Following three days of “heavy handed” dawn raids on the homes of Irish anti-austerity activists, a solidarity protest was held outside the Irish embassy in London on Wednesday.
The demonstration was organized after 11 Irish anti-water charges campaigners were arrested, detained and questioned by Irish police. The campaigners in question maintain they were arrested on spurious grounds.
Among those hauled into police custody were socialist TD (MP) Paul Murphy, and leftist Dublin-based councilors Mick Murphy and Kieran Mahon.
All three men are public representatives of Ireland’s Anti-Austerity Alliance, which has campaigned tirelessly against the Irish government’s debt repayment strategy to international and EU creditors.
Further anti-water charges campaigners arrested by Irish police included two boys aged 16 and 14. Ten officers were reportedly dispatched to arrest the 16 year-old, while six showed up at the remaining activists’ doors.
Irish MP Paul Murphy, who was hauled from his house at 7am on Monday morning by police, told RT the dawn arrests were “politically motivated,” and designed to intimidate Ireland’s wider anti-water charges movement.
He said the political maneuver demonstrated an alarming and unnecessary waste of police resources.
The socialist TD said the timing of the arrests, following the election victory of Greece’s leftwing Syriza party, is worth noting.
“We have an establishment that is scared, scared that the lessons of Greece will be learnt, that there is an alternative to austerity and the establishment parties can be ousted,” he argued.
“They focus that fear, correctly in my opinion, on the anti-water charges movement, which is the biggest movement of protest this state has seen in decades.”
Murphy said he was unsure who had orchestrated the arrests, but suggested the call may have come from the upper ranks of Ireland’s police force or the Irish government itself.
He argued the primary objective was to “criminalize the anti-water charges protests” to smear the political movement, and quietly quash dissent.
Wednesday’s protest outside the Irish embassy was organized by the Socialist Party of England and Wales.
Neil Cafferky, a member of the party, told RT the arrests of anti-austerity activists in Ireland were “blatant political policing” designed to undermine Ireland’s anti-water charges movement and wider political left.
UK campaigners gathered at the embassy and attempted to hand its staff a letter denouncing what they call the Irish government’s “blatant attack on the democratic right to protest.”
Protesters had informed the embassy of the letter prior to the demonstration. Embassy officials refused to accept it, however, while an RT cameraman remained on the scene.
They subsequently accepted the letter once the cameraman had left.
“The eviction of the RT cameraman from the embassy really does show that the Irish government is not at all comfortable with the scrutiny these arrests are attracting worldwide,” a spokesman for the protesters said.
The solidarity protest’s organizers told RT the continued persecution of political activists in Ireland will be “met with a wave of protest internationally.”
Demonstrators have gathered in multiple rallies in Ireland in recent days to protest what they call a politically motivated attempt to stamp out dissent.
Dublin’s recent wave of dawn arrests is not the first phase of alleged political policing to surface in Ireland.
On January 28, socialist TD Clare Daly was arrested for supposed drink driving. She was handcuffed outside her car, and subsequently brought into police custody.
Following official tests, it transpired she was well below the state’s legal alcohol limit. Although the incident was reported widely in Ireland’s press, her name was eventually cleared and no charges were brought against her.
The timing of Daly’s arrest is significant, according to Irish TD Paul Murphy.
He said the incident occurred while she was attempting to expose “a major scandal” in the Irish police force. The TD for Dublin South-West stressed Daly’s arrest was staged, whereby she was “handcuffed and pictures were leaked to the media.”
He said the arrest was a calculated move “to damage her publicly and diminish the allegations she was making about the police.”
Ireland’s Prime Minister Enda Kenny insists Irish police operate independently of the state’s government. Probed on the arrest and detainment of Anti-Austerity Alliance TD Paul Murphy, Kenny declined to comment.
As he made his way to a ministerial meeting, he said the issue was a matter for Irish police.
“They run their operations completely independent of Government,” he said.
Ireland’s Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Brendan Howlin, also dismissed allegations of political policing following the arrest of Murphy. Howlin said Ireland’s police force and prosecutorial system is autonomous from its government.
“I reject any notion of political interference with policing,” he said.
“The guards do their job as they see it in their own light independently. That’s the way independent proper functioning democracies works.”
Prior to this week’s arrests, a political meeting in Dublin held in solidarity with Greece’s newly elected government was monitored by two members of Ireland’s elite Special Branch police force.
Rising political dissent and tax evasion receive wildly differing responses from Irish police and prosecutors, according to Cafferky, a leading organizer of Wednesday’s protest.
“What a contrast to their attitude to the recent revelations of tax evasion by the super-rich, aided and abetted by HSBC, where Irish authorities will not even be investigating the matter,” he said.
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