Whose side are you on?
Last Tuesday in Strokestown, Co Roscommon, two brothers and a sister, in their fifties and sixties, were forcibly removed from the house where they lived, presumably for not paying the mortgage or rent. When one of the crowd assembled to watch the eviction shouted that the men involved should be ashamed of themselves as Irishmen, one of the ‘security’ men called back that he wasn’t Irish, he was British.
Then yesterday, in the early hours, dozens of men turned up at the farmhouse. The eight security men occupying the house were injured and four vehicles set alight. Three of the security men had to be taken to hospital and a vet was called to put down an injured dog.
So whose side are you on?
The local Fianna Fail TD, Eugene Murphy, appealed for calm, and said he’d be contacting the bank today to see if anything could be done to ease tensions. “Whatever the circumstances of this case may be, it appears to me that the eviction was handled in a cold manner.”
So did Mr Murphy speak up in defence of his evicted constituents before the attack on the security men?
The eight men who evicted the two brothers and sister had, I would guess, little knowledge of Irish history and the role of family eviction in the fuelling of national anger.
Independent TD Michael Fitzmaurice said “Nobody wants to see violence and I have always been a believer in peaceful protests.”
Would this case have received the same media coverage if there had not been violence?
If you had been one of the brothers or the sister, would you have welcomed the arrival of dozens of men to deal with the security men? If one of the brothers or the sister had been a relative of Michael Fitzmaurice TD, would he still have been a believer in peaceful protest?
General notions about the need for law and order tend to take a buffeting when law and order allows the forcible removal of elderly people from their home.
I know whose side I’m on.
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