When they heard
about an anti-fascist protest that was to be held in Dublin that coming
Saturday, they thought it would be a perfect idea to attend. In fact, they were
really fired up for it. Social media was alive with posts imploring students to
come from all corners of the land and to voice their protest outside Leinster
House where a pint-sized little Hitler wannabe from something called the Irish Patriot
Party was due to give a speech. The anti-fascists intended to be there in great
numbers to counter his message of hate. The police, no pun intended, were to be
piggy in the middle of this tangle.
Both protesting
sides had promised to largely adhere to social distancing guidelines. The guards
did not believe them, but were letting the demonstrations go ahead to stop even
bigger trouble from breaking out if the sides could not air their grievances in
some public way. They would round up the ringleaders later when the fuss had
died down and the issue was no longer dominating the news cycle.
The excitement
on the bus to Dublin was immense. Surrounded by her fellow students-cum-protestors,
Cloda felt part of something bigger, something that was bringing change to
society. She was happy, she had a warm fuzzy feeling, and she was keen to play
her part.
Cloda was
admired by the student body in general, she had natural leadership qualities
and both lecturers and students alike reckoned her as “one to watch” in terms
of carving out a successful career for herself whatever she decided to throw
her hand at after college.
This idealistic,
energised group disembarked from the bus at Merrion Square and proceeded at
pace towards the protest site, their placards glinting in the September sun. They
quickly found themselves amongst the larger group of anti-fascist protesters
that had assembled at the top of Molesworth Street between Buswells Hotel and
the Grand Lodge of Freemasons of Ireland.
The thin blue
line, the Irish police, more commonly referred to as the guards, stood to
attention on Kildare Street, guarding the peace by separating Cloda et al from
the Patriots who flooded around the gates of Leinster House cheering on their
diminutive dictator who was spewing bile down his bullhorn with gusto.
“No more hate!”
“Black lives matter!” “Fascists go home!” were just some of the slogans chanted
by Cloda’s crowd in their attempt to drown out the Patriots who in turn
responded with “Ireland for the Irish!” “All lives matter!” and “Close the
borders now!”
Their leader,
replete with said bullhorn, led these chants, his little hands clutching the
instrument tightly and a glint of psychosis in his wild green eyes. The
atmosphere was febrile, tense with the expectation that it could spill over
into violence at any moment.
The guards stood
calm but alert between the two sides ready to intervene should trouble break
out. And that was exactly what happened next. A missile, hurled from the
Patriots to the anti-fascists, caused the two sides to surge in rage towards
one another. The guards drew their batons and deployed their riot shields and
through a combination of patience and training kept the warring sides apart.
Things quietened
down after about ten minutes of melee. That’s when Cloda noticed the injured
woman beside her, blood streaming down her face from a gash above her left eye.
Two friends were assisting her and people were filming with their phones as was
a television crew from RTÉ. Turns out she was someone of note. Her name was
Freda Furlong, one of Ireland’s foremost anti-fascist fighters, quite famous
throughout the land and once the blood was cleared from her face Cloda realised
who it was.
Freda Furlong:
an icon to practically everyone on Cloda’s university campus, a veteran of the
anti-fascist wars, the culture wars and even some of the academic theory wars
of the 1980s. The injury to her face was quite serious as it was and, indeed,
could have been a lot worse. She’d been hit by a bollard launched in the air by
a so-called Patriot. It was that serious that an ambulance had been called and
Freda Furlong would be going to hospital as a precaution.
The whole
incident raised the hackles of Cloda. She was bloody angry. Angry at the
fascist patriots and angry at the guards who at that moment were not taking
immediate steps to arrest the hurler of the bollard who had injured the skull
of one of Ireland’s most fearless social justice warriors. So angry was Cloda
that she approached a sergeant of the police standing on the line to
remonstrate with him about the injury to Freda. The sergeant was having none of
it:
“She put herself
in the line of fire,” he snapped. “It’s madness here today. We’re here to guard
the peace not act as nurse and comforter to every agitator who’s jumping up and
down spoiling for a fight. Now get back over to your side please, miss, or I’ll
have you taken down to Pearse Street and you can cool your heels in a cell!”
Cloda bit her
lip. She knew by the sergeant’s tone that he was out of patience. The threat of
being placed in a cell was clearly to be taken seriously. So she sneered at him
and walked away, back to her own crowd. An ambulance trundled up Molesworth
Street to take Freda Furlong to hospital. The Irish Patriot Party leader piped
up again, once more with feeling, to the delight of the rabble following him
and hanging on his every word. These speeches of his were their daily bread.
Seeing Freda the
injured heroine being placed gently in the back of the ambulance infuriated
Cloda all the more. And her anger was principally towards the police more so
than the fascists. There was only one thing she could think of doing at that
point to assuage her anger. It was the modern day’s most fashionable fallback
protest position. She pulled out her phone and took to Twitter, where she
maintained a healthy complement of some 30,000 followers, not bad for a girl of
22 who’d yet to make her mark in the world (though she was undoubtedly on her
way to doing so).
“I can’t express right now just how much I hate the
fucking guards! Freda Furlong has been injured by a fascist and the sergeant I
spoke to doesn’t want to know!! #dublinprotest”
Having tweeted
this, in haste and in anger, Cloda felt satisfied immediately having gotten it
off her chest. The tweet itself took on a life of its own with likes, retweets
and comments gathering pace quickly. Cloda had a viral tweet on her hands. The
numbers ran into the high thousands. The comments in the main were pro-Freda,
pro-Cloda and very much anti-police. The thread was hijacked for a spell by the
Patriots but they were beaten back by the Cloda backers quite quickly, though
that didn’t stop them from continuing to return.
The physical
protest and counter protest died down after about another hour. The Patriots
had aired their views, the anti-fascists had tried to howl them down and the
guards in the middle had done what they do best and maintained the thin blue
line between order and chaos. The skirmish midway through proceedings during
which Freda Furlong was injured had actually proved a great way for both sides
to let off steam. Now it was time for everybody to go home.
Along with her
fellow students, Cloda made her way back to Merrion Square where a bus was
waiting to take them out of the city and back down the motorway to college. As
they boarded they felt a sense of pride that their protest had been a success
and they had acquitted themselves well in the capital city. A tired Cloda sat
back in her seat and scrolled Twitter on her phone where her tweet was still
generating a buzz. Her notifications were hopping. Other students on the bus
said things to her like:
“Hey, Cloda,
you’re trending!” and “Well said, girl, the guards are a disgrace!”
She smiled a
tired smile glad of the attention. She loved Twitter and the opportunity it
gave her to speak to the world, and she loved in particular, as the bus headed through
the early evening, the fact that her tweet about the guards was very definitely
going viral. She hoped that sergeant from the protest today would read it.
That’ll show him, she thought, the little twerp!
As the bus
pulled into the college grounds she took another look at her phone. In point of
fact she had hardly been able to put it down all the way home. She was
delighted to see the tweet had now amassed twenty-seven thousand likes and five
thousand retweets. Oh yeah, sock it to the man! She was in the vanguard of a
revolution.
She alighted
from the bus with her roommates Clinton and Autumn and they made their way to
their block and up in the lift to their quarters. Entering the flat they got a
terrible shock. The place had been turned over violently, looked like every
press and drawer was upended. Their laptops were gone, their passports, some
money (not much thankfully) they had kept in a wallet for groceries. And Autumn
and Cloda’s jewellery (some of it worth a few bob). The three of them stood in stunned
silence till Clinton said:
“We’re going to
have to call the guards. This is some serious break-in we’ve had.”
Autumn and Cloda
could only nod and agree. Cloda’s phone was still pinging with the ongoing
notifications pertaining to her viral tweet. The fuss around it hadn’t died
down since she had tweeted it in Dublin hours earlier. #dublinprotest was the
biggest trending topic on Irish Twitter that day. Clinton and Autumn had been
following the whole fuss with great enjoyment all the way home, too. Cloda had
always wanted to have a viral tweet but now she was in a bind. Her ambition to
go viral had been achieved with an anti-police tweet on the very day she and
her flatmates needed the police. Their overrun apartment was proof of that. Now
they wanted some justice.
“Call them so,”
Cloda said. “Let’s hope they’re not on Twitter.”
“Actually, why
don’t you delete your tweet?” Autumn said.
“Yeah, Cloda,”
Clinton said. “Delete it.”
She thought
about it for a moment. Socking it to the man was all very well but sometimes
you needed him around. She took out her phone.
“Yeh, I think I
will,” she said.
She pressed
delete and then called the police.
© Brian Ahern 2021
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