sirenianshores

Dublinblog is reporting that the hunger strike has now ended

The hunger strike has ended peacefully. All the protestors have left the Cathedral. The Gardai first removed the 8 minors who agreed to leave voluntarily around 10pm. In the last hour they removed the adults, they did not resist. The adults will now be brought before the district court tonight where they will face criminal charges on public order offences.

Pictures of the events outside the Cathedral, including yesterdays protests, can be found here.
Pictures from the inside the cathedral can be found here.

Internation media reports can bee seen here and here.

By my estimate, about 250-300 attended the solidarity protests with about 2 dozen or so counter demonstrators. The majority of the of the feedback from the people on the street seemed postive towards the Afghan asylum seekers, but there is a significant core of people who despise what they are doing and are in favour of the idea of sending the asylum seekers ‘back to where they came from’ and that we should ‘take care of our own first’. All very ironic when you consider Irelands long history of immigration, it’s current rich status and the fact that last week was the 25th anniversary of our own hunger strikers.

In any society there is also going to be a certain percentage of people who will be xenophobic or racist no matter what. There was a guy attending who appeared to be organising the counter protesters. Pictures of him here and here (standing in the middle). There a rumour going round that he was an English chap with links to the BNP. But I’ve seen no conclusive proof of that. As immigration becomes more of an issue in Ireland, we will no doubt see more of his kind come crawling out of the woodwork. Perhaps the BNP will seek to start up a sister party over here. Time will tell I suppose. Having said that, I think there recent news headlines about our shambolic health service have had an effect. That combined with the anger felt by the marginalised sections of our society who feel the Celtic Tiger has passed them by may have created a climate which is unsympethetic to the hunger strikers. As one young counter-protestor from the inner city said: his mum had to wait on a trolley in a hospital corridor for hours to be seen by doctors, while the Afghans on hunger strike received immediate attention on the form of an ambulance with paramedics when he fell ill. Perhaps that is a rather simplistic argument given the circumstances of the asylum seekers. But their anger is heartfelt, although misdirected. Their anger should really be focused at our government, who if they were capable of running the country competently, should be able to provide any adequate health services for both its own native population and the relatively small numbers of Asylum seekers who come here.

A contributing factor to some people’s negative views of the hunger strikers has been the media coverage of the events, which has been generally poor with either sparse covereage or else with a very pro-government / anti-immigrant bias. The media has been reporting that one of the protesters is the nephew of a former cabinet minister in the Taliban government in Afghanistan. The minister split from the government when he spoke out against the destruction of the Buddist statues which the Taliban destroyed in 2001. Consequently, he faced death threats from his former colleagues. Another reason for the lack of sympathy may be to do with the backlash from the Mohammad cartoon protests which are still fresh in peoples minds.