Cianan Brennan: Dublin protestors bend the truth for the disillusioned

A large crowd gathered at the anti-lockdown protest this afternoon at Herbert Park Dublin.

A strange atmosphere fell over Dublin for the oddest of St Patrick’s Days.

All day long the Garda helicopter circled overhead, from the city centre, to Ballsbridge, to RTÉ HQ in Montrose, and back again.

Garda vans were everywhere, gardaí in clusters on every corner, ready for a violent threat that ultimately didn’t emerge.

The protests seen two weeks ago didn’t manifest for a second time. Instead, the so-called ‘meeting of free spirits’ was decidedly low key.

Herbert Park in Ballsbridge in the south of the city, as expected, ended up being the focal point, at a protest chiefly organised by the Irish Freedom Party’s Dolores Cahill, a UCD academic.

Across the morning the city centre remained silent, a number of minor altercations notwithstanding, with Government Buildings and Dáil Eireann on full lockdown. 

Clearly, the heightened Garda presence had put paid to the notion of further violent scenes on top of what happened a fortnight ago, when 11 people were arrested.

Coming up to 2pm, a small crowd kept vigil at the Herbert Park bandstand amid a significant Garda presence. Then the numbers began to swell just as the numbers of gardaí in attendance were noticeably scaled back.

Clearly, the force was content to keep events confined to one non-violent area. Nevertheless, as more and more people gathered, the area remained defiantly mask-free.

Those who would talk had differing backgrounds and drives. All had one thing in common - they were very fed up indeed with Ireland’s Covid restrictions.

“I’m just completely sick and tired of lockdown,” said one woman, whose boyfriend declined to talk. “It’s destroying people’s lives, destroying their mental health.” 

It was her first protest, she said, but wouldn’t be her last, that she thought the movement of similarly-minded people was growing.

Many of those at the outskirts of the crowd, which swelled to what felt like a thousand people bolstered by those who had marched from RTÉ, were of a similar mind - fed up, cheesed off, had enough.

But while everyone present may have been fed up, answers to difficult questions were less forthcoming.

“Is the virus real?” we asked one woman from Kildare. 

“It is, but it’s more of a threat if you’ve a bad immune system,” she said. 

“They’d have been better off pouring all that money into a first-class hospital system for actually treating people,” she said of the billions spent on pandemic welfare payments to date.

Other, similarly ordinary-looking people held more radical viewpoints, with one man declaring himself “sceptical” of all media, and particularly distrustful of Facebook and Google. 

“I did my biology,” he said. “I can’t get my head around this lockdown.” 

Perhaps mindful of the bad optics surrounding the previous protest, a great deal of effort had gone into promoting a festival-like atmosphere for the event, with the organisers taking any opportunity to assert that the meeting’s agenda was one of mental health.

“Hello all you lovely maskless people,” said an MC with a British accent, before launching into a rendition of Freedom. 

“This is not a protest, this is a meeting of free spirits,” he boomed. Camera-phones and selfie sticks were everywhere, everything being filmed.

The faux-carnival atmosphere carried on for more than an hour before anyone actually spoke, although cursed by a temperamental PA system.

One of the most discomfiting aspects of the gathering, for this writer who misses the normal world but who fully believes in the wearing of a mask for the common good, was the sheer ordinariness of proceedings.

A religious group at the anti-lockdown protest this afternoon on Dublin's O'Connell Street. 

Children were everywhere playing, everyone dressed lightly for the unseasonably warm weather. This socially unacceptable gathering had that unmistakable vibe of how people are supposed to congregate and be merry. The only people wearing masks were journalists and gardaí.

But then you saw the placards discussing ‘vaccine lies’ and ‘real aim? Chinese takeover’ and remembered that many of those gathered are less than reasonable.

Ms Cahill referred to the “Prime Minister of Ireland” in her speech, perhaps mindful of an international audience. 

“This lockdown is based on lies,” she said. 

“Asymptomatic people do not exist. Old people are our treasure. Invite them to Sunday dinner."

“The gardaí here are not arresting you because you are doing nothing unlawful,” her compatriot barrister Tracey O’Mahony, told the crowd.

That felt like a bending of the truth, but one you feel the ordinary people gathered will have no problem believing.