Opinion: Protest is democratic, but tactics of fear and intimidation are not

A REPUBLIC is no longer a republic if democracy does not matter. Democracy stops mattering if the right to dissent, and to protest, is not protected, if the rights of minorities are ignored, if government does not listen to the people. A republic stops being a republic the day fear is used to manipulate public discourse.

I’ve participated in many protests. I’ve carried placards and banners, handed in “letters of protest”, and generated as much publicity as I could for the causes of the protests. I’ve walked with thousands of people and sometimes with a tiny few.

And I’ve seen people I worked with being the object of protests. I remember Barry Desmond, when he was minister for health in the 1980s, having to run a gauntlet of angry demonstrators in Carlow. I remember Dick Spring and Garret FitzGerald facing protests over all sorts of things — from local authority charges to changes in Anglo-Irish relations.