Why should police seek to criminalise the alter-globalisation movement in the first place?
What conditions enable or prevent legitimation of the use of force by the police?
What do police and protestors learn from these events?
Considering its origins, the Republic of Ireland is a remarkably peaceful state, as shown by international comparisons of murder rates or the availability and use of weapons, official and unofficial. This is tied to the successful pacification of the state during the post-Treaty ‘counter-revolution’ and more recently to the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’, which have had a massive impact on political violence in the republic. The key security institutions of the state have – or at least had until the Good Friday agreement of 1998 – been justified by the Northern Ireland conflict (and, by extension, the supposed subversive threat to state power in the republic), to which they have directed most of their attention, with the support of most political forces and media in the south.
One major implication of this preoccupation was a sharp division in policing style for protest in the republic in the last third of the twentieth century. ‘Routine’ political demonstrations of whatever colour were (until 2000) essentially self-policing, with very low police presence and organisers determined that their protest should be fundamentally non-disruptive, in contrast to the routinely tolerated disruptive protests by insider interest groups like farmers and taxi drivers. Conversely, other kinds of political protest – notably republican events, but also working-class and Traveller protest, and rural protests against the development plans of multinational corporations – were met with a massive and coercive police presence as a matter of course.
Political riots have been rare in the republic’s recent history. After the ‘Bloody Sunday’ killings of protestors by soldiers in Derry in 1972, a crowd set fire to the British embassy in Dublin. It was again a target during the 1981 hunger strikes, but this time the crowd of 15,000 met a brutal response. This zero-tolerance security operation is seen as a watershed in Irish policing history.4 Conversely, non-political collective violence on a small scale has long been a fairly routine feature of Irish life. For example, at the time of the 2004 EU summit protests in Dublin (twenty-nine arrests, but only half reached trial), the ‘Rally of the Lakes’ resulted in forty-three arrests in Killarney,5 where one incident was reported thus:
Officers were targeted by thugs when they arrived at the scene of a fight at the busy junction linking Main Street and Plunkett Street at 1.30 a.m.
As they moved in to apprehend two culprits, other bystanders got involved and Gardaí were targeted with missiles when reinforcements arrived to break up the row. ‘It was basically the crowd that couldn’t get into the nightclubs that had congregated on the street – these were people who had come out of the pub and couldn’t get in anywhere,’ Sergeant Tom Tobin told The Kingdom.
Around 300 people were present at the scene as Gardaí broke up the fight. Seven people were arrested under the Public Order Act as a result of the fracas, making up a quarter of the 28 public order arrests made on Saturday night and Sunday morning. Nobody was injured as a result of the street fight and those arrested will be brought before the courts.6
The contrast between the policing of the Killarney event and that of the EU protest, for which over half the republic’s police force was deployed, is stark.
Similar conflicts at Traveller weddings and funerals have been a feature of life in the Republic, and routinely provoke a ‘moral panic’ in the media as well as intensive policing. Yet another kind of response marks the frequent encounters between police and groups of youths on council estates in west Dublin and elsewhere, which are typically occasions for the deployment of state force but without any media fanfare. Such ‘social violence’ took an explicitly political form in 2006, with the so-called ‘Dublin riots’ in which an apparently spontaneous gathering of marginalised working-class youth prevented the loyalist Love Ulster organisation from marching past the GPO. This event highlighted both the organisational capacity of those involved and the separation of their networks from those of traditional republicanism: both republicans and the police were caught by surprise.7 This event, however, stands out as exceptional, and is best understood as a transposition to the city centre of normally hidden conflicts on peripheral estates.
Despite this peaceful history, the alleged likelihood of anti-capitalist violence has frequently resulted in high-scale policing of protest, justified by implausible information fed to the media.8 Equally interestingly, the co-operation of courts and media – routinely available to criminalise working-class youth and Travellers – has often been withheld. What is it about the alter-globalisation movement that seems to make the Irish police want to criminalise it and yet makes their attempts to do so fall flat? By 2002, senior Irish police officers were familiar with their European colleagues’ picture of alter-globalisation protestors as ‘the new subversive threat’, a perspective highlighted in 2001 by the near-fatal shooting of three protestors in Gothenburg and the killing of one in Genoa. Dublin’s ‘Reclaim the Streets’ (RTS) protests were equally international in inspiration and were by now traditional in Dublin, highlighting the privatisation of public space by car traffic and disrupting it with street parties.
The 2002 street party began with about 400 people listening to music played from a rig blocking one of the city’s busiest roads. Banners against car culture and commodification of the city called for free public space. Numbers rose to 700 and the party continued for three hours until the police became hostile and began making arrests. Partygoers decided it would be safer to walk en masse to Stephen’s Green and disperse there but, as they began to move, an unmarked police car drove into the march, breaking it up. Several police vans arrived and participants alleged that gardaí started indiscriminately attacking – people partygoers, bystanders and passing shoppers. As police numbers rose to about 150, the crowd, now only 200, was still moving towards the park, but was blocked by police vans and bikes. One protestor recalled:
This was the worst of the baton charges I saw. Previously they had been happy taking a few swings at a couple of people to frighten people back. This time they were knocking people to the ground and continuing to baton and kick people once they had gone down. I saw a young man being thrown against the side of a bus and batoned there by at least five gardaí ... One advertising executive reported that he had been hit three times before seeing two motorbike cops banging a young man’s head off a wall. A woman was knocked off her bike and beaten on the ground before being arrested, and many people were sent to hospital at this point.9
These events fitted into an increasing police hostility to alter-globalisation activism. On European Car Free Day in September 2001, a well-established and generally tolerated event in other EU states, five Dublin activists were arrested for obstructing traffic. Three weeks later a protest against privatisation was met by a baton charge, with fourteen protestors being arrested and held overnight – a then unprecedented measure in relation to minor public order disturbances. A journalist recording the event was arrested and had his equipment confiscated. By the time the police attacked the Dame Street party, arresting twenty-four and hospitalising over a dozen people, a pattern of aggressive policing of anti-capitalist movement activity had already emerged. The Irish Times journalist William Hederman commented:
Since last summer, there has been a remarkable shift in the garda’s approach to dealing with protests by the ‘anti-capitalist’ or ‘internationalist’ movement. Activists report that gardaí have been moving in suddenly and aggressively, making arrests and bringing criminal charges under the controversial Public Order Act (POA).10
Protestors also noted that the riot units that attacked the crowd were not wearing numbers, a serious breach of discipline if it had not been sanctioned by senior officers.
What marked this event out from previous incidents was the availability of high-quality video footage of the events and the willingnes
s of national television to broadcast images of police violence, resulting in what is now widely seen as one of the major police legitimacy crises in recent Irish history.11 Uniquely, tabloid headlines the next day criticised the police rather than the protestors, and it became clear that the traditional licence accorded to students in particular to engage in unusual and colourful behaviour was widely accepted even among traditional, ‘middle-class’ supporters of the gardaí. A crowd of almost 1,000 marched the following week to demonstrate against the treatment of RTS protestors, the marchers representing a broad mix of socialists, anarchists, republicans and the travelling community.
There were serious repercussions for the police: over €1 million was paid out in compensation to victims, while the Garda Complaints Board denounced the behaviour of the police involved in attacking the RTS protest. An internal inquiry was held (in which officers unanimously claimed not to be able to identify any of their colleagues as having taken part) and batons were taken away from the police at the next RTS demonstration, six months later. For their part, police participants in the September events held that they had been ‘hung out to dry’ by management. Plans to hold the European meeting of the World Economic Forum in Dublin the following year were scrapped after the Irish Social Forum and Grassroots Gathering mounted an anti-summit campaign. If, as activists believed, this represented an official acknowledgement of police inability to deal successfully with new kinds of protest, this was clearly a problem for the police (not to mention an embarrassment for senior politicians) and required a new strategy on their part, as well as a substantial investment in training.12 As an aside, we can observe that Dame Street was by 2010 partially closed to private transport and used only by buses and taxis.
Two years after the events of May Day 2002, Ireland was scheduled to hold an EU summit meeting in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. The old left used this opportunity to hold a conventional march against neo-liberalism in a location approved by the police, whereas the libertarian left established the ‘Dublin Grassroots Network’ and called for a march to the summit itself. Following the model of Argentinean cacerolazos, the aim was to ‘bring the noise’ – whistles, pots and pans – to discover whether dissenting citizens could in fact be heard by EU leaders. The key issues were opposition to what were seen as racist ‘Fortress Europe’ policies, the privatisation of basic services, neo-liberalism’s perceived contribution to social injustice and the increased militarisation of the European Union.
Although May Day 2004 was officially framed as a ‘day of welcomes’, anticipatory media coverage of the summit protests – drawing on the usual unattributed ‘security sources’ – warned the Irish public that hordes of EU citizens were planning to travel across the Irish Sea to protest. Elsewhere in the EU, similar attempts by citizens to exercise the right to demonstrate have routinely been met with the suspension of the Schengen agreement, the detaining of protestors at frontiers and the systematic demonisation of ‘foreign’ protestors. The Garda Representative Association claimed that everyone who had been in Genoa (some 250,000 according to standard estimates) would come to Ireland; another claimed that there were ‘20,000 anarchists’ travelling from the UK. Rather more accurately, the final Garda Review analysis suggested a figure of twenty visitors intent on causing trouble.13 The bizarre inflation of numbers seems to have been part of a disinformation campaign, which ran for months before the event, attacking alter-globalisation demonstrations and aiming to legitimise militarised policing. Stories were leaked of secret armies, arms dumps, a threatened gas attack on the Taoiseach and plans to burn down Blanchardstown shopping centre; journalists wrote of infiltrating ‘secret meetings’ which turned out to be publicly advertised and open to all.14 Aisling Reidy of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties said they were ‘very concerned that gardaí, through stories fed to the media, [were] trying to soften up public opinion for a show down, by talking of potential violence and well-planned attacks by subversives’.15
The summit’s location, close to a residential area, was marked off by a four-mile exclusion zone, with between 4,000 and 6,000 police officers – half the national force – deployed on summit-related duties, 1,000 in riot squads. Overtly alarmist measures included the deployment of over 2,500 troops, the use of the navy and air corps, placing the army’s chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear unit on stand-by, detailing other troops to help gardaí secure key installations around the capital, including the airport, tightening immigration checks at ports and airports, cancelling all garda leave and borrowing water cannons from the Northern Ireland police, from whose tactics gardaí have historically preferred to dissociate themselves. More disturbingly, senior gardaí told hospitals to have their emergency contingency plans ready in case of serious civil unrest, space was cleared at the city morgue and body bags16 were said to have been ordered, a wing of a Dublin prison was emptied in readiness, and gardaí visited city-centre businesses warning of serious violence and encouraging them to shut up shop for the weekend, producing a frightened, silent and militarised city.17
The right to protest was directly suspended with the announcement, two days before the protest, that the riot squad would be deployed at the march’s starting point with orders to break up any attempt to assemble – a serious threat to those who might not hear of this in time. In the face of this, and the usual anonymous announcements in the media that the protest had been cancelled, Dublin Grassroots Network declared a new starting point. The eventual march brought 5,000 marchers within a mile of the summit venue, well inside the supposed exclusion zone, and safely back to the city centre, a distance of some eight or nine miles. In the confrontation at Phoenix Park’s Ashtown gate between some protestors and police, the apparently overwhelming force available to police was restrained in the face of a massive media presence, legal observers, memories of 2002 and the presence of large numbers of interested local working-class men on a warm Saturday evening. An attempt by a group of protestors to push through police lines was met with the use of water cannon, producing a stalemate, and protestors retreated in good order in the face of baton charges.
Police strategies were also less than successful in the public arena. Banning the march almost certainly boosted the number of protestors who were defending the freedom to protest. Serious media used the more ludicrous claims fed to journalists to mock the alarmism of the tabloid press. Journalist Harry Browne commented that the event was ‘actually a garda riot control operation without a riot ... and the virtual erasure of people who were involved in peaceful protest in a public place and were subjected to assault by baton and cold bath, then arrest by gardaí’. The denial of bail to the handful of protestors arrested (usually on trivial charges, and held over the bank holiday weekend) was the subject of newspaper editorials and it was rapidly reversed.18
Far from the organisers being charged with conspiracy to organise a riot, as would have been logical if the police had believed their own claims, only trivial charges were brought (most for ‘breach of the peace’ and ‘refusal to obey the instructions of a garda’). The courts refused to entertain police requests to take into account the political context of the supposed offences. The most serious charge (of possessing stencils) was thrown out because the police had failed to bring any evidence to show their purpose.19 We may note that four years later the Irish electorate rejected the EU’s Lisbon Treaty and was ‘sent back’ the next year to vote again until the officially approved result was achieved.
The year after the EU protest, five men from an isolated rural community in north-west Ireland were jailed for refusing to comply with an injunction against interference with Shell’s plans, using the first compulsory purchase orders awarded to a private company in the history of the state, to construct a gas pipeline on their land. Local residents, supporters and much expert opinion considered the experimental pipeline and refinery to pose a significant danger. After years of organising, local people resorted in 2005 to civil disobedience in a desperate attempt to halt th
e development. They picketed the gates of the refinery construction site on the day of the jailing, preventing any work from taking place. Following the imprisonments, a major national and international mobilisation ensued in support of the locals, and Shell quickly changed tack, enabling their release and ending a serious PR disaster. The Shell to Sea campaign now came to be seen as an international example of local struggle against global capital.
In October 2006, the situation changed. Smears against the campaign were spread to the press, claiming that it had been hijacked by dissident republicans,20 and the policing operation changed. That month, the picket line which had been held for nearly a year and a half was violently broken by hundreds of police who were brought into the area and remained there for the next couple of years. In an interview Superintendent Gannon explained the changed strategy:
The entrance to the site was blocked for a year and a half. Local people had a veto on who went in and out of the site: it was out of this situation that the current operation was born ... There were no arrests. That was part of our strategy: we did not want to facilitate anyone down there with a route to martyrdom. That has been the policy ever since.21
The net result of this ‘no arrests’ policy was the use of police violence rather than risking the uncertain support of the courts and media. It clearly followed from the major mobilising effect of the imprisonment of the Rossport Five, which drew criticism from many quarters in Irish society. Other elements of the new policy evidently included the targeted use of off-camera violence and the intimidation of individuals through intense surveillance and harassment – this, however, was counter-productive, in that the local residents who were the main victims became more, rather than less, committed to their protests. The situation was intensified by the appearance of groups of masked individuals who hospitalised one local fisherman and sank his boat; it is hard to imagine this could go unnoticed by the massive police presence. Ironically, following the end of the ‘no-arrests’ policy, this same fisherman found himself targeted for imprisonment.22
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