No torture jets. Earlier protest in Dublin featuring poster.

On Saturday 25th Feb 2006, while Dublin was busy rioting against a loyalist paramilitary march, peace activists entered Shannon airport and conducted a peaceful protest against the use of a neutral civilian airport as both a staging point in the occupation of Iraq and as a conduit for the transfer of prisoners of the CIA in "extraordinary rendition".

From the newswire (Justin Morahan, Peace People): Colm and I decided to go in, drove to the car park, parked and went in to the airport. We wandered around for over an hour, sat in the observation lounge and saw three US planes, one Aer Lingus and one Ryanair, two small planes partly out of sight. Unfortunately, we had no camera. We also saw US troops passing up and down the corridor beind a glass panel opposite our window.

We had a cup of tea and decided to do the protest in the middle of the Departure Lounge where there were passengers waiting and people including staff to the left, right and upstairs. Colm took out his favourite poster (with Village pic as in previous vigil in Ranelagh see http://www.indymedia.ie/article/74470) and I mine. As we stood holding the posters I started to say Ed McCurdy's poem "Last night I dreamed" and followed with an impromptu speech. Colm wore his Pitstop T-shirt.

Traffic cams show riot in real time

Looking on through the lens of the virtual on Saturday I was stunned by the breath and depth of the live and parasitic (in a healthy way) critique of the action which unfolded alongside the action on O'Connell Street on Indymedia Ireland and throughout the hiberno-blogosphere. I quickly realised that this was definitely the first example of an ad-hoc flashmob of citizen journalists banding together with a decentralised diy publishing infrastructure, spontaneously, as live and with no pre-planning whatsoever and with no notice, flexing its muscles and absolutely wiping the floor with the methods of the traditional media. RTE had just about caught up with events by the time the (10 minutes later than scheduled) late evening bulletin came around. All of the blogs all day were choc full of dissatisfaction with the performance of the 'public service' broadcaster.

I, like almost everybody I know, didn't predict the events of Saturday. In fact the only person I know who did predict a major riot was a friend of mine who happens to hail from the wee North - in retrospect I should have realised that he had his finger on the pulse, for not only does he have much more experience of sectarian marches, but through his job he knows many of the people who were involved and has an unusual insight and sympathy for those people who most Dubliners write off as 'scumbags' and 'knackers'. This article is an analysis of what happened and why almost everybody got it so wrong. This article is a companion piece to the photo essay which I published yesterday.

A 13 minute video of the rioting in Dublin is now available on the global indymedia video site. You can download it by clicking here or by visiting the global indymedia website at video.indymedia.org. The file is made with the xvid codec and mp3 audio. It is approximately 100 MB in size, you will require a broadband connection to view it.