Mica protest moves to its own drumbeat
Some estimates put the size of the protest at 10,000. Picture: Gareth Chaney/Collins Photos
Mike McSweeney was never on a protest before. He can remember the tax marches in the 1980s, and he didn’t even turn out then. But he was on the protest on Friday along with four fellow members of the Limerick Pyrite Action Group.
They were completely outnumbered by their kindred spirits from Donegal, but they stood in the shadow of the Custom House in Dublin’s city centre, foretelling that things are going to get a lot worse.
“The pensioners when they marched in 2009 showed what can be done so I thought it was time I got involved,” he said.
Some estimates put the size of the protest at 10,000. They congregated at the Garden of Remembrance on Parnell Square and set off for the Custom House, where Housing Minister Darragh O’Brien has his office. Down onto O’Connell Street they poured, moving with a determined step. Chants rippled back through the procession. “What do we want? 100%. When do we want it? Now.”
Halfway along, eight big drums kept up a beat, a slow rumble that sent out an ominous message. This was political power on the move. Donegal may be tucked away in the north-west corner of the island, but the mica issue has galvanised tight-knit communities, particularly those on the Innishowen peninsula.
A message was being transmitted to the capital, from the go-slow on the M50 on Friday morning, down the city’s main thoroughfare and onto the seat of parliament. This time it’s for real.
There were mica sweatshirts and tee-shirts and baseball hats and face masks; mica posters and placards and banners and signs. And they were all after the full monty, 100% redress. If you had arrived from Mars you might think mica was a football team and its supporters always gave 100%.
Apart from the preponderance of Donegal green and gold GAA jerseys, there was a smattering of colours, representing counties reaching down the west coast, from Mayo and Sligo and our delegation from Limerick.
Mike McSweeney reckons we don’t know the half of it when it comes to defective blocks in his county. “There was a bad frost back a few years and the cracks began to appear,” Mike, from Loughill, said.
“After that, we got an engineer out but there is no [redress] scheme in Limerick and you can drive a four-inch nail into the blocks in the wall. That’s how far gone they are.”
Ann Ryan from Askeaton came to the first protest on the issue last June, but she has seen little progress. “There is a pyrite scheme for foundations but not for defective blocks,” she said. “I have it and my brother down the road has it also. We have to get movement on this.”
Moving around in front of Ann beside the hydraulic trailer that acted as a stage was Paddy Diver, Mr Mica himself.
Diver has, by common consensus, done trojan work to highlight the problem. He was carrying half a four-inch block presumably to demonstrate to somebody how it crumbles like cake.
A few minutes earlier, he did the warm-up act on stage, and at one point the stage was raised high over the Liffey to unfurl another banner and let Paddy look down on his people.
“Paddy Diver for president,” somebody shouted when he stepped down.
Other speakers, most prominently a succession of local politicians, followed. They all want the same thing and they want it now. Many of them referred to Dara Ó Briain, describing him as the Minister for Housing, but of course that man is a comedian.
Maybe it was the influence of the Donegal Gaeltacht that prompted the Irish version of the minister’s name or maybe a lot of people do mix him up with a comedian.
Whether in English or Irish, the minister is expected to deliver his verdict within the next two weeks on whether the new redress scheme will cover 100% of costs for the stricken homeowners.
At the back of the stage, Martina Hegarty wasn’t finding it funny. She is from Crossmalina, Co Mayo, and was one of 19 people who were initially turned down by the local authority for inclusion in the scheme.
“We won on appeal but my home has to be demolished,” she said. “Every room in the house has cracks in it now. When it is demolished I will have to start from scratch, get an architect, drawings, planning, the whole thing. That’s what so many of the people here are left with now.”
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