Call off the blimp!

The Donald Trump 'blimp' is not coming to Ireland after all 

Let’s call off the blimp, because Mr President is not coming after all.

Well, not yet, at any rate!

It has been amazing to hear so many people in Ireland express regret that President Trump has postponed (or cancelled) his Irish visit this coming November.

They were so fired up that many said they were looking forward to joining a political protest for the first time.

Irish protesters had to reach out to their counterparts in the UK, who turned out in their thousands to make the President feel so unwelcome when he visited London back in July.

Sorry, they said, we won’t need to ship the giant orange “baby blimp” to Ireland after all!

People in Dublin were really looking forward to the sight of a giant baby Donald in a nappy floating across the skyline.

And a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign had already covered the cost of bringing over the six metre high blimp within days of being set up.

Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be part of mass protests against the US President. The sense of anti-climax was palpable as soon as the White House announced that he had postponed his travel plans.

The leaders of two opposition parties, Labour and the Greens, had come  together to announce plans for a joint rally for “democracy, decency, and international solidarity” in Dublin.

As though such concepts, so alien to Mr Trump, were plentiful across the political spectrum here in Ireland.

Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin went as far as to say that President Trump was “no friend of democracy or human rights”.

Mr Howlin said it was important to stand up to Trump on issues such as climate change, the treatment of migrant and asylum-seekers, spending on arms, and the slashing of aid budgets.

In Galway, the local anti-racism group wanted hundreds of people to gather to spell out the words “Feck off Trump” (with a little Irish humour, from the ‘Father Ted’ TV series) on a beach.

In much different times, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy addressed 50,000 people in Eyre Square and the city authorities renamed it as Kennedy Park in his honour.

We are unlikely to see a ‘Trump Park’ in Galway any time in this millennium.

So many Irish people wanted to protest against Trump in November

So many people are disappointed that the street protests are off. They wanted to convey a firm message that Trump’s policies have no place in a modern, prosperous, outward-looking Ireland.

They want to reject the anti-immigrant rhetoric on an island where emigration provided the only refuge for the afflicted through much of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The street protests are off . . . as though there was nothing to protest about closer to home.

The economy might be in recovery, but the recovery does not seem to have reached so many Irish people who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads.

Last week, masked thugs – protected by masked Gardai – used heavy-handed tactics to evict homelessness campaigners from an empty building in Dublin.

Marcing in solidarity with homelessness campaigners
in Galway city centre last week

The sight of masked policemen with no identification on their uniforms caused consternation at a time when there are almost 10,000 people living in emergency accommodation across Ireland.

And now our Minister for Justice says he would support moves to criminalise the photographing of Gardai as they carry out their duties.

Such a move would be an attack on press freedom and should lead to questions as to what the Gardai have to hide.

Would that mean banning photos of public events such as GAA games or the annual Macnas Parade?

The last time I checked such measures were only being considered in states such as Israel, where an oppressive occupation force has a vested interest in covering up its crimes in the West Bank.

Given recent Irish history, we don’t have to cross the Atlantic in search of police forces who abuse their power. In fact the filming of protests has helped to prevent injustice from occurring.

So, instead of worrying about Trump, perhaps we should be looking at how power is being abused much closer to home.

Children sleeping in a Garda Station in Dublin

Last month, a photo of homeless children sleeping in a Garda Station went viral. The youngsters had to sleep on hard chairs in the police station because there was nowhere else for them to go.

The distraught mother who took that photo could soon be guilty of a crime.

Last week, a photo of a sick and distressed 92-year old woman sitting on a chair in a public hospital Emergency Department went viral.

Gladys Cummins posted the photo on Facebook out of frustration and despair. Her mother did not even have a trolley, as she spent 25 hours sitting on that chair.

Two months ago, I saw a 93-year old family member spent 48 hours on a trolley in the ED Department in Galway. The unacceptable has become acceptable and lengthy waiting lists in our public hospitals have become the new norm.

In a supposedly “socialised” health service – compared to the US at any rate – the old and the weak are being forced to spend days lying in corridors in overcrowded facilities.

But Irish people are not taking to the streets to protest about our health crisis.

In June, Irish people became outraged by the images of child migrants on the US-Mexico border crying in distress after being separated from their families. They were outraged by Trump.

Yet few of them have much awareness of the hardships endured by those who spend up to seven or eight years in Ireland’s own Direct Provision system.

A protest against Direct Provision in Dublin

About 5,000 asylum-seekers are detained at 31 accommodation centres without permission to work, or even to cook for their children. Among them are 2,000 children, growing up in highly inappropriate shared spaces with adults from a variety of countries.

Direct Provision centres have been described as the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes of our times. Some even see them as a "time bomb" for future problems to come.

We have British politicians steamrolling headlong towards Brexit, with little or no awareness that their dangerous language is threatening the peace process which transformed life in Northern Ireland over the past 20 years.

We have the families of victims of loyalist collusion who are shocked that a former member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary is now at the helm of the Irish Gardai.

They believe he has questions to ask about their long search for justice for atrocities such as the Miami Showband Massacre and the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

We rant against Trump for his sexism, at a time when Irish society has been convulsed by a cervical smear test scandal in which the Irish Government treated Irish women appallingly this year.

A lot of Irish people are disappointed that they won’t get a chance to protest against President Trump, but let’s not pretend that we don’t have some pressing problems much closer to home.



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

Protest has a vital place in a healthy democracy

When I was 16, the President of the United States visited my home town. It was a massive event for Galway and, fuelled by the passion which often drives people at that age, I attended a mass protest against the decision by University College Galway (now NUIG) to award an honorary degree to Ronald Reagan.

By that stage, people knew that his Government had been involved in war crimes in the Middle East and Latin America. His funding of people like Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan and sale of chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein in Iraq was widely known, but that did not stop the city fathers from closing down the city centre and rolling out the red carpet in his honour.

A group of protesters had built a massive paper mache statue of Ronnie ‘Raygun’, with nuclear missiles coming out of his head, and we teenagers were disgusted when they agreed to lower it as the President’s cavalcade passed by in the glare of the world media. Compromise can be hard to understand when you are a teenager.

I remember that three of us from Colaiste Iognaid took time out to attend the protest beside the Cathedral. We were enraged that this perceived war criminal was being feted by our city’s University and among those who objected was the current President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins.

I called myself a ‘Sandinista’, a fan of The Clash and supporter of Nicaragua, even though I had never ventured further away than the west coast of France at that stage in my life.

A bit of humour goes a long way ... 

Almost three decades on, during a wonderful gap year, I finally arrived in Nicaragua to work as a volunteer for three months. In my 40s, I suddenly realised that the teenage version of me was right about so many of the wrongs and injustices in the world way back when Reagan came to town.

I fell in love with Nicaragua, a land that stood up to Uncle Sam and its illegally funded ‘Contras’, even though it took me more than 25 years to get there. I felt so at home in the place, debating politics in the street or with taxi-drivers, especially when I met so many mothers who lost sons in the 1980s in a pointless war.

Suddenly, 26 years later, standing in a museum with these wonderful mothers, I felt a strange glow of satisfaction that the teenage version of me had the guts and wisdom to protest on behalf of the people of Nicaragua so many years before. If it was not for Ronald Reagan, many of their sons would still be alive today.

One of my friends at that Galway protest back in 1984 was active in the youth wing of Sinn Fein. It was quite normal in those days for detectives from Galway Garda Station to pick him up on his way home from school and question him for more than an hour. It was ‘political policing’ before we had heard of the term.

That teenage rebel has since gone on to become a respected academic – we have long since lost touch – and I don’t even think he is a member of Sinn Fein anymore, but his regular harassment by detectives really alarmed some of us who were in school with him at the time. 

Not that we all supported Sinn Fein at the height of the Troubles, but it was scary to think that a 16 year old could be arrested (or at least detained in the back of a police car) just because of his political views or the adults he associated with in the evenings. His parents were horrified when the detectives used to call to their home.

I was reminded of that demonstration against President Reagan this week when I saw a video of a protest meeting against ‘political policing’ in Dublin, which was addressed by a 16-year old.

That young lad was hauled from his bed at dawn last week, on a school day, after ten Gardai called to his front door. Instead of going to school, he spent two hours in a Garda Station answering questions about an Irish Water protest he had attended three months earlier.

He told the meeting that footage from the protest in Jobstown had been supplied to the Gardai by RTE, the national broadcaster. He worried about what the neighbours thought of him after being whisked off to a police station by such a huge force of Gardai.

There is something ‘sinister’ about a 16-year old being taken from his own bed at dawn by a force of ten Gardai, a full three months after he took part in a protest. He said he was baffled that he had to spend two hours in a police cell when he should have been in school.

And yet, according to members of our Government, the people who protest against Irish Water are the ‘sinister fringe’.

There is no excuse for abuse or violence, but people have a right to protest peacefully against what they believe to be an unjust charge. 

For 14 years, a protest at a small rural community in North Mayo received scant publicity. Incidents of police brutality were documented at the Shell to Sea protests in Rossport and the way in which the gas pipeline tore the community apart is brilliantly documented in Richard O’Donnell’s film, The Pipe (2010).

Time after time, people were arrested at the Shell protests only to be later released without charge.

Seven years ago, the British newspaper The Guardian reported that Shell delivered €35,000 worth of alcohol to Belmullet Garda Station as a Christmas present for the officers. The protesters in Rossport felt that the Gardai were not ‘neutral’ and that the national media almost ignored a shocking dispute which saw five local men spend months in jail.

People have a right to protest peacefully and if they were engaged in criminal activity in Rossport or Jobstown then of course the Gardai have a right to arrest and question them.

But protest has a vital place in a healthy democracy, which is why last week’s spate of arrests in the capital - and today's imprisonment of five water charges protesters - have caused so much concern. People are genuinely outraged that those who brought Ireland to its knees, leading to this 'crisis', have largely gone unpunished for their crimes.

The message seems to be that protesting against a form of "triple taxation" is more of a crime than corrupt banking or political practices.

I wonder will that 16-year old who was hauled out of his bed in Dublin, Jason Lester, look back in 30 years and say he was dead right to protest against the Irish Water ‘quango’. 

Just as I can now say that the thousands of us who protested against President Reagan in Galway way back in 1984 were perfectly justified in doing so, given what we now know about his murky and downright criminal dealings at the time. 

Sometimes a teenager can have as good a grasp of political realities as any mature adult, even or especially if he is labelled as a member of the “sinister fringe”.

Perhaps this time, change really is in the air

During last May’s local election count, I interviewed Fianna Fail TD Eamon O Cuiv for the Connacht Tribune. In the midst of a discussion about how the count was going, he told me that there was “no such thing as right and left” in Irish politics.

It struck me as a very odd comment.

In virtually any other country in the world, there is a clear distinction between right wing parties (who favour big business and an open market economy) and those on the left (who feel that the poor should never be penalised for the wrong-doings of the rich).

Maggie Thatcher, for instance, was right wing. She sold off council houses, privatised as much as she could, and closed down the mines. She attacked the working class. Whereas the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, where I volunteered for three months, were idealistic left-wingers (at least in their early days) after overthrowing a right-wing dictatorship.

O Cuiv, of course, is steeped in Irish political history. His grandfather, Eamon De Valera, was Taoiseach three times and President of Ireland. Fianna Fail is in his blood.

People like him don’t like to be reminded that Ireland has effectively been run by centre-right parties since its foundation. If you took the Civil War out of the equation, can anyone really distinguish between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael?

If they were in Britain, both parties would be labelled as “Conservative”. It has never been a radical move by voters to replace one with the other. Instead, it has always boiled down to family loyalties and friendships. The parish pump has been the real driving force in Irish politics.

The danger is that a certain perception of the Irish political landscape can then somehow be deemed the one and only “reality”. If all the major parties support the ‘bailout’, you can be labelled a lunatic if you question whether there is another way.

The dominant narrative allows people to ridicule those who believe it is absolutely appalling that the low paid should have to bail out unsecured bondholders.

It allows an RTE newsreader to label idealistic protesters as “idiots” live on air.

It allows elements of the media to completely ignore the anger that is so prevalent across the country in the wake of seven years of austerity.

Images of Gardai confronting Irish Water protesters don't make the national airwaves, but those who do protest are labelled as the "sinister fringe".

An academic even claimed recently that people were only protesting over the Irish Water charges because things were getting better. He called it a “revolution of rising expectations”.

When the Troika came to Dublin in 2010, I was working as a volunteer in Central America. Canadians and Germans sympathised with me. Some wondered why there was not a greater spirit of rebellion among the Irish. I could not tell them why people back home were so down, so accepting of the imposition of austerity on ordinary people who had nothing to do with the “crisis” which followed the property crash.

People who never bought a second house or SUV were suddenly lumped with the Universal Social Charge, pay cuts, and the Local Property Tax, for no other reason than to bail out a tiny elite who had been consumed by greed during the Celtic Tiger era.

In 2011, support for the Fianna Fail-led Government imploded, but voters only replaced them with another centre-right coalition. Can anyone really claim that Government policies have changed since the night of the infamous bank guarantee in 2008?

It has been a horrible few years for the Irish, but now there are huge hints of change in the air.

In last year’s European Elections the people of the West, Midlands, and North West voted for two Independents, one Sinn Fein MEP, and one Fine Gael. The most conservative constituency in the country, supposedly, returned three protest (or left wing) candidates out of four – and only one from the ‘traditional’ parties (FF, FG, and Labour).

A protest against Irish Water drew 100,000 people onto the streets of Dublin a few months ago. That would have been unthinkable half a decade ago. These were ordinary people, fed up with austerity, fed up with quangos, and the ‘bonus culture’ and sense of entitlement of those who rise to the top of these kinds of organisations.

For many people, the obscene bonuses and the sight of water meters being installed in their estates came as a final straw. 

All around Europe this week, there were stark warnings from right wing politicians and mainstream media that the Eurozone was about to be plunged into turmoil if the left-wing party, Syriza, won the Greek general election.

Fair play to the people of Greece. They have had enough of austerity, unemployment, and job cuts. They are tired of paying a price for the sins of others. And they were not afraid to defy the stark warnings in Sunday’s elections.

Syriza have pledged to renegotiate the country’s €240 billion bailouts, just as businesses regularly restructure their debts. Greece’s debt is equivalent to 175% of its GDP and the Greeks, like the Irish, need some hope after years of cuts.

Of course, Syriza’s victory has sent “shockwaves” through the markets, with speculation that Greece will default and have to leave the Eurozone.

But, amid all the stark warnings, the Greek people still went out and voted for the hard left.

While our hospitals remain overcrowded, while homelessness continues to be a huge problem, and the jobless rate is disguised through JobBridge and community employment schemes, the rise of Syriza should provide a stark lesson to Enda Kenny and company in the Irish Government.

In the second half of last year, the Irish Water demonstrations all over the country showed that people here are prepared to get out and protest – in one of the least radical countries in Europe. 

It will be interesting to see what happens in Greece now and whether the stark predictions of a Eurozone exit will materialise. 

By choosing to vote for Syriza, Greek voters have dared to question the perceived “reality” in which it is perfectly acceptable for ordinary people to bail out bankers and bondholders. 

The people have spoken. All across Europe, in Spain, Ireland, and Portugal, change is in the air.

And perhaps people here are beginning to realise that replacing FF with FG, or vice-versa, is not the only answer come election time.

Nobody wants to see a host of Independents bring instability to the Dail. But, equally, voters want to express their anger at the establishment parties after putting up with austerity for so long.

The next year or two could be very exciting indeed in Irish politics as a “wind of change” brings an end, finally, to the politics of the Civil War. It has only taken us just under a century to fall in line with the rest of the world!

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