Protest highlights Ireland’s role in the Gaza slaughter
Demonstrators call for military planes to be inspected at Shannon
By Ciaran Tierney
A civilian airport on the west coast of Ireland, overlooking the body of water where Ireland’s biggest river meets the Atlantic Ocean, might seem to be an unusual location for a major anti-war protest to take place on a Sunday afternoon.
But, then again, Shannon is no ordinary airport.
Ireland may be officially a “neutral” country, but for the past 23 years, since the immediate aftermath of 9/11, US military planes and planes contracted to the US military have been using Shannon as a refuelling stop for warplanes.
Monthly protests have been taking place here for more than 20 years.
But the protests have taken on a greater urgency, and attracted greater interest, over the 11 months since Israel began its latest war on Gaza, which has now taken more than 41,000 Palestinian lives.
As Palestinians were taking bodies out of the rubble in Gaza, following the latest bombing of the tiny strip, people from all over Ireland were making their way to Shannon for a major national rally on Sunday afternoon.
There were buses from Cork and Dublin, and private cars from all over Ireland, in the vicinity while a large cordon of the Irish police, the Garda Siochana, kept the protesters well away from the terminal building.
Just last week, investigative Irish website The Ditch established that eight Israeli planes had carried more than 57 tonnes of weaponry, in what ordinary Irish people view as a clear breach of Irish neutrality.
“This state is facilitating a genocide by allowing those flights fly over this country,” said Roman Shortall of The Ditch. “All that we did was provide the documentary evidence that proves that everything you have been saying at these protests is true.
“Munitions are being brought over this state. The state knows exactly what is on every cargo flight that flies over Ireland, but the Israelis cannot fire those bombs and missiles without these parts. They are coming over here, right over our heads. That is the part that our state is playing in the butchering of children in Gaza.”
Shannonwatch, who have been organising monthly protests outside the airport for two decades, have maintained records of US military planes landing and taking off from Shannon since 2001.
With more than 1,000 people present, representatives of Shannonwatch and the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) marched to the Garda line to hand in a letter to the head of the Irish police force.
They called on the Gardai to expect the planes on the runway at Shannon, which is a major transport hub for tourists visiting the West of Ireland.
According to Shannonwatch and the IPSC, no foreign military aircraft likely to be involved in the genocide in Gaza should be allowed to transit through Irish territory or airspace. The letter stated that appropriate actions needed to be taken to avoid complicity in the killing of tens of thousands of people in Gaza.
“Ireland has abandoned its neutrality to support US warmongering. These days we can see exactly what US weapons are being used for in Gaza. It is brutal, and Ireland should not be facilitating it in any way,” said a Shannonwatch spokesman.
Shannonwatch claim that hundreds of US military and military-contracted aircraft have passed through Shannon Airport or Irish airspace over the past 11 months. Flight records show that most of these aircraft have been going to and from the Middle East, and several have landed in Israel.
This has caused alarm among Irish people, given that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that there was a case of “plausible genocide” in Gaza in April of this year.
The issue of Shannon Airport being used by the US military was a cause of controversy in Ireland long before October of last year but, with member states of the United Nations obliged to avoid complicity with war crimes, the protests at Shannon have grown substantially over the past year.
The large group of Gardai prevented the protesters from approaching the terminal buildings and, after Edward Horgan of Shannonwatch handed over the letter, the protesters returned to a green area beside the approach road.
Women dressed in red and black held up shrouds, and baby shoes were laid out on the ground, in memory of the children of Gaza.
Horgan, who is now in his early 80s, has a respected background in the Irish military. He has been a peace activist for many years and made headlines in Ireland some years ago when he tried to inspect a US military plane as he was about to board a flight from Shannon to London.
He took legal action against the Irish state more than two decades ago, on the basis that the US military’s use of Shannon violated Ireland’s status as a neutral country.
“The Irish Government and its various ministers and officials are likely to be complicit in war crimes and genocide,” he said.
— * A digital journalist and Irish language planner based in Galway, Ireland, Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award. Find him on Facebook or Twitter here.
