Hundreds of protesters gathered at the Garden of Remembrance, Dublin, on Saturday afternoon to stand in solidarity with the people of Gaza, Lebanon and Iran and to call for Ireland’s neutrality to be protected.
A three-year-old girl on the march wore a T-shirt bearing the words “Kids Against Genocide” as she held her mother’s hand and her Barbie before being all but swallowed up by Palestinian flags, placards calling for an end to the conflict in the Middle East and condemning wars of occupation.
“From Ukraine to Palestine occupation is a crime. Neither Moscow nor Washington,” read one banner held by protesters. Others loudly condemned US president Donald Trump and Israel’s leader, Binyamin Netanyahu.
Sandra McKeever from Drogheda, a member of the Louth For Neutrality organisation, said she felt compelled to attend “to save” Irish neutrality.
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“We voted against the Nice Treaty. We voted against the Lisbon Treaty twice. We made our feelings clear to the governments at the time and they responded by introducing the Triple Lock,” she told The Irish Times. “And now the Government feels that they can just abandon that without a referendum.”
The Triple Lock is the State’s “mechanism” that must be used before Irish troops can be deployed on overseas peacekeeping missions. It guarantees that no more than 12 Irish soldiers can be sent into battle zones without the permission of the Government, the Dáil and the United Nations.
Jim Roche, from the Irish Anti-War Movement, said the aim of the march was “to draw attention to the fact that the Government is trying to weaken Irish neutrality and is in its collusion with wars. It is colluding with apartheid genocidal Israel. It is colluding with Trump’s wars in Iran through the facilitation of US military at Shannon Airport”.
He called on Ireland to mirror the “robust” response from the Spanish government to the present conflict in the Middle East. “Ireland should be leading the charge against these warmongers,” Roche said.
Among the protesters was People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy, who said the aim of the protest was to highlight the “immorality” the war in the Middle East and to demonstrate that public opinion continued to be in support of Irish neutrality and against the scrapping of the triple lock.
“This is a protest against Trump and Israel’s wars in the Middle East, against the price that all of us are paying for those wars. Obviously the most horrific price is being paid by the Palestinians, the Iranians, the Lebanese people, but people across the world being asked to pay the price for them in terms of increased prices,” he said.
The Dublin South-West TD said the scrapping of the Triple Lock had “been the agenda for a long time”.
“What we have on our side is public opinion. It is firmly in favour of neutrality, but there is a battle to be fought. People have voted for this on two occasions in terms of the Lisbon Treaty and the Nice Treaty, so at the very least people should be given a choice and allowed to decide with a referendum,” Murphy said.
