The day Ireland stood up, but couldn't be counted

Excitable reporting of the 'storming' of the Dáil meant that the nature of Tuesday's protest – and its size – were misrepresented, writes PAUL CULLEN

DAVID CAMERON was being unveiled as the new British prime minister on Tuesday night when Sky News interrupted its coverage to tell viewers that the Dáil had been invaded. “Bid to storm Irish parliament foiled,” stated the ever excitable broadcaster, over some shaky footage of shouting demonstrators and baton-wielding gardaí jousting at the gates of Leinster House.

The BBC also gave the story a run – “Protesters storm Irish parliament” – and it must have looked to the eyes of the world that Ireland was following the example of Greece in stoutly and even violently opposing the cutbacks imposed as part of the financial bailouts in their respective countries. Sky attempted to find a link between Kildare Street and Athens, while the marchers themselves drew inspiration from their Hellenic counterparts, at one point chanting “Acropolis Now!”

Paul Doran, a former Sinn Féin activist who was part of the small group who tried to rush past gardaí through the half-open gate to the Dáil, certainly felt he had taken part in an heroic event.

"I thought history was in the making and that the Irish people had risen. We were going to be like the Greeks," he told Joe Duffy on Livelinethe following day. "Maybe it was 1916 all over again."

All of which goes to show that the camera can lie – or at least mislead – and that that the worst place to gain perspective is in the midst of the action. It might have seemed to the world’s television viewers that the Irish people were revolting again, but the reality was somewhat different. The march – promoted by the Right to Work campaign, an umbrella group of people seen before at similar events, and other organisations, along with some newer faces – was a small affair and the attempted storming of the Dáil was a tiny one.

The organisers claimed that more than 2,000 people took part in the march; The Irish Timesput the numbers at 800, while RTÉ and the Irish Independenttook their cue from the Garda estimate of just 500.

The counting of crowd numbers is an inexact, sometimes vexed science, but in a march as small as this, one wonders why closer agreement on the figures cannot be reached. Whatever the real numbers, though, this was still niche-market protesting.

As for those who tried to gain access to Leinster House, video footage clearly shows a breakaway group of no more than 30, many of them holding red Socialist Worker flags, moving towards and seemingly past the Kildare Street entrance. At this point, some of the group veered left and tried to rush the handful of gardaí manning the entrance. Others in the group barrelled in behind and, soon, up to 100 marchers had detached themselves from the main protest and were cheering their support.

The gardaí, some of them women and some wearing bicycle helmets, struggled to resist the surge from the crowd and two raised their batons. After a few minutes, they managed to link arms and eventually to close the gate. Within minutes, the hullabaloo had come to an end. Several protesters and gardaí emerged with minor injuries, including 61-year-old former midwife and Socialist Workers Party activist Mary Smith, who said she’d been hit on the head by a baton-wielding garda.

Hardbitten journalists didn't share in the collective over-reaction. RTÉ, in its report, referred to "unruly scenes" and scuffles outside the Dáil, while The Irish Timesdescribed the events as a "disturbance". Veteran broadcaster Vincent Browne, who devoted most of his TV3 show to the protest, judged the alleged "storming" of the national parliament to be "harmless" and claimed that most of those present were just looking at what was going on up front. It was "reasonable enough" for the gardaí to raise their batons in the circumstances, he averred.

All this hardly bears comparison to events in Greece, where three people, including a pregnant woman, lost their lives when a bank was firebombed during a protest last week. Yet it could be a foretaste of what is to come if the march organisers get their way and are joined by ordinary folk outraged at the continuing bailout of the banks.

“The time for polite discussion is gone,” one of the speakers told the march. “The time for polite argument is gone. Now is the time for civil disobedience.”

In Mary Smith’s view, the charge on the Dáil gates was legitimate because “the way the most vulnerable in Ireland are being made to pay for the sins of the rich requires drastic remedies”.

In the days after the protest, left-leaning bloggers and twitterati typed excitedly about mounting a general strike, but whether any of them could be bothered to step away from their keyboards to organise one remained in question.

And while the violence garnered plenty of headlines it also served to cause a rift in the nascent protest movement. Jeannette Byrne, of Patients Together, a speaker at the rally, spoke of her anger the following day that a peaceful protest had been tarnished by the actions of a small minority following a pre-determined plan.

Another speaker, Irish Timescolumnist and assistant editor Fintan O'Toole, had left before the march arrived at Kildare Street but expressed the view that the march had been responsibly and lightly policed.

In Greece, mass protests have declined in fervour and numbers since the deaths of the three bank workers. It seems likely that this week’s scuffles on Kildare Street may have a similar chilling effect on the protest movement here. We’ll find out next Tuesday, when another march is planned.