Beneath the barricades

“I’m completely against planes being landed at Shannon. One of our sons worked in Baghdad for a lot of years in the hospital there, we know all about it. We’re completely against this annihilation of people.”

So says 83-year-old Valentine Stokes, explaining why she joined the anti-war demonstrations outside Leinster House on Wednesday April 2, accompanied by members of her family. She came away from that demonstration shaken and having suffered bruises and scrapes as a result of what she alleges was rough handling by Gardai.

“It was a lovely evening, there was no aggro or shouting or anything,” she told Hot Press. “We were just chanting, there were about three or four hundred people. We were leaning on the barricades facing the gates of Leinster House.”

According to Ms Stokes, the demonstration passed without incident until a number of police attempted to move the protestors away from the barriers.

“Suddenly this big Garda came first,” she said, “there were others behind him in a line, but this big fellow said, ‘Move away from the barricades.’ I looked back to see where could we move to, and there were just streams of people all behind us, hundreds, standing from there to the other side of the road, there was nowhere anyone could move.

“We were still standing there when he shoved the barricade right to me, because I was leaning on it. People were saying, ‘Don’t do that – there’s an old lady’, and my hat fell off, and I was thrown to the ground, and I’m tiny. I got the full force of the barrier; he was a big fellow. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. I could’ve been killed. I’ll never forget it. But I did go in and make a complaint this morning.”

As a result of her fall, Ms Stokes says she sustained bruising “all across my chest, down my arms and my knee, my knee was very sore, and a big chunk of skin pulled off my leg where it scraped off the ground.”

According to her son Pearse, who recorded the events on video, this incident immediately soured the atmosphere outside Leinster House.

“I got some pretty incriminating footage of a whole row of Guards being told to push their way through a crowd in order to make it easier for the Fianna Fail TD Sean Power to get his car out of the gates of Leinster House,” he says. “As soon as the Guards started to move, people shouted, ‘Look out, there’s an old lady in here’ and they just barged on. People came to her aid and so on, but it was that which set the tone for the whole rest of the evening at that place.

“You can see it on the video, for quite a number of moments afterwards you could see people were absolutely dazed, people in their 50s and 60s and so on, just standing around getting their breath back, quite shocked. But they clearly decided then they weren’t going to go.

“Five or ten minutes later then the riot squad were brought out of some vans where they had been waiting up the road, and they marched down carrying full-length top-to-toe shields, and that was such a psychological mistake for the Guards because the citizens were galvanised. That was when the sit-down protest really happened – nobody was going to go anywhere unless they were carried. My mother even wanted to go back and sit down and be arrested – she was absolutely fuming at the treatment. We suggested that she might retreat a little bit to the back for her own safety because she’d had a broken hip a few years ago. And I also gave the video camera to somebody to take it away because I didn’t want the Guards to confiscate it. That will be a very important part of her evidence.

“In the end then a stand-off developed, a number of politicians came out of the Dail – these would not include Fianna Fail politicians or PDs by the way – independents and so on. A certain amount of negotiation took place between the Gardai and the organisers of the protest, the Irish Anti-War Movement, they negotiated a truce as it were, and the riot squad were taken off the site altogether, leaving the uniformed Gardai. As the riot squad left there was really loud jeering and cries of ‘Shame’ repeatedly from the assembled masses and eventually the crowd accepted that and moved away.”