August 14th 2012
Emerging
from cavernous Croke Park at around nine o’clock last Sunday evening, all the All-Ireland
hurling semi-final work for the Irish Examiner tucked up and put to bed (that’s
‘tucked’ up!), I was heading to my car when hailed by a guy along the way. He had
been there for a while he told me, waiting for me to emerge, knowing I would
have to pass where he was parked because he had noted my car further on with
all the ‘Ballyhea Says No To Bondholder Bailout’ stickers.
He
was waiting so he could apologise, apologise for a remark he had made several
hours earlier when passing our little group as we were getting our picture
taken in front of Croke Park, having marched from the Garden of Remembrance.
It
wasn’t his true form, he explained, wasn’t his true feeling either; far from
disparaging what we were doing he respected us, even supported us in principle.
I accepted the apology of course, fully and without reservation.
Truth
be told, though I had heard the comments and noted the speaker it hadn’t
bothered me, not in the slightest. Over the last 76 weeks those of us who have
been marching every week in protest at the extortion of tens of billions of
euro from us by EU/ECB have become used to every kind of criticism, have become
inured to every kind of disparaging remark.
This
isn’t to say we’ve become pros at this protesting lark – far from it. We’re all
so far out of our comfort-zones now that we’re going to need assimilation
courses to get back to normality when all this is finally over. Many times over
the past 16 months my guts have been in knots as I waited for our next move to
unfold – sit-down protests on the main Cork/Limerick road, Run To The Dáil, a
week-long bread-and-water fast, the ECB HQ protest in Frankfurt. Last Sunday in
Dublin was no exception.
Unable
to make the Ballyhea protest because of the All-Ireland hurling semi-final in Croke
Park (for those who don’t know, I work for the sport section of the Irish
Examiner), I had decided at the last minute to bring a branch of the protest to
Dublin, meet at the Garden of Remembrance at 11.30am, the same time they were
meeting in Ballyhea, then set off at noon for Croke Park. At that appointed
hour, I can tell ye, 11.30am, the Garden of Remembrance was a hell of a lonely
place!
A
few people did turn up, and I'm so grateful to them – so should be the whole
country. We marched, got a lot of bemused looks, a few shouts of support, and
yes, some disparaging words. But in spite of it all we march, because we know,
now more than ever, that our cause is just.
At
the end of June and to much fanfare, our media proclaimed a great deal for Ireland
– the Eurozone leaders had met and from that summit was issued a statement which
began with these immortal words: ‘We affirm that it is imperative to break the
vicious circle between banks and sovereigns.’ This is an admission that the
policy which had been forced on Ireland hadn’t worked, had in fact seen us
caught in this ‘vicious circle between banks and sovereigns’.
In
the next few weeks, to absolutely no fanfare, that vicious circle continues, a
€600,000,000 bond from Anglo on September 3rd, then a billion-euro bond – yes,
that’s €1,000,000,000, would fund a lot of gold medals – on October 1st,
this one from AIB. We own both those banks, that’s our money, and this scandal
is still going on.
That’s
why we march, that’s why we risk derision, even from our own friends and neighbours.
We don’t ‘cod’ ourselves about either our size or our impact but neither do we
care; some day everyone else will awaken to what the EU/ECB is doing to us, the people
of this little nation. It's not just wrong, it's not just bullying, it's criminal; it is extortion, it is larceny, it is blackmail, tens of billions of public funds (€69.6bn so far) being diverted to bail out failed private banks and their failed private bondholders. It’s
a crime being perpetrated by the EU/ECB against one of its smallest member
states at a time when that state is at its most vulnerable.
This
Sunday, Aug 19th 2012, we’ll meet again at the Garden of Remembrance, 11.30am, in solidarity
with the march back home in Ballyhea and Charleville, and we’ll march again, at
noon, to Croke Park. We wouldn't mind a few extra with us, however, wouldn't mind
at all!
Regards,
Diarmuid O'Flynn.
