Ghosts were out in force at the weekend.
Saturday was a day of strange echos of my past.
Went to the Refugee Council AGM in Dublin, in a trade union hall on Parnell Square.
The meeting itself was boring until it came to the guest speaker. He was a former refugee from El Salvador, head of the Canadian refugee protection organisation. Canada has one of the best refugee protection schemes in the world but it's still, in his words, 'the most complicated system, not in the world but in the universe'.
Echo 1, I've spent more hours than I care to recall at boring meetings in trade union premises in Parnell sq. I've heard magical speakers, who can evoke a different world, there too.
When we left the meeting the anti-war protest was making it's way down the road. Trade union bands, and socialist workers party posters, and 'anarchists' in black boilersuits and masks. (Here is a hint to the guy in the third row. There is no point in wearing a mask over your face if you have a very dramatic multi-coloured mohican hairdo!) The new Ireland was there in force too, it was good to see a group of veiled muslim women in the protest. Anti-war campaigners come in all cultures, shapes and sizes and learn to respect each other.
Echo 2, I've marched and sang in many of Dublin's protests in the past. Many were justified, some were nonsense, such as the current bin tax protest.
Posters on lamposts invited people to the 20th anniversery commeration of Seamus Costello's death.
Gerry Adams was signing his book in Eason's. There was a big crowd waiting and he had a fixed smile on his face as he greeted and signed. He would have found it easier facing a British patrol on the Springfield road in the height of the troubles I believe. It's good though, yet another sign that the war is in the past.
Echo 3, I walked a short distance on that road once. Fortunately I never did anything that I seriously regretted, but that was a matter of luck, not anything else.
Yes, there was as many ghosts as Ulster football supporters in O'Connell st on Saturday.
posted by Carigeen at Monday, September 29, 2003
