Food Not Bombs in Galway under pressure - call for support

galway | rights, freedoms and repression | feature Wednesday July 18, 2007 18:28 by J - Food Not Bombs Galway 0851306097

Last Sunday 15th of July, Galway's Food Not Bombs collective got into trouble with local community warden T.J. for the second time. The first occasion was on the 13th of May in Eyre square, when warden T.J. came up and insisted on seeing a permit (which we didn't have). After a short discussion the event was wrapped up.

Next day we went to the city council to ask for official permission to hand out free food once a week. We were told that even if the council were to approve the setting up of a table every Sunday we would have to have public liability insurance for 6.4 million euro. As one of our principles is to accept only food donations, not money, this is of course impossible.

Other active groups in Galway operate weekly tables without any problems, so we decided to go on without the permit and had no trouble until last Sunday. This time the same community warden T.J. came up and started picking on us with ridiculous excuses. For example, when he started taking pictures of us, I took off my plastic gloves, grabbed my camera and took a picture of him. He then said that I was serving food without gloves and that this is against the food serving safety rules. I went around the corner to have a smoke, and the warden called me up. I came to him passing behind the table and he told me that I was smoking behind the food table and that's against the food serving safety rules again. Then he asked how we ensure that paper plates that we use for serving food won't be dumped around the town, because it doesn't mean a thing that we provide bin bags with clear signs – some people walk away with plates and they might dump them just on the street.

Community warden T.J. then told us that he had sent our photos to the Gardai and called them, also he informed the health and food safety commision that serious infringements were being commited and said they were coming to 'put us into serious trouble'. Being almost finished the food, we packed up. The community warden told us that he will make sure that we will not do this again.

So far we are looking for any advice from activists as to how can we reasonably continue our actions in a sustainable manner. Also we are working on getting support from local politicians, so that we can state their names if confronted by the Gardai.
(There is a by-law prohibiting the use of a table on the street, so maybe we can improvise in that regard.)

We invite everyone to come this Sunday at 2pm to Lynch's castle (Shop street by the A.I.B. bank), community support will be needed.