Knitting for Peace at Shannon

clare | anti-war | news report Saturday January 10, 2009 13:19 by Margaretta D'Arcy - Women Knit for Peace margarettadarcy at gmail dot com

10 Hours in sub-zero weather

Nollaig na nBan, 6th January: in sub-zero conditions women (and some men) kept alive the tradition of the Shannon Airport Women’s Peace Camp.

The annual Women’s Peace Camp was started by Mary Kelly and myself in 2003 just before the invasion of Iraq. This year we did something different, spurred on a few weeks earlier by Fiona Wheeler as we were standing on the airport roundabout for our regular second-Sunday-of-the-month vigil. “Why don’t we,” she asked, “have a knitting circle?” Most of us hadn’t knitted for years. A son of one of the women sneered, “I didn’t think that women were to ‘get out of the house’ only to knit.” But the more one reflected, the more the symbolism took hold: to knit is to mend, to unite, to concentrate one’s thoughts. It was banned in parts of Denmark as being too subversive, “wool-gathering” men called it. It was also the grimly-significant activity of the women who sat under the guillotine knitting their enemies’ names into the fabric as the heads rolled into the basket...
We sat there with our needles, conscious that it was a working day and that we were right in the hub of the Shannon Free Zone, the underbelly of an insidious war machine where companies produce the dual-purpose primarily-military armament components (helped along with grants from us tax-payers), where US troops pass through on their way to war, where manacled prisoners have been transported to torture, where the Gardaí are paid overtime to protect the war from the likes of us, where their pensions will eventually derive from investments in the war machine itself.
So I sat for ten hours, warmed by Fiona’s wood-fired brazier, fed by her hot soup, busy in my own thoughts as I knitted: I considered the questions of who we are, what are we doing, how is our country governed, with all its double-dealings, hypocrisies and corruptions? We felt in touch with the nightmare happenings in Gaza as news came in of the children herded ‘into safety’ by the Israeli army and then slaughtered; Conor Cregan rang us from Hebron; Ed Horgan told us about his invitation to Obama’s inauguration and how he had been initially refused a visa because of the fears of Homeland Security.
We were in the right place for a check on reality. The world condemns Israel for killing civilians, and yet there we were at the entrance to a civilian airport which has now become a military one. Why are we allowing this? We who are civilians must take back our civilian space. A surreal image came to mind as we knitted in the firelight: a huge woollen blanket made of small pieces of knitwear from thousands of women (and men too), sewn together in all their different colours to be thrown over the whole of Shannon, reclaiming our airport, a blanket to blank out the military, a huge soft cloud descending from the heavens: all we need are knitters. Any volunteers?