Irish Council for Civil Liberties says Garda handling of protest shows 'organisational failure'

Speaking with Hot Press this morning, Executive Director Liam Herrick laid out the problems with the Garda's handling of the removal of protesters from a vacate property 34 Frederick Street late on Tuesday evening.

"The first issue is, what was the purpose of this operation?" says Liam. "The Guards are disputing whether it was an eviction because they’re saying it wasn’t a bona fide occupation. I think what we need to be clear on here is that evictions are civil matters, and it is not for the Guards to be carrying out evictions on behalf of property owners. Now, the Guards are not saying that they’re not doing that, but it’s very understandable that that’s what it looks like from the outside."

The handling of this situation has not only led to widespread outrage and resulted in a sitdown protest on O'Connell Street, which took place yesterday evening (Wednesday, September 12) but it also raises larger questions about the nature of policing.

"We need to understand exactly what the nature of the police operation was. If they’re saying that it was a public order event, and they were approaching this from a public order perspective, then we need to know – How do they approach public order events and issues of this type?"

Liam believes that there's a parallel to be drawn with the Jobstown protests of 2014, where the Garda's own investigation identified that they didn’t have proper management in place for managing protests.

"If this is a protesting operation, then the Guards have to show that they’re supporting and facilitating people’s right to protest. And on the face of it, that doesn’t tally with what we witnessed happening at Northern Frederick Street.

"The Guards wouldn’t be carrying out the eviction, but they will say that they were just alongside it to deal with public order issues, but of course, the experience that we’ve had in Ireland is that Garda have become involved in evictions, in many instances over the years including, for example, with Travellers and with other instances of people occupying private houses. So there is a history to this. And it’s essential for the law, and for the relationship between the Garda and the community, that the Guards should make very clear that they have no role in evictions. Even if that wasn’t the case in this instance, there’s certainly a serious communications problem with what happened."

The Irish Council For Civil Liberties have called on the newly appointed Commissioner Harris to produce a public report on what happened.

"We’ve raised these matters with the Commissioner and asked him to provide a public report," says Liam. "One of the key issues here is that there should be a clear Garda policy on how they approach protests and that should be publicly available. That’s the case in Northern Ireland and it’s not the case here.

"In that policy, there should be a clear statement that they respect the right to protest. We also need a public report when these things happen, so that they can explain things like – If they have to use force, why was this justified?

"They also need to show the steps they took to avoid conflict. Until we get something like that, the public are right to have serious concerns. They doesn’t seem to have been any plans to avoid confrontation and the use of balaclavas and batons seems to have certainly been disproportionate.

"In many other jurisdictions, there are clear rules that need to be followed when it comes to protests, so in that sense, there’s an organisational failure here that there’s not those rules in place. The Commissioner should be very aware of that."