Ciaron's Journey Home - An Irish-OZ Experience

dublin | crime and justice | news report Wednesday September 01, 2004 10:28 by Ciaron - Dublin Catholic Worker/Pit Stop Ploughshares Back in Dublin 087 918 4552

Wherever you Go! There You Are!

In August, the Irish state let me go home to Brisbane, Australia to visit my folks. Here's some reflections.........

In the last daze of July, the Garda indicated to our Ploughshare's lawyers that they would not oppose me returning to Australia for a month to visit my parents. I hadn't been home for 3 years in which time I hadn't seen my mum. My Dad (originally from Clara, Offaly) had spent 3 months over here with me and his family 2 years ago. The Pit Stop Ploughshares crew have been on bail for 18 months the first 9 months signing on at a Garda station on a daily basis, the last 9 twice weekly. I'd been pretty good at this so I guess the irish State didn't consider me a flight risk.

On the Friday cyber savvy DCW community members started hunting for an airline ticket with short notice in peak tourist season. By the Sunday night we had found one for 1500euro, by Monday we were in front of the Judge and by Wednesday I was winging it outta Dublin.

Had a good day in London with some of the Catholic Worker crew (check link on www.ploughsharesireland.org). London CW is a resistance & not a live-in community. London is a big town so it is remarkable that they can gather from the four corners of it so regularly and pull off so much nvda for such a small group. They also volunteer at a church based soup kitchen in Kentish Town on Sundays. Pluralist crew - Chris (a christian-anarchist practioner of the Alexander technique), Angela (Anglican with a long anti-Trident resistance record) Zelda (6 years a nurse in Nicaragua inclding a cameo in "Carlo's Song" which she worked on as a nurse. Zelda took an anarcho-brick in the head in a "firendly fire"incident at J18 didn't dampen her resistance spirit any!). Sr. Susan (Riverside Plowshares www.plowsharesactions.org )back from a nonviolent tour of duty at CW communities in the U.S. is heading for the Oxford Catholic Worker community - Oxford CW is a shelter for folks awaiting decisions on their assylum seeking application. The address supplies them a basis for beiong released from the Campsfield detention Centre). Also Susan Van der Hijden (Jubilee Ploughshares (www.plowsharesactions.org check chronology) was present .

Then the long haul to OZ. Met at the Briz airport in the early hours by my older bro Sean and my lawyer Terry. Went home to see the folks - both looking a little older and slower, but the wit as sharp as ever. Crashed out and then headed for my old neighborhood West End. When I first went there in the '70's it was an aboriginal gathering place (45 aborigines died in 3 years in Musgrave Park - malnutirition, lightning, killings, burnt to death rolling onto fires and in 1993 Daniel Yock killed by the cops, no charges laid) and a Greek area (at the end of WW2 a village in Rhodes got up and transplanted itself to West End). West End is surrounded by the river on three sides - in the '70's and '80's place of low rent shared housing (The book & movie "He Died with a Falafel in His Hand" was drawn from our shared housing disaster stories and set in our West End neighborhood. "Powderfinger" and a "Go Between" were based in this neighborhood). The uni was a ferry ride across the river in the old money part of town - so lots of artists, punks acvtivists and from 1982-2000 a Catholic Worker community we kickstarted in the old West End.

The Brisbane CW community (downsized!!???!! to a couple with 7 kidz have moved to start a CW farm at Dayboro where amongst other things they generate so much solar, methane, wind energy they are selling to the state grid. There van runs om recylcled fish and trip oil...they took the vehicle 3,000+ miles roundtrip to do nvda at the U.S. spy base at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs. They wrote to Fish and Chip shops en route and asked them to svae them the oil!

In 1988 the Expo/the World Fair was planted on the edge of our West End neighborhood-resulting in 3000 evictions and all the resistance we could muster in the bicentenary year. A lot of the aboriginal folks were gradually ethnically/economically cleansed from the neighborhood being pushed out to the sattelit ghettos of the sprawl that is Brisbane (once the largest land mass governed by a sole City Council in the world....as in big backyards, man).

As I walked into my old neighborhood ( I had lived on Boundary St. '79-'89 all of my 20's before- like the guy at the end of "Pulp Fiction" - getting to wander the earth, trying to kick start Catholic Workers and coming a cropper with various nation state militaries, arms corporations and prison administrations!) there were some worrying signs!

The Roundabout Cafe didn't have a roundabout in front of it no more. The "Guns & Ammo" Shop didn't have any guns & ammo in it or the polaroids of gutted kangaroos but was now the "Guns & Ammo Cafe" (I kid you not - I guess you could try and celebrate this as a kinds of "swords into ploughshares" transformation but it reeked of the gentrification that has been spreading like cancer since '88.) Then there was a "Doll & Teddy" hospital decorated like an emergency section - yes, for Dolls and Teddy's (we're not talking about looking after aging 1950's subcultures here - we're talking dolls and teddies in a land where the traditinal owners have Third World mortality rates. My God the main street must have the highest density of coffee shops in the Western world, a tourist economy on main street.

In the midst of all this some good stuff still survives and thrives as well as new intiaitives. The anarcho-ecologist "Bicycle Revolution" recycling old push bikes and "Reverse Garbage" a recycling co-op business with the most amazing aisles of esoteric and practical stuff in there. The monthly anarchist newspaper "Neighborhood News" has been recently ressurected. There are still some characters on main street. I sat down on a bench and within 15 minutes was in a zimmer frame/wheelchair pile up as old survivors recognised a fellow traveller and pulled up for a chat! There was a guy originally from east End of Lonodn who had dug turf in Offaly after WW2, kept asking him near what town - but he "couldn't remember only that they had us in camps".

While I was in Briz I did some speaking about our disarmament action at Shannon Airport, tthe forthcoming trial, Irish complicity in the ongoing war on Iraq. I spoke at the local Hiroshima Day rally, gave some homilies at churches and at the mass for 400 boarders at the most elite boarding school in Queensland (they had me back for a day at school taking classes), spoke at a couple of working class Catholic schools, did some radio interviews, at the university and a teach-in for 1960's & '70's activists.

Queensland was a hard place to be active in the '60's-'70's-'80's. We had a corrupt Calvanist State Premier (on the take form transnational mining companies & "developers") AND a corrupt Irish-Catholic police force runnig the brothels, illegal casinoes and the smack. Any of us who stood up were raided, bashed, blaklisted, arrested and harrassed with monotonous regularity. All civil liberties were suspended from 1977-1982 (the year I left high school, punk took off etc.....very formative years). I have lots of resepct for anyone who sttof up in those years and tried my best to track a lot fo old activist frineds down.....some are now academics, some are in big jobs, some still struggle on at the grass roots, some are Greens, some struggle with heroin addiction, ones a police prosecutor, one's working for British Aerospace, some are doing their best to raise their kids in post-nuclear situaltions.....we're all looking a little heavier, greyer, slower and hopefully a bit more tolerant of each other).

Politically thangs are grim-Australia is an eager participant in the U.S war on Iraq. My folks live backing on to Ennogera Army Barracks, I grew up there during the Vietnam War. Sitting in the backyard the other day with a friend (a Huey flew low over us). down at the Brookside Shopping Centre young soldiers in camo drove brand new motorbikes and pick ups. It was a vibe reminsicent of the '60's-an army at war. The OZ army has rehabilitated itself after Vietnam with it's recent intervention in East Timor (totally ironic and undeserved when one considers it's 25 year enthusiasm for training Kopassus and the Indonesian death squads unleashed on the East Timorese (Indo regualrs trained at Cungara Jungle Warfare Centre on the edge of Briz/the elite Kopassus by the elite OZ SAS in Perh). Amnesia Rules OK!

The cynisicm the young held the OZ military in post-Vietnam has evaporated, cadets are returning to schools. 3 new US training bases are being built (2 in the Northern Territory & one in Queensland's Yeppoon-these will serve as U.S. arms dumps for interventions in South East Asia). 10% of Yepoon town's populations turned out to protest against this new base. (Dunno know how much of it was anti-war motivation or NIMBY-not in my backyard motivation). The anti-war movement is similar to the scene in Ireland a lot of passive opinion against the war but little grassroots anti-war activism in evidence. The tyranny of distance is always an obstacle for us peaceniks in OZ - getting to U.S. bases, uranium mines thousands of miles into the outback (and people in Ireland complain about a day trip to Shannon!)

The offensive against those refugees fleeing the wars that Australia support reemain as brutal as ever (the issue has won the conservative OZ govt. the last two elections - although the lies they told about refugees throwing their children overboard just before the last election are presently being expose din the mainstream media!). While I was in OZ the high court ruled that the OZ Govt. can detain a Palestinaian refugee for the term of his natural life because he is stateless and they have nowhere to deport him. This Palestinian guy has spent the last year as the only prisoner in an OZ run detention cemtre set up in New Guinea! U.S. companies like Wakenhut are making a mint out of running sveral gulags in the isolated outback where Afghani & Iraqi kidz are also detained for years no prisoner ever accused of commiting a crime in Australia. Direct action at Woomera freed 25 refugees during an easter nvda camp a few years ago leading the the closure of the Detention camp - like others - a center of torutre, self harm and menatl disintegration. But they have opened Baxter Detention Centre just down the road with a fence they call "empowered" (they refuse to call it "electrified") to deal with any feral hippies thinking of tearing down Woomera style.

Meanwile the Kafkaesque court martial of OZ citizen Terry Hicks has started in Guantanemo with the OZ Govt. sychophantically mute about how their U.S. Coalition partner in the "War on Terror" is treating OZ citizens (in contrast how U.S. citizen John Walker (see Steve Earles fine song "John Walker Blues" on the Jerusalem album) wasn't sent to Guatanemo but got sent home to be dealt with under the U.S. consitution charged with U.S. law). And of course the 13 Saudis who got sent home last year in exchange for the 6 Brit business men drugged, tortured into confessions & framed on Al Qaida car bombings of another set of Brit business men involved in the sly grog trade in Saudi. terry Hick's father has headed over to the military tribunal on Guatanemo - a film has just been released in OZ about Terry Hicks and his father eretracing his footsteps through Afghanistan etc.

Well some frinds flew me down to Melbourne (1200 miles south of Briz) to do some speaking gigs. Gave one to 40 folks at the Melbourne indymedia centre which they rent for about 35,000 euro a year - an old lingere factory...the basement converted into a bicycle recylcing workshop and lots of other interesting stuff going down. Spoke at a Uniting Church after there Sunday service to another 40 good folks. Went to where Ned Kelly was hung at old Melbourne jail. And to nearby Trades Hall to here Joe Higgins TD speak - Joe seemed pleasantly shocked to see me so far from Dublin.

I ran into a number of friends on the street in Melbourne including Joe. Joe has a punk band called "The Joes" so I went to their gig. Joe's day job is playing 2Senior Seargent Steiger 2 on the TV soap "Neighbors" we ended up hooking up with other friends we had met a the 1998 blockade of the under construction Jabiluka uranium mine in the Northern Territory. Hey! We recently won that one with the mining company putting all the earth back in the hole the dug in contravention to the desires of the traditional owners the Mirrar who denied them the ability to build an access road to the 25 year old open cut Ranger uranium mine down the road that just had another major accident recently thrreatening the beautiful wetlands up there and the people who live in harmony with country.

Well it was time to go home to Dublin and ended with a great party at my lawyer and Godson;s house with lots of rellies, old hippy, pumk, feminist, CW, Irish, muso friends. The last night into town my folks accompanied me and an ex to at lk by Fr.James Allison a former Dominican gay priest (author of "Faith beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay"). As much as Mumia Abu Jamal is the most articulate voice out of the U.S. prison System, this is the most articualte voice I've heard form the gay scene). My brothers Sean & Brendan took me to the airport. Landed back in Dublin, airline lost my luggage for a couple of daze. Headed ou to the Dun Laoighre music festival for a soft landing. My two other CW community members have come up with some exciting plans for the near future so stay tuned.

Many thanx to all who made this trip possible to the OZ dude who stumped up 500euros for all the other Aussies who musterd another 500 euros. For all the solidarity expressed and offered to the PIt Stop Ploughshares as we continue this disarmamaent journey through the courts etc. For all those who continue the nonviolent reisstance to this war on Iraq and the larger war on the poor. Prayers for Ciaran Farrel from the homeless shelter who in August.
Cop U Later
Ciaron