"Hi. We're the Workers' Party. And we're mental"
The Workers’ Party condemns the gross overreaction of An Garda Síochána in pepper-spraying and using batons on students in Trinity College Dublin who were engaged in a legitimate protest against former United States president and genocide enabler Joe Biden.
Biden is a legitimate target of protest. During his presidency, he armed Israeli forces during their genocide in Gaza. Both his actions — and inactions — have led to the physical destruction of the entire territory of Gaza, the displacement of over two million people from their homes, and the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, including almost 20,000 children. Clearly, both the Irish state and college authorities were well aware of the revulsion of the Irish people at Biden’s role in this ongoing genocide, which is why the event was kept so low-key in the first place. In our view, he should never have been invited.
The overreaction of Gardaí — evidenced by their use of pepper spray and batons — is part of a disturbing pattern of curbing the right to protest and dissent which has been ramping up steadily, especially since the start of Ireland’s EU presidency.
The right to public protest is a basic but hard-won right. From the brutality committed against those seeking basic civil rights in Derry in October 1968 and January 1970, to the brutalisation of protestors who stood against the giveaway of our natural resources and the threatened destruction of a local community in Rossport, Co. Mayo, we can see that the states both north and south had to be pushed into allowing citizens the right to public protest.
The actions by Gardaí in Trinity College Dublin are part of an ongoing process designed by the authorities to curtail public protest, which includes the abuse of the Public Order Act in an effort to hide the level of opposition in Ireland to many aspects of government, EU, and US policy, particularly in relation to the creation of an EU army, and the ongoing complicity in and facilitation of Israeli genocide in Gaza.View quoted post on X
