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June
20, 2003
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Bush on "Revisionist Historians"
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19, 2003
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June
21, 2003
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Late
Date in Court for Irish Activists
By HARRY BROWNE
Dublin.
"They won't actually get
put in prison, will they?" Call it a postcolonial hangover,
but Irish people have a healthy skepticism about high-minded
concepts such as "an independent judiciary". So when
you mention to ordinary friends and colleagues that the five
Catholic Worker activists arrested in February for damage to
a US Navy plane at Shannon Airport -- an action previously described
here in CounterPunch-- are going to face trial for their
actions, the response is often based on the implicit belief that
the Irish government will somehow avoid making prison-martyrs
of them. Sure, they'll have to be prosecuted -- the Yanks would
expect no less -- but not locked up; that would be a national
embarrassment, not to mention a focus for dissent.
It's a nice thought, and quite possibly
accurate. But listen to the Pitstop Ploughshares group for a
few minutes and it becomes obvious that they're not putting their
faith in any such nod-and-a-wink "Irish solution".
Indeed, by pressing for a jury trial on the criminal-damage charges,
before the Circuit Court, they've pushed up their potential sentences
to 10 years, and by thus raising the prosecuting costs for the
state, they may have made a harsher punishment that much more
likely.
So it was sighs of relief all around
the other day when they won a small but significant victory:
their trial date has been postponed from June 24 until at least
October, on the basis of insufficient "discovery",
and perhaps even more importantly the venue has been moved, from
picturesque Kilrush, Co Clare, to Dublin. The defendants might
have relished trying to convince a jury from the environs of
the airport -- where there is considerable, and quite possibly
increasing, economic dependence on military stopovers. Their
lawyers reckon they stand a better chance with "peers"
who haven't been bombarded with stories about the destructive
effects of protest on the local economy.
They still face a considerable fight.
We have written here previously about the characteristic Irish
Catholic allergy to religious enthusiasm, and about the extraordinarily
prejudicial coverage and commentary from the state broadcaster
and government ministers that followed the Ploughshares arrest.
(The government was particularly pissed off because spokespeople
had been so sanguine about Shannon Airport security after a similar
breach about a week earlier; activist Mary Kelly, from the Atlantis
community, faces a separate trial for that action, and is back
in court in the next couple of weeks.)
The immediate spin on the Ploughshares
group was that they had 'overpowered' a policeman during their
wee-hours action, though no assault charges were subsequently
proffered. "We prefer to say he was 'overwhelmed', like
the centurion at Christ's tomb," says defendant Ciaron O'Reilly,
at 42 by far the oldest of the group and, as a veteran of US
and Australian actions and prisons, its obvious 'ringleader'.
He says that in the tradition of "comforting the afflicted
and afflicting the comfortable", the group ministered to
the policeman, who was shocked and worried about the consequences
for his livelihood of the three women and two men running around
with wire-cutters, inflatable hammers and blood for splashing
on runways.
When the burly, dreadlocked Australian
O'Reilly speaks, it's with utter conviction, but every third
sentence is a joke. He imagines, for instance, setting up a pacifist
wing at Portlaoise prison, where unreconstructed paramilitary
prisoners are still held. "While the Real IRA and the INLA
are doing their military drills, I could be doing tai-chi."
He and the other four defendants are, by dint of their intelligence,
passion and wit, the best argument that a "just cause"
acquittal is possible, especially if they're allowed to speak
their minds in the witness box.
Three of them, including O'Reilly, are
diaspora Irish. American Nuin Dunlop has zealously blue eyes
and a ready laugh, and has learned her politics young from Catholic
Worker comrades in the US and here in Ireland. Scotswoman Karen
Fallon is a smokier, edgier character, visibly angry at the injustices
meted out to the people of Iraq: "I did what felt right
for me at the time, and it still feels right for me. I don't
give a fuck what anyone else thinks."
Dubliner Deirdre Clancy is seriously
and deeply engaged with the ethics of her action and its personal
consequences. She says matter-of-factly: "When you know
the truth, sometimes you have to either act on that knowledge
or go crazy." And seminarian Damien Moran is the clean-cut
country boy who carefully weighed the successes and failures
of 'pressure' politics before his crawl under the perimeter fence;
he should appeal to any mammies on the jury. None of them underestimate
the seriousness of what they've done or what they face; as bail
conditions were being argued, they all spent at least a month
in jail between February and April.
With his Berrigan mentors O'Reilly was
accustomed to months of preparation for non-violent direct actions.
At the Shannon 'peace camp' the Ploughshares 5 came together
and planned their action in a matter of less than two weeks.
There was and is something ad-hoc about their alliance. Rumour
has it that after their arrest, when they were asked to state
their religion, one of the five began to explain her pagan, wicca
influences, before a quick elbow prompted her to declare "Catholic!"
Nonetheless their relationship remains
visibly strong-- thankfully they were able to lose the initial
bail condition that they could not confer with each other. (They
still have to stay out of Clare, stay a mile away from the US
embassy and sign on every single day at a police station, a duty
usually only imposed on accused murderers.) They will tell anyone
who wants to listen that their February action was a matter of
bearing 'prophetic witness', and of making the point that not
only had the war against Iraq's people been going on for 13 years,
but that its escalation into more bombing and killing was an
obvious fait accompli. "There was very little option to
'influence' the governments," O'Reilly says. "At that
stage it should have been obvious to anyone that they were just
marketing a pre-determined decision."
Of course in February there were millions
of people who still hoped the relevant governments were amenable
to influence. O'Reilly notes with some resignation that, at the
Dublin February 15 protest, attended by more than 100,000 people,
the then-still-jailed activists were never even mentioned from
the stage.
On June 24, instead of facing trial in
Kilrush, the Ploughshares group are walking from an ancient pagan
and Christian well in Kildare right up to Dublin's Leinster House,
where parliament sits. There they will stage an overnight fast.
But they know that's just the first stop, and they're ready for
what lies ahead. "We want to take the spirit of the action
into the courtroom," O'Reilly says, "and, if necessary,
back into the prison system."
See also www.ploughsharesireland.org
Harry Browne
writes for The Irish Times and is a lecturer in the school of
media at Dublin Institute of Technology. He can be contacted
at harrybrowne@eircom.net
Today's Features
Elaine
Cassel
Bush Plays the Racial Profiling Card:
It's a Smokescreen
Brian
Cloughley
Punch-and-Judy in the West Wing:
The Powell-Rice Show
David Lindorff
What's Next?
Mark
Jacobs
A Serious Conversation: a Former Foreign Service Officer on Diplomacy
in the Age of Bush
Alfredo
Castro
Bloodbath in Colombia: The Army and the Death Squads
Saul
Landau
Lying, Flag Waving and Redefining
Conservative Values
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/19
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