Ken Loach supports Pitstop Ploughshares + Updates

international | anti-war / imperialism | news report Wednesday June 21, 2006 12:17 by PSP'er - PSP

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Ken Loach supports Pitstop Ploughshares + Updates

While in Cork attending the Premiere of his award-winning film ˜The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Director Ken Loach and screen writer Paul Laverty expressed their support for five peace activists. The five, Deirdre Clancy, Nuin Dunlop, Karen Fallon , Ciaron O'Reilly and Damien Moran, await their third trial in Dublin in July. They face charges arising from the disabling of a US war plane en route to Iraq at Shannon Airport in February 2003.

In response to the question ˜what do you have to say to the Irish people on the role of Shannon in the Iraq war", Ken Loach stated that "we are all implicated, Britain by having troops there and Ireland by providing facilities for warplanes and personnel at Shannon."

Screenwriter of the Wind that Shakes the Barley, Paul Laverty issued the following statement:

"I've always wondered what damage a 10 pound hammer would do to the delicate instruments of a plane, apart from the odd dent it must complicate the circuitry.

I've seen the effect of a 1000lb bomb on a little girl in Iraq who wore a lilac dress. She was on the front page of a Spanish newspaper, El Mundo. Her traumatised father pulled her from the rubble. Her right leg dangled behind the knee from two stubborn sinews. No doubt she died in agony, along with another 100,000 civilians according to the Lancet Report, in the first 18 months of the war.

And yet, to wield a hammer to a war-plane carries a sentence of ten years in an Irish prison. To drop a thousand pound bomb on civilians carries no consequences at all.

For every blow of that hammer to the blunt nose of an inanimate object a thousand delicate complex individuals were blown to bits by Western bombs.

I'd like to thank Deirdre, Nuin, Karen, Ciaron and Damien for engaging our imagination and reminding us of alternative uses for ordinary household items.

Just think what we coud do with a toilet brush."

Paul Laverty, Screenwriter, Wind that shakes the Barley, 20th June. Cork.

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