CITY RIOTS - FEATURE IN INDO - JOE AGAIN

Saturday May 11, 2002 14:14

by blisset

The garda reaction to last Monday's Dublin demo shocked the public and placed a spotlight on previously almost anonymous activists. GEMMA O'DOHERTY meets one of their leaders

CITY RIOTS

The new voice from the streets

The garda reaction to last Monday's Dublin demo shocked the public and placed a spotlight on previously almost anonymous activists. GEMMA O'DOHERTY meets one of their leaders

It's early afternoon on a Wednesday in Dublin and the city's streets are already paralysed by traffic gridlock. From a bar on the corner of Westland Row, a young bearded man gazes at the chaos, a cynical frown etched across his face.

Out of nowhere a blue Volvo swerves into the bus lane, hitting the side of the kerb. An elderly pedestrian who had been close to the edge trying to cross loses her balance and falls to the ground. The Volvo roars on, its driver seemingly unaware of the harm he has caused. The human bundle lying on the dusty street is left to pick herself up.

The young man gasps at the scene unfolding before him. "Look at that. That is exactly the sort of thing we are talking about, this is the sort of world we are trying to change. Cars are taking over our lives and nobody cares."

Last week, Joe Carolan was an anonymous activist dividing his time between English language teaching and demonstrating on the streets of Dublin about the numerous causes that keep him awake at night. Sellafield, Palestine, Indonesian sweat shops, Third World debt, the housing crisis, racism, globalisation.

He and his co-protesters were the sort who were ridiculed by mainstream society as layabout hippies who came four decades too late. With their futile Saturday marches up and down O'Connell Street and their non-conformist way of life, they were 'rebels without a cause who didn't realise they had it so good'.

One week on, Carolan is enjoying a rather different image. The events of last Monday have elevated him to the status of virtual hero among his peers and brought him a whole new cohort of fans, most of them part of the vast constituency of 20-somethings who won't go near a polling booth next Friday. He has roused a section of disillusioned youth from its slumber, become their voice, and said exactly what they wanted to hear. No one would push them off their streets! No one would take away their rights! No one would tell them what to do!

In the mayhem of last Monday, this soft-spoken 31-year-old from the Cooley Peninsula (who escaped injury) became the self-appointed spokesman of the Irish protest movement, a movement which now sees itself as a force to be reckoned with. Almost overnight, his group, Globalise Resistance, has become a household name; its website receiving hundreds of hits this week, enquiring about membership. "I wouldn't normally be the type to go out and protest," the messages tend to say. "After last Monday, I am."

Bloody Monday, as Carolan calls it, was one of the worst days in his life. But in some ways it could turn out to be one of his best. The Garda reaction that shocked the nation coupled with the fact that the follow-up protest on Thursday resulted in zero retaliation from the 2,000 who took part has catapulted the activist community to the moral high ground.

Not only has it raised their profile, but it has given them a respectability among those who previously dismissed them as left-wing loonies who spent their time outside McDonalds restaurants eating veggie burgers. Now they have an audience and it couldn't have come at a better time.

"Ordinary people have shown us a huge degree of solidarity," says Carolan. "They have come to us and said 'how dare they do that to you on our streets'. They see this sort of raw oppression in faraway places, or in Northern Ireland from time to time when the RUC have got out of hand, but they don't want to see it in their own city. Monday raised huge questions for people not just about some individuals in the Gardai but about the very nature of the force and whether they can trust it any more. They say they will come out and join us on the streets from now on to put it to the test.

"Look back at history. When the likes of Martin Luther King and Gandhi or even Irish civil rights demonstrators in the 60s were met with police brutality because they were trying to change the world, they gained huge support. Rank and file workers like nurses and teachers fear they'll be next. They are saying 'if they get away with what they did to you, we're next in line. Will they baton charge us on the picket lines?"'

Carolan believes the defining moment that politicised many of his generation of activists was the X case, which took him to the streets for the first time at the age of 21.

"That was the straw that broke the camel's back. My generation came out and said 'you cannot deprive a 14-year-old girl of her human rights.'

"It's nearly 10 years to the day, but 10,000 people came out to protest during the X case and they ended up letting her go. That showed me that people power does work."

Carolan, an English graduate from Coleraine University, was among the 100 Irish protesters who went to the Italian city of Genoa for the G8 summit last year. He believes the public reaction to police brutality there, which resulted in the death of a 23-year-old protester, will be echoed in this country.

"If you look at the oppression that was used by the Italian government. We were tear-gassed, baton-charged, water-cannoned. It was absolutely terrifying. Then they shot Carlo Giuliani dead and drove a truck over him. That galvanised everyone around Italy and the protest movement over there has grown hugely as a result. There was a general strike last month involving three million people. The events of Monday will have a similar effect here.

"There's a growing constituency in Ireland that's looking beyond the establishment mainstream parties the Ireland that voted No to the Nice Referendum, to increasing militarisation, to the erosion of our democracy.

"As young people grow more frustrated with mainstream politics, the Irish protest movement is expected to flourish in the coming years. Disparate groupings are coming together and consolidating, realising that unless they are organised, they will not achieve anything: angry cyclists like those involved in Reclaim the Streets and Critical Mass (two groups campaigning for more urban space), young middle class socialists who call themselves the new poor because they can't afford a place to live, anti-racist groups on a mission to stop prejudice against immigrants in its tracks. Despite the variety of causes, one philosophy unites them all that capitalism is past its sell-by date.

"As they watch multinationals turn their backs on this country and move on to cheaper pastures, they can't help saying we told you so.

"People are realising that we are not wide-eyed lunatics but that what we have been saying is coming to pass.

"All across Europe, directives are coming from on high to crack down on the anti-globalisation movement because they see that ordinary people are starting to listen to us.

'In this country, we have given huge tax breaks to big multinationals, then they suit themselves and up and leave. There is a huge amount of wealth floating around at the moment, yet people my age can't get a house and are having to pay exorbitant rents in the private sector. These are the sort of people who have had enough and believe there has to be another way."

Already this year, several new activist bodies have been spawned, including a student environmental group called Gluaiseacht (Movement) whose main focus is the Sellafield campaign.

"There is still apathy out there, and young people still need to be spoonfed information," says Ciara Fitzgerald, a student of English at UCD and founder member of the group. "But we are making noise and getting our point across that this planet is going to self-destruct if we continue the way we are going."

Buoyed by their new-found support, Ireland's protesters are gearing up for the Seville EU summit in June, to which several hundred plan to travel. The summit is expected to witness the largest anti-globalisation demonstrations to date and any political progress that happens within it will almost certainly be overshadowed by activity on the streets.

Carolan will be a part of the protests, but when he returns he and his group plan to become a more visible presence on the streets of Ireland.

"You can use elections as a way of getting the ideas across, but it's when grassroots movements come on to the streets that you really bring about change.

"Why did women get the vote? Why was segregation abolished in the southern states of America? Why were trade unions legalised? Because people went out in their masses in other generations and won these rights for people. Our aim is to do the same and create the new sort of world we want."

Gemma O'Doherty