Picture of US Troops at Shannon

by Dubsky Tue Jan 29, 2002 15:17 slack at redbrick dot dcu dot ie

The RTE journalist who covered the anti-war rally at Shannon airport on December 15th wasn't even there. She wrote the story from her home using information from some friend who she told me did attend, and stories she had heard earlier about US military stop-overs at Shannon.

When I put it to her that ours was an anti-war rally (that's what the "anti-war rally" bit in "anti-war rally at Shannon airport" was for on our posters, flyers, and banners), she told me I was nitpicking. She wanted to leave the story as it was: two people arrested following scuffles with police at protest against US marines returning home from Germany via Shannon. Only one person was arrested following the scuffles (if she had been there herself or had read more carefully the three sentence long police statement that was faxed to her she'd have known). The other arrest was made on the rough-grass part of the apron (over the fence and far away from any scuffles or anything of the like) and was entirely peaceful.

Luckily her editor was more reasonable and agreed to remove the innacuracies from RTE's news website. I think that it was simply lazy journalism (she explained to me that actually she didn't know where the plane was heading, but that she had been told before where those kind of flights usually go to). Still I'm not surprised, after speaking to her at length on the phone, that her sloppy reporting made us out to be a violent and misguided bunch, trying to stop Americans going home for Christmas time (how un-Christian of us!).

Though for me it was a wonderful day, there was unfortunately an unacceptable level of pushing and shouting at police. We've addressed this directly with nonviolence workshops dealing with direct action, diffusing violence, working in affinity groups and nonviolence guidelines. I've explained my position on this further in a comment to a similar article to this on the Indymedia UK website. Ideally the Garda Siochana will help us be guardians of the peace and resist the war through nonviolent direct action at Shannon airport in future. Other than the odd thicko (one airport policeman suggested I join the Taliban -- not the brightest), the police I spoke to there seemed quite reasonable. At the end of the day when we win and the US military flights are banned we'll need to rely on them to police the airports and make sure Donald Runsfeld and his boys aren't getting drunk in the airport bar!

by j piece Tue Jan 29, 2002 13:04

So much for the excuse that they were coming from German bases in Desert Camoflage? time for us to get protesting again!

by moss Sun Jan 27, 2002 08:23

really shocking!