of the struggles their emigrant brothers and sisters had to forge out a decent standard of living in America.

The Irish were still facing discrimination when they moved into that building but, remarkably, she told us that 25% of the people in New York had been born in Ireland at that time. No wonder our people took over City Hall, the police, the fire department, and perhaps even the crime gangs at the time.

Our guide, Chelsea, told us of how the Irish enriched New York with their music, their pubs, and their culture, but not their food, unlike say the Italians or the Chinese.

She knew a lot about the Great Famine, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her that huge swathes of the Irish population had lived solely on the humble potato for over half a century before the Moore family moved to their small tenement in the Lower East Side in 1869.

Out at Ellis Island, a steady stream of tourists is reminded every day that a young Irish girl called Anna ‘Annie’ Moore, aged just 15, was the very first immigrant to be processed at Ellis Island in 1892.

They are asked to imagine the excitement of a young girl upon seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time, after making a 12 day voyage from Co Cork.

At the World Trade Centre site, I came across the memorial to Tuam woman Ann McHugh who lost her life on 9/11, just a five minute walk from the Irish Hunger Memorial.

In Hell’s Kitchen, Mayo women in their 50s and 60s used to serve us tea and coffees in Irish cafes on my first visit to New York two decades ago.

So many of our generation found new lives in the United States in the 1950s and again in the 1980s when the Irish Government could offer them little hope of finding work at home.

Celebrating the Irish Current Affairs Blog of the Year award

"Emigration will soon cause it to be said that Ireland is no longer where flows the Shannon, but rather beside the banks of the Hudson River,” says one of the more memorable quotes at the Irish Hunger Museum.

New York is no longer an “Irish” city in the way it was a century ago and the Irish have long since moved out of the Five Points to be replaced by Chinatown.

The distressed migrants of 2018 are no longer crossing the Atlantic on ‘coffin ships’ from Cork and Galway, but joining a caravan from Honduras and El Salvador or paying people traffickers to take them out of the hell of Syria.

For so many of our people, escaping famine and persecution in the 1800s, the shame of a judgemental society in the 1950s, or recession and stagnation in the 1990s, New York – and America – offered the Irish opportunities and dreams which were denied to them at home.

Where would the Irish be without America?

As we look forward, and our lives evolve, we should never forget where we came from.


Ciaran Tierney won the Best Current Affair Blog in Ireland award at the Tramline, Dublin, last week. Find him on Facebook here

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Bluster over Brexit shows many wounds have yet to be healed

Irene from Manchester, England, was very upset.                                 

Nobody wants a return to border checkpoints

She thought it was terrible that a small little island has been holding up those important Brexit negotiations.

She wrote to a newspaper this week to say that the island next door to Britain was “too small to have a border” and “causes everybody a headache”.

In her opinion, Ireland “should never have been split”.

She said it was about time the Irish made up their minds, to decide whether they were “in or out” of the wonderful United Kingdom.

It seemed to have escaped her attention that the Irish pretty much made their minds up about the British Empire a long time ago.

They spent hundreds of years trying to break free; issues such as the Plantation of Ulster, the Great Famine, the Penal Laws, and the attempted destruction of their native language might just have helped the pesky peasants to “make up their minds”.

Irene was quite shocked to discover that this little island to the west had a border, the only land frontier between the departing Great Britain and its former partners in the European Union – apart from that wonderful piece of Britain down on the Rock of Gibraltar.

Presumably, when she voted for Brexit last year, Irene did not think too much about the niceties or the consequences for the farmers or commuters dotted along the border in Tyrone, Fermanagh, or South Armagh.

She wasn't alone. How many times did the 300 border crossings feature in the Brexit debate in Britain last year?

It might have been news to Irene that few of the Irish were too happy about the border when it was invented back in 1922.

She had probably never heard of Michael Collins, sent to London to negotiate a peace deal for the Irish ‘terrorists’ at the cost of a border, a terrible civil war, and the loss of his own life.

The editor of The Sun was pretty upset last week, too.

His newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch, has longed for the day when “floods” of immigrants would no longer be able to access Great Britain via the port of Dover.

The tabloid campaigned vigorously for Britain to leave the European Union and how darn annoying it was in recent weeks to see a former colony delay the Brexit negotiations because of an inconvenient land border.

Papers like The Sun and The Daily Mail were gung-ho in their calls for a Brexit vote last year and one of the London tabloid’s columnists, Katie Hopkins, compared migrants to cockroaches at the height of the debate.

It's pretty hard to have a rational debate with someone who compares human beings fleeing wars to cockroaches.

“Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants,” was the headline on one of Katie’s pieces, before she referred to migrants who try to board trucks heading to Britain as “a plague of feral humans” in The Sun.

The Sun in 2017 is the modern equivalent of the 18th and 19th century British publications which referred to Irish people as less than human, even as a million of them starved under the British Empire and poverty drove a further two million to emigrate to North America.

Irony and respect for the neighbours is lost on The Sun, who advised the Irish Taoiseach to “shut your gob and grow up” when he expressed concerns over the impact a ‘hard’ Brexit would have on communities either side of the Irish border.

An Taoiseach: told to "shut his gob" about Brexit

The Sun let An Taoiseach know, in no uncertain terms, that 17.4 million people voted for Britain to leave the European Union and reminded him that British billions “stopped Ireland going bust” as recently as seven years ago.

Arlene from Fermanagh was also upset.

On Monday, she put a spanner in the works of the Brexit negotiations.

Arlene is more British than Irish and the party she leads, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), has the balance of power at Westminster.

She found a deal which made a distinction between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, to prevent a hard border, unacceptable.

She’d rather have massive inconvenience for people in her region who regularly cross the border than any “divergence” which might separate Fermanagh from London or Liverpool.

Many people in Ireland find it ironic that the DUP see themselves as more British than Irish, yet do not want to bring in the kind of legislation which would bring the province’s abortion or marriage equality legislation in line with the rest of the United Kingdom.

When it comes to the relationships between the two islands, perhaps Irene is right after all and the smaller island really does “cause everybody a headache”.

Always has.

Murals in Belfast depict the long struggle
for Irish freedom from the British Empire

In 1847, for example, 15,000 Great Famine refugees were deported from England back to Ireland. Even though Ireland was part of the British Empire, it was made very clear by the authorities that the deaths of over a million people were an Irish – not a British – problem.

Relations have improved considerably between the two islands over the century which has passed since the 1916 Easter Rising and the executions of the Irish rebel leaders which eventually led to independence for most of Ireland.

Things have particularly improved over the past 20 years, since the Good Friday Agreement brought peace, joy, and prosperity to both parts of the island and the removal of the despised observation posts and military checkpoints along the border.

The ugly tower blocks have been removed and there are no longer British Army soldiers pointing guns at passing motorists but, clearly, less visible wounds remain.

Prior to the Brexit referendum in June 2016, when 51.9% of UK voters chose to leave the European Union, there was a long and lengthy debate about issues such as immigration, free movement, trade deals, and British sovereignty.                                             

Looking back now, the Irish border and the implications for people living and working in border counties barely featured in the debates across England.

If Ireland isn’t causing everybody a headache, it’s pretty much an afterthought for voters throughout Britain - pretty much how it has always been throughout centuries of animosity, misunderstanding, occupation, and suspicion.

Thankfully, the dispute over the border has been resolved and Irish people are delighted they will not see a return to British Army checkpoints when travelling from Letterkenny to Derry or Dundalk to Newry.

In standing up to the sabre-rattling Unionists this week, and achieving a deal which will not plunge border communities into disarray, An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has done Ireland proud.

But, if nothing else, the tempestuous ‘hard’ Brexit negotiations managed to remind Irish people that there are still some appalling attitudes to Ireland and the Irish among some politicians and commentators on the other side of the Irish Sea.



Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and digital storyteller, based in Galway. Ireland. Find him on Facebook at http://facebook.com/ciarantierneymedia

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Beware the rising people

All across the world, grassroots communities are waking up to injustice and to the ways in which greed and big business are destroying our precious planet.          

The protest at Standing Rock captured the hearts of
environmentalists all across the globe

From the Native American reservations threatened by an oil pipeline, to the rural community in North Mayo which was torn apart by a gas pipeline, or the people living near the edge of a beautiful woodland in Galway City, local communities say they have had enough.

They can see what the greed espoused by Donald Trump is doing to their rivers, lakes, and woodlands and they are awakening to the fact that they must do something to make sure their grandchildren will be able to live in harmony with a threatened world.

On Saturday, in Galway, I met an amazing woman who epitomises all that is wonderful about the human spirit and the benefits of connecting communities.

Her people, the Lakota, have suffered decades of abuse, of being told they are not good enough, of being denied the right to practice the beliefs which ran through their bloodlines for generations.

Like many indigenous people across the earth, she has been surrounded by alcoholism, abuse, violence, depression, and suicide through most of her life.

Standing Rock water protecter Chas Jewett
speaking in Galway on Saturday afternoon

But she’s not angry or vindictive. In seeking justice, she is finding her own strength and the strength of her own people and she was blown away by the support she has received during a speaking tour of Ireland.

Last October, at the height of the siege, thousands of Irish people “checked in” to Standing Rock on Facebook in order to confuse the US authorities and protests took place outside the US Embassy in Dublin.

Through social media, Chas Jewett is making connections. She is learning that a small rural community in Rossport, Co Mayo, has faced the same kind of pressures as the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation where, through protest, Native Americans are beginning to rediscover the wonders of their own past and traditions.

A capacity crowd attended Chas Jewett's talk in Galway

At a speaking engagement in a Galway garden, Chas was overwhelmed by the number of Irish people who turned up to hear her talk about the campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline which has captured the hearts of environmental activists all across the globe.

And how fitting it was that the water protector made her first trip to Ireland in the week in which an Irish town unveiled a sculpture of nine eagle feathers to commemorate a Native American tribe who remembered the Irish at their time of greatest need.

The Choctaw people, who were run off their own ancestral lands in 1831, were compelled to send money to the starving Irish when they heard about the Great Famine in 1847. They were honoured by the people of Midleton, Co Cork, last week.

According to Chas, the Native American people of Standing Rock took huge inspiration from the solidarity they received from Irish people during the stand-off on their sacred lands which attracted global attention late last year.

The idea that Energy Transfer Partners could move half a million barrels of oil a day between the Missouri River, the main source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux, has galvanised Native Americans and environmentalists all across the world.

Chas connected with the campaign to save Merlin Woods in Galway

Suddenly, a people who were forbidden to practice their own beliefs until 1978 – who were fobbed off to boarding schools where they were abused in attempted “assimilation” – are waking up to the wonders of their culture and their ancestors’ wonderful connection with their sacred lands.

It was not lost on many of us in the Galway audience that the Native Americans’ belief system is exactly the type of model all of humanity needs if we are to avoid a global environmental catastrophe.

They lived in harmony with the earth, rather than with the intention of exploiting it.

Chas talked about the “dehumanisation” of her people through The Washington Redskins American Football team or the belief among many people in the United States that Native Americans still live in tepees.

She talked about the extraordinary high suicide rate, seven times the national average, or the fact that the average life expectancy of a Native American man is just 45 years.

“Every woman that I know has been raped,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “Anger has been driving us for a long time, but anger doesn’t do the warrior good.”

She described the damage which the fossil fuel industry has caused all across the world and how the protests at Standing Rock have given Native Americans back their pride.

They have learned to control their anger, to insist that the protests are peaceful, and that the threat to their drinking water has epitomised the environmental crisis being faced by young people all over the world.

Chas has learned to control her own rage.

Since the protests began she has learned that people have to learn to heal themselves before they can heal the world.                                                                                

Native American protesters facing police lines at
Standing Rock during protests against the oil pipeline

She said that the election of President Donald Trump might have been necessary to show people just how broken the system has become in the United States.

“I felt that big business only cared about property and that they wouldn’t hear us unless we broke their windows. Thankfully, I wasn’t in charge,” she said.

“For the past 150 years, people thought that our culture was one of violence and alcoholism. We want our children to stop killing themselves. We want hope.

“We are on the brink of extinction, not just our people but people across the world. We all need so much healing. We have to talk about the rapes. We have to talk about the violence. I myself was gang raped when I was nine years old. I took a long time to learn to love myself. We, all of us, have to move from ‘rape culture’ to ‘consent culture’.”

She said that the high alcoholism and suicide rates were a response to attempts to wipe out Native American people and traditions across the US, but the sight of so many tribes coming together at Standing Rock has inspired her people.

Messages of support from across Ireland, from environmental groups and land rights activists, have galvanised the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Sioux people and allowed them to begin to explore the forgotten treasures from their past.

She said that young people, impelled by a tragic series of suicides and guided by ancient prophecies, have been to the forefront of the peaceful protests at Standing Rock.

Coming together has inspired them and activism has given them the strength to tackle issues such as depression and drug abuse. It has given the Native American youth a sense of purpose which has been lacking in their lives for so long.

Chas Jewett, an inspirational speaker, following her talk
at the Secret Garden Cafe in Galway City

After her inspiring 90 minute talk, Ms Jewett was delighted to meet activists from the West of Ireland who have campaigned against the destruction of an urban woodland at Merlin Park and the Shell gas pipeline in North Mayo.

“I know that I’m so fortunate to be able to be here in Ireland, because most of my people are struggling to eat and to live,” said Ms Jewett.

“Water is our first love and water is being polluted all across the world. We have to go back to the basic elemental things that matter if we are to give a future to our grandchildren.”



Blog post from 2015:
'Protest has a vital place in a healthy democarcy' 
http://ciarantierney.blogspot.ie/2015/02/protest-has-vital-place-in-healthy.html

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Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and digital storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. Check out his Facebook page here

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Banned from the land that made us refugees ...

“Where e’er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees
From fear of priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies"

‘Thousands Are Sailing’, The Pogues


Between 1847 and 1850, a hundred ‘coffin’ ships sailed out from Galway Bay. The people who made it onto those ships were desperately impoverished and full of fear, and yet they saw themselves as hugely fortunate compared to those who were forced to stay behind.

They were the equivalent of today’s Syrian or Iraqi refugees. Their land had been stolen, the crops had failed, and they dreamed of new lives far removed from the conflict and turmoil which raged across their homeland.

Many were less fortunate, such as little Celia Griffin, aged six, from Connemara. Celia never had a chance in life and was found lying on the side of a road, just one of hundreds of thousands to die of starvation.

The ships were destined for the ‘New World’.                    

Not much empathy for the children of Syria
in President Donald Trump's USA

Poor country people from villages and townlands across the West of Ireland, many of whom could barely muster a word of English between them, sailed across the western ocean in search of a chance in life which had been denied them under the British Empire.

I think about those people most weeks when I bring foreign English students on a walking tour of Galway. I think of how forgotten they were for decades in Galway City, their point of embarkation.

It was only when a returned emigrant, the late Mark Kennedy, kicked up a fuss that the city and region honoured them with a wonderful Famine Memorial Park which opened eight years ago.

For many, the collective memories are still too painful … of poverty, of families torn apart, of the pain of long-term emigration. Most of those who made it to the other side – many died during the lengthy crossing – never got the opportunity to go home and visit their loved-ones again.

The Irish fugitives were near the bottom of the barrel in 19th century America. As they flocked into the Bronx, Hell’s Kitchen, or South Boston, it would have been unthinkable to imagine how their lives would have turned out if they had been denied entry at the US border.

Had the US president taken a hardline on emigration, had there been 19th century equivalents of Donald Trump and his “extreme vetting”, then countless Irish would have been turned back as soon as they reached the east coast of America.

They wouldn’t have had enough food to survive the return journey and, if they did, the numbers who died in the Great Famine would have been vastly higher.

Given our terrible history, it was shocking to wake up this weekend to discover that “extreme vetting” – bordering on fascism – has now been introduced just an hour’s drive south of where those coffin ships departed from Galway Bay.

Last October marked the 15th anniversary of Shannon Airport’s complicity in the US ‘war on terror’
At the stroke of a president’s pen, Muslims from seven countries have been banned from entering the US.

Marking 15 years of Shannon Airport's use
as a US military base last October

Persecuted in their own country and no longer welcome at the end of an arduous journey, Syrians refugees in 2017 have quite a lot in common with the Irish who escaped from the discrimination and hardship imposed by the British Empire.

The Irish died in their thousands on coffin ships in the 1840s and now Syrians are dying on makeshift boats as they make their way across the Mediterranean.

Back then, the Irish were seen as a threat, deeply unpopular, rebellious spirits, who could not be trusted on the streets of New York or Boston.

Today, Muslims are the new “enemies”, even though, strangely enough, Saudi Arabia (who provided the vast majority of the 9/11 bombers) is not on Trump’s list of seven banned countries.

Amazing, too, how Yemen is on the list, considering it has been bombed to bits by US “ally” Saudi Arabia over the past two years. Yemen is on the verge of famine, but any Yemeni who turns up at a US border will be deported and sent back home.

The targeting of an entire race, nation, or religion has brought up understandable comparisons with 1930s Germany.

Back then, good people were afraid to speak out while their Jewish neighbours were being forced to wear yellow stars to make them more identifiable in a growing climate of hatred and intolerance.

Given our own troubled history, it’s incredible to think that racial profiling is now taking place on Irish soil.

The US ‘pre-clearance’ at Shannon was supposed to make travelling easier when it was introduced in 2009, but now it could lead to people being discriminated against for no other reason than their country of birth.

It is unthinkable to imagine the kind of hostility a Yemeni or Syrian would have to deal with if he or she was to try to board a flight to the US at Shannon.

Imagine, the land where hundreds of thousands of people were made refugees is now about to let a powerful nation, motivated by xenophobia and fear, discriminate against refugees on Irish soil.

Of course, Irish people have already been turning a blind eye to what’s being going on at Shannon Airport for the past 15 years.

President Donald Trump's anti-Muslim measure has
caused huge controversy in Irealnd

Last July, for example, 85 civilians – among them almost a dozen children – lost their lives in a bombing in a small Syrian village.

Combatants had targeted a village in Northern Syria which had been held by Islamic State (IS) or Daesh fighters.

The combatants or “terrorists” who carried out this attack on Tokhar stop almost daily in Shannon to refuel their aircraft.

The terrorists were US soldiers. But there was no minute’s silence, no protest, and the bombing did not even merit a mention on BBC or RTE news.

People in Ireland or the UK only found out about it thanks to RT, the Russian channel, and Britain’s Channel 4.

How can we care about the loss of innocent lives when we are not even told about them by many segments of our media?

Most of us just shrug when we hear that over 2.5 million US soldiers have landed in ‘neutral’ Shannon Airport since the beginning of the ‘war on terror’ in 2001.

We didn’t protest when US soldiers who pass through Shannon murdered hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq and Syria over the past decade.

We didn’t protest when planes carrying munitions, helicopters, and even deadly chemical weapons to aid the Israeli occupation of Palestine passed through Shannon.

We didn’t protest when prisoners were renditioned through Shannon on their way to be tortured at Guantanamo Bay.

Mind you, we can’t be sure about that one … because not one person in authority in Ireland has ever searched a US military plane during 15 years of Shannon’s use as a military base.

But surely, finally, it’s time to protest now. Is it acceptable that people in uniforms standing in Co Clare can now prevent people from getting onto a ‘plane on the basis of their nationality alone?

The Americans have made a mockery of international law by effectively turning a civilian airport into a military base. Now they want to discriminate against refugees before they even leave Ireland.

In light of our own terrible history, can Irish people really stand idly by when we hear that racial profiling has become a fact of life just an hour south of where the ‘coffin’ ships once set sail from Galway Bay?


Shannonwatch, who have monitored the US military use of ‘neutral’ Shannon Airport for the past 15 years, have organised a protest at the airport this coming Thursday (6pm)

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