Diarmuid Breatnach
(Reading time: 4 mins.)
April 17th is the annual Palestinian political Prisoners’ Day and it was marked in O’Connell Street, the main street of Dublin’s city centre, by an event with speeches, banners and chants organised by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
Palestine national flags fluttered about the crowd being addressed by a number of speakers with occasional toots of solidarity from passing traffic – a common occurrence at Palestine solidarity events in most of Ireland.
Dáithí Doolan was one of the speakers and though saying some progressive things about solidarity with Palestine and the terrible situation in which the occupiers have them, soon revealed the political poverty and lack of solidarity with resistance of his Sinn Féin party.
Doolan reminded his audience of when there were political prisoners in Ireland, as though this was no longer the case, presumably because the prisoners now are not of his party. Nor did he mention the current attempts to extradite Irish Republicans to British administrations.
The SF speaker went on to extol the South African process, perhaps not caring about the betrayal of the struggle and sacrifice of the masses there, the deepening grip of imperialism on the rich natural resources, the corruption and repression of the ANC regime and the massacre at Marikana.1
If Doolan thought about it he must have hoped that his audience did not remember that the South African process had a twin, the Palestinian one at Oslo which sabotaged the Palestinian struggle and brought into being the corrupt Palestinian Authority2, the Israeli proxy in the West Bank.
Sinn Féin has achieved a somewhat similar position in the Six Counties colony and has been working hard to reach a corresponding role in the Irish state. And why not, when it endorses the “Two State solution” giving the Palestinians 20% of their land under Zionist eyes and guns.
The very least, Doolan said, that the Irish Government could do to help the Palestinians, would be to enact the Occupied Territories Bill but he proposed nothing further, not even the ban on US military flights through Shannon Airport or on Israeli arms flights through Irish airspace.
Darragh Adelaide from the People Before Profit party spoke too about Palestine and solidarity but also about the Palestine refugees that have had to sleep in tents on Irish streets and the attacks on them both by the authorities and by fascists and other racists.
Palestinian prisoner conditions
A woman gave a detailed list of statistics relating to Palestinian political prisoners but also went through the tortures and terrible conditions in which they are kept. She concluded reminding her audience that each prisoner is a human being, a parent, a child, a sibling and not a number.
In a year and a half, more than 15,800 Palestinians have been arrested, including 500 women, 1200 children, and thousands of detainees who were placed under arbitrary administrative detention. 64 Palestinians have died in prison since October 2024, including a child.3
The prison administration’s special units have carried out violent raids on prisoners’ cells, administering severe beatings, torture, and ill-treatment.4
Prisoners have suffered power and water cuts, and all of their belongings—including clothes, electrical appliances, and hygiene items—have been confiscated.5
They have been placed under complete isolation, family visits have been completely banned, and the International Committee of the Red Cross has been prevented from visiting them inside prisons.
Additionally, a policy of starvation has been implemented against thousands of prisoners, who are being provided with only two extremely poor-quality and quantity meals a day.6
The MC of the event led chants in which he called out Palestinian political prisoners! and the audience responded with Free them all! Similarly with Free the children prisoners — Free them all! and Free the women prisoners! — Free them all!
He also referred to the woman arrested outside the Irish Embassy in Berlin for speaking in Irish and, in defiance, led the audience in a chant in Irish expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people: Saoirse don Phalaistín! (Freedom for Palestine!)7
What was notable in its total absence from all the speeches was any call to step beyond the marches and similar measures which have been supported by thousands in Ireland over more than 18 months but which have not succeeded in moving the Government even to enforcing its formal neutrality.
This is replicated in most solidarity events across the state, leaving those few who take action to increase greater pressure on the ruling class to face the repression of the Irish State, as with 23 men and women in three different events over a four-day period in Dublin recently.8
Political prisoners from the armed resistance
The Joe McDonnell Ballad9 would have been most appropriately performed at this event, in particular the chorus line: You dare to call me a terrorist, while you look down your guns … But the IPSC would hardly endorse the singing of that song nor wish to be associated with it in public.
There were two large prisoners’ solidarity banners of the IPSC at this event but it is remarkable how rarely one sees them on the IPSC’s national marches. The problem with the prisoners for liberal organisations is that some of them, at least, have been armed fighters of the Resistance.
This, combined with ignorance perhaps, accounts for the comparatively low numbers at this event. However, it has to be said that known revolutionary organisations were also visibly absent.
Doolan’s party was a problem for liberals when many of the political prisoners here had been armed Irish Republican resistance fighters; it’s still a problem for them today — but also for Doolan and his party now that the current Irish political prisoners are no longer associated with them.
If solidarity does not embrace resistance then it’s charity, not solidarity. And if resistance is to be embraced then it should be so for all its expressions, artistic, cultural, mass mobilisations, strikes, boycotts … and armed. Including solidarity with those who, because of resistance, end up in jails.
Free them all!
End.
NOTES
1Culminating on 16th August 2012 (while Mandela still lived) the police of the ANC Government carried out a massacre of over 40 striking miners over a period of three days. The massacre was to suppress a strike in a platinum mine of the Canadian Lonmin company, repressing also a breakaway union from theANC-allied National Union of Mineworkers. The massacre is widely believed to have been organised by Cyril Ramaphosa, then a millionaire and vice-President of the ANC Government and recent leader of the NUM, now President of South Africa.
2Which also beats and incarcerates Palestinians resisting the Occupation (exact figures are difficult to obtain) and has murdered some.
3https://www.addameer.org/news/5549
4Ibid.
5Ibid.
6Ibid.
7This slogan has now become well known in Ireland in voice but also in writing, appearing on flags, banners and placards. It represents a partial success for those of us who have tried to insert a measure of the Irish language into Palestine solidarity, in the belief that it is important for the Irish language to be present in progressive movements.
8See https://rebelbreeze.com/2025/04/06/irish-state-ramps-up-repression/
9By Brian Warfield of the Wolfe Tones band in honour of Volunteer Joe McDonnell of the Provisional IRA who died on hunger strike in 1981; the song also names other hunger strike martyrs of the Provisionals Vols. Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, McCreesh but adds Vol. Patsy O’Hara of the Irish National Liberation Army. In total, seven of the Provisionals and three of INLA died on hunger strike in 1981.
USEFUL LINKS
IPSC:https://www.ipsc.ie
Adameer – Prisoner Support and Human Rights Organisation: https://www.addameer.org/
Adameer Statement on Prisoners’ Day: https://www.addameer.org/news/5549
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