Anti-war protests defended

One of five anti-war protestors charged with damaging a United States of America aircraft at Shannon Airport in February 2003 described their actions as "disarmament in a non-violent and legal way", a jury at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court has heard.

When interviewed by gardaí shortly after the incident on February 3, 2003, Mr Ciaran O’Reilly, an Australian national living in Dublin and working with homeless people, told gardaí that what they were doing was "a systematic cover-up of the deaths of one and a half million Iraqi children".