Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The most recent phase of conflict in the North began when civil rights protesters campaigning on matters such as equality in housing were beaten off the street by the Royal Ulster Constabulary, RUC back in the late 1960s. That produced 30 years of conflict. We all welcome the fact that an Agreement arose out of the fact that people in the North got sick of communal violence, demanded some sort of end to that violence and rejected paramilitary violence as a way to deal with the problem, and rightly so. However, it is worth reminding ourselves that the start of it all was repressive forces of the state attacking peaceful protesters who were not protesting on communal or even on nationalist lines. They were just campaigning for housing equality.

So it is a great irony when one sees the so-called peace dividend in the North manifesting itself in the most horrendous, deliberately intimidatory security operation around the forthcoming visit of the G8 to Fermanagh where, incredibly, drone planes that are used to kill innocent people in Afghanistan will be deployed in the North to monitor protestors who will protest against the militarist agenda of G8 and its failure to deal with issues such as global poverty. There is a concerted campaign to bully and intimidate those peaceful protesters including the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Friends of the Earth, War on Want, Trócaire and a host of other civil and political organisations which are campaigning against global poverty and militarism.

Incredibly 2,500 police are being drafted in from Britain for the operation. In an unprecedented move, courts will be opened on Sundays. This is against a background where the Democratic Unionist Party, DUP will not even allow children's playgrounds to open on Sundays because we must keep holy the Sabbath day, apparently. However it is all right to have special openings of courts to deal with protesters, as they are suggesting they are going to do, and prepare cells to arrest hundreds of protesters in a deliberate attempt to discourage, bully and intimidate people who want to do nothing more than engage in peaceful protest around the visit of the G8. That is a disgrace and is the sort of thing that led to the conflict in the North in the first place, and we should be protesting about it down here.

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