These photos were published in the UCG student periodical, Unity, vol.11, no.2 (no date given, but probably early December 1970). Below are extracts and summaries of the accompanying reports
MARCH FOR FREEDOM
Thursday, 19th November. Some 300 students went to the County Courthouse to attend the trial of M****** H****. Most of them seem to have attended for reasons of curiosity; only a minority could have been called supporters or sympathisers of MH [a member of the Communist Part of Ireland – Marxist-Leninist, colloquially Maoists] Yet, during the afternoon, these curious and uninvolved students witnessed scenes of the most outrageous and unprovoked police brutality and thuggery. Some of them were beaten up, others kicked, all of them saw our so-called ‘forces of law and order’ act in the cruel and vicious manner that we have come to associate with their counterparts in Northern Ireland. But this was Galway, these were the Gardaí, and nobody could have called the crowd a hostile one.
[MH’s] trial was originally timed to take place in the morning, and those who arrived at the Courthouse at 10 o’clock saw that the Gardai were enforcing a system of selective entry to the public gallery. Anyone who did not conform with the Gardaí’s idea of quiet respectability was invariably turned away... The case was not heard in the morning and a larger crowd assembled in the afternoon... Those who demanded their right of entry were told that the gallery was full, although this claim was not supported by the evidence of empty places to be seen inside... When one group of students began to shout, they were attacked by a Garda who sought to drag one particularly small person away from the rest. In his efforts to do this, he pushed R***** M**** aside and she swung at him and knocked his cap off. This was obviously construed as extreme provocation, and the Garda dropped his captive and struck her violently in the face. He then pushed her across the hall and banged her against the closed door. Two other Gardaí helped him to drag her outside and she was thumped against one of the stone pillars before she was taken down to Eglinton Street Garda Station. All of this had taken place in full view of 200 people who had been shocked into silence by the suddenness and violence of this attack on a girl. But the shock was soon transferred into virulent outrage, and the crowd surged down to the Garda Station.
Those who had come down out of curiosity had witnessed a seamy and brutal aspect of Garda behaviour and they did not like it. They screamed for Miss M’s release and seemed prepared to storm the barracks to ensure it. After twenty minutes, she was set free. She was charged with assaulting a policeman.
The report continued, describing the students reconvening at the Courthouse, the outrage at the 7 day prison sentence handed down to MH for contempt of court, further beatings by members of An Garda, a meeting in the University Aula Maxima attended by 900 students, which condemned the Garda violence, and agreed on a non-violent protest at the Courthouse on the following Thursday 26 November in support of the demand for ‘Free Speech.’ Five hundred attended, and the student journalist stated that many more would have participated but for the prominence of ‘Maoist’ slogans.. There was more consideration shown towards student observers on this second occasion, and relative leniency in the sentencing. MH, back to face his substantive charge, was fined £20, RM was bound to the peace. The students believed that the leniency was due to their mobilisation. At further meeting of 400 students on the evening of 26 November, a resolution demanded ‘that every action be taken to expose the brutality of the Gardai and to ensure that similar events did not recur in Galway.’
There's a link here to another contemporary article on Irish Maoism (Nusight, May 1970) http://www.politico.ie/component/content/article/6235.html
Some further context for the events is provided below:
MARCH FOR FREEDOM
Thursday, 19th November. Some 300 students went to the County Courthouse to attend the trial of M****** H****. Most of them seem to have attended for reasons of curiosity; only a minority could have been called supporters or sympathisers of MH [a member of the Communist Part of Ireland – Marxist-Leninist, colloquially Maoists] Yet, during the afternoon, these curious and uninvolved students witnessed scenes of the most outrageous and unprovoked police brutality and thuggery. Some of them were beaten up, others kicked, all of them saw our so-called ‘forces of law and order’ act in the cruel and vicious manner that we have come to associate with their counterparts in Northern Ireland. But this was Galway, these were the Gardaí, and nobody could have called the crowd a hostile one.
[MH’s] trial was originally timed to take place in the morning, and those who arrived at the Courthouse at 10 o’clock saw that the Gardai were enforcing a system of selective entry to the public gallery. Anyone who did not conform with the Gardaí’s idea of quiet respectability was invariably turned away... The case was not heard in the morning and a larger crowd assembled in the afternoon... Those who demanded their right of entry were told that the gallery was full, although this claim was not supported by the evidence of empty places to be seen inside... When one group of students began to shout, they were attacked by a Garda who sought to drag one particularly small person away from the rest. In his efforts to do this, he pushed R***** M**** aside and she swung at him and knocked his cap off. This was obviously construed as extreme provocation, and the Garda dropped his captive and struck her violently in the face. He then pushed her across the hall and banged her against the closed door. Two other Gardaí helped him to drag her outside and she was thumped against one of the stone pillars before she was taken down to Eglinton Street Garda Station. All of this had taken place in full view of 200 people who had been shocked into silence by the suddenness and violence of this attack on a girl. But the shock was soon transferred into virulent outrage, and the crowd surged down to the Garda Station.
Those who had come down out of curiosity had witnessed a seamy and brutal aspect of Garda behaviour and they did not like it. They screamed for Miss M’s release and seemed prepared to storm the barracks to ensure it. After twenty minutes, she was set free. She was charged with assaulting a policeman.
The report continued, describing the students reconvening at the Courthouse, the outrage at the 7 day prison sentence handed down to MH for contempt of court, further beatings by members of An Garda, a meeting in the University Aula Maxima attended by 900 students, which condemned the Garda violence, and agreed on a non-violent protest at the Courthouse on the following Thursday 26 November in support of the demand for ‘Free Speech.’ Five hundred attended, and the student journalist stated that many more would have participated but for the prominence of ‘Maoist’ slogans.. There was more consideration shown towards student observers on this second occasion, and relative leniency in the sentencing. MH, back to face his substantive charge, was fined £20, RM was bound to the peace. The students believed that the leniency was due to their mobilisation. At further meeting of 400 students on the evening of 26 November, a resolution demanded ‘that every action be taken to expose the brutality of the Gardai and to ensure that similar events did not recur in Galway.’
There's a link here to another contemporary article on Irish Maoism (Nusight, May 1970) http://www.politico.ie/component/content/article/6235.html
Some further context for the events is provided below:
This is a piece I posted on the Cedar Lounge Revolution blog last year, as part of a discussion on Irish Marxist-Leninism
http://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/stevie-and-the-red-menace-maoists-in-limerick-in-1970/
... A quick scan of those local and national papers of the time that have recently been digitised indicates that Communists of the Marxist-Leninist school were active in the 1969 to 1972 period in Dublin, Limerick, Cork, Kilkenny, and Galway, as members of the Irish Revolutionary Youth Movement and the Irish Student Movement, and that they turned up in other towns to sell the ‘Red Patriot.’
The impression is that they emerged in a student milieu (and this has been widely discussed elsewhere) but that a number of recruits made serious efforts to ‘join’ as it were, the working-class. Members in Limerick and Dublin were reported to have given up their studies, to have found work in factories, and to be doing their best to play leading roles in the trade unions they found in these factories. The brouhaha discussed in several of the postings above resulted in the revolutionary Marxist-Leninists losing their jobs in a Shannon factory, despite being ‘good workers’ according to the factory management. Evidently a member of an unconnected group of Young Socialists also lost his job in the Limerick area, and almost lost his accommodation, because his group became confused with the IRYM.
The unfortunate Martin Dolphin, referred to in a posting above, was one of those who left University to take a job in a factory where he became an assistant shop steward. Accused along with a female comrade of assaulting a garda at a UCD protest, they were both imprisoned, where they went on hunger strike. At a subsequent hearing, Dolphin was declared incapable of pleading by reason of insanity, and committed to an institution for the criminally insane (on foot of a sealed order from the Minister for Justice, Mr O’Malley). Student and factory friends who did not at all share Dolphin’s politics (with some support, it seems, from USI) tried to have him freed but found his parents (the father was a very senior psychiatrist) to be unsupportive. Noel Browne, incidentally, raised the case in the Dail and elsewhere. Whatever about the detail of the case, the Marxist-Leninists (and indeed many others on the left) regarded the Dolphin case as an example of political oppression.
There were several arrests on pickets of one sort or another, with the impression of – how should one put this? – Garda impatience whenever they encountered the precocious Communists. Indeed, as the Limerick and Cork episodes indicate, there was marked public intolerance of the advocates of Chinese-style Communism. The high profile in Ireland of the Maynooth/Columban Mission to China probably contributed to this, as did the wide circulation of books like Fr Harold Rigney’s ‘Four Years in a Red Hell.’
In Galway, a student was arrested for obstructing access to the public toilets in Eyre Square while simultaneously addressing a public meeting and selling the Red Patriot. Following a schemozzle, he was accused of assaulting a garda. [This was the MH case, described in 'Unity', above] During the subsequent court case, large numbers of UCG students packed into the courthouse. A young woman (the one who had been arrested earlier previously in Dublin with Dolphin), who allegedly called a garda a fascist while knocking his cap off on the way into the courthouse, also faced charges.
The word ‘fascist’ was very freely applied, indeed – journalists from several papers who sought comments from IRYM picketers were advised that no comment would be given to representatives of ‘the fascist press.’
Of course, as Brian Hanley’s article http://www.limerick.eu/media/1970%20springboks%20tour.pdf shows, there were actual fascists active in Limerick and in a few other places in the late 1960s and early 1970s, members of the National Movement, who succeeded in gaining a hearing in more mainstream circles (including Stephen Coughlan’s Labour Party). There was evidently a fascist movement in Kilkenny also at the time, which published a local periodical in the city. A supporter of this outfit was a columnist in the Munster Express, under the pseudonym, ‘Voice of Kilkenny,’ where he favourably cited Nationalist Movement publication alongside exculpatory pieces on 1930s fascism, and urged that direct action be taken against any sign of communism. ‘The time to stop the distribution of all communist propaganda in Kilkenny is NOW,’ he urged in January 1971, because it was ‘as corrupt as the vilest hard-core propaganda.’ Communists were targeting children, ‘Voice’ went on, with ten and twelve year-old boys found with little red books in their schoolbags:
‘Some Kilkenny parents have recently complained that their children have recently been given copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book and other communist publications such as the “Red Patriot.” The parents concerned believe that local left-wing organisers are responsible. They also suspect that an “underground” Maoist cell is developing in Kilkenny city. One mother complained that her young daughter was given a red book by a “bearded” young man and was told that “Communism was a better religion than Catholicism.” The young girl concerned is only eleven years old.’
But the Red Patriot have the capacity to influence people? A commentator in the ‘Connacht Sentinel,’ who seemed to be generally well-disposed to the idea of youth rebellion, thought not. He wrote as follows: ‘I procured a copy of the ‘Red Patriot,’ a paper sold by the ‘Revolution Youth,’ and the main articles were headlined as follows: ‘Soviet imperialism denounced,’ ‘Fight against the concrete manifestations of revisionism,’ and ‘The Canadian communist movement.’ When one reads their slogan-filled publications it is very easy to understand why workers and students distrust them. They give the impression of being extreme religious fascist fanatics.’
As well as much criticism of the above sort, there was occasional physical conflict with others on the political left. It is not always easy, from reports in the mainstream press, to discern the actual causes of such incidents, but frequently they seem to have been sparked by what was regarded by others as unreasonable behaviour on the part of the Marxist-Leninists at meetings. At a James Connolly commemorative meeting in May 1970 in Dublin, addressed by Conor Cruise O’Brien, by Bernadette Devlin, and by Eamon McCann, there were physical altercations when one member of the audience began to read aloud from the ‘Thoughts of Chairman Mao.’
The impression then is of a very vibrant, but naive and secluded political sub-culture. One thing that is surprising is the number of the protests that were occasioned by the showing of unpalatable films. The Marxist-Leninists joined, with other groups, in protests against screenings of John Wayne’s pro-Vietnam war film ‘The Green Berets,’ but placed their own pickets on another anti-communist Hollywood film the ‘Shoes of the Fisherman,’ on a film set in China, ‘The most dangerous man in the world’, and on a documentary on Gandhi. ‘Mahatma Gandhi was a representative of the Indian big bourgeoisie, which opposed British colonialism in India for the sake of extending their own exploitation of the Indian people,’ one picketer told a journalist.