IT LOOKED like just another Easter Rising commemoration with a booming oration of the 1916 Proclamation in front of a small, windswept crowd. But yesterday’s ceremony in Dublin’s Arbour Hill had one crucial difference.
“In the name of the markets and not of the dead generations from whom she receives her old tradition of nationhood,” bellowed actor Donal O’Kelly, reading from a reworked proclamation script, “Ireland, through us, summons her children to our interests and strikes for her enslavement to debt!”
The event, organised by social justice lobby group Afri, was aimed at highlighting the erosion of economic sovereignty and ways of resisting further austerity measures.
Spokesman Joe Murray said the debt burden and its implications for independence meant Easter was an apt time for an alternative proclamation.
“When you look at the original Proclamation, it was a visionary statement about our ideal republic,” he said. “And now look at the sorry state we’re in. We wanted to show the chasm that exists between those ideals and the position we now find ourselves in.” He said the erosion of democracy satirised in Afri’s version of the proclamation could be resisted if we were to learn from other countries who had successfully done so.
O’Kelly, a member of Afri, read out the reworked document in the guise of a “faceless bondholder”, wearing a pinstripe suit and painted face.
His oration continued: “Having disorganised and demobilised her spirit through her clandestine nexus of bankers and property developers, and through her open political organisations, having patiently perfected her corruption, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal ourselves, we now seize that moment, and, through the IMF and the EU, but relying in the first on her own weakness, we strike in full confidence of victory.
“We declare the right of senior bondholders to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible.
“The long usurpation of that right by the Irish people and Government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by their repudiation of the bank debt.”
