2 weeks Ago By Justine McCarthy
They laid candles and pictures of massacred children on the ground in front of the gates of Leinster House. Upon each child’s picture, they placed a pair of small shoes and a flower. Through the night, they kept vigil with the images of the young innocents whose lives were obliterated by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza .
It was a tender demonstration by Mothers Against Genocide of solidarity with the parents of at least 16,000 children who have been slaughtered since October 2023. What happened the next morning is a scandal of unadulterated hypocrisy. It ought to be the first item on the agenda for the new Oireachtas justice committee whenever it is, eventually, formed.
The women had told a garda on duty on Sunday night that they intended moving from the gates by 7.30am to make way for people coming to work in Leinster House, a non-sitting day for the Dáil, which only cranks into action at 2pm on Tuesdays. But before dawn, a small number of gardaí began removing the children’s pictures.
In response, about a dozen of the mothers sat down in front of the gates, cradling “pillow babies” resembling the shrouded dead children carried by distraught parents that have become a familiar feature of news reports from Gaza. Garda reinforcements and vans arrived and 11 women, plus three men from different groups, were arrested and taken to Dublin Garda stations in Kimmage, Kevin Street, Irishtown and Pearse Street. Oonagh Peters from Rathmichael, South Dublin, told me she was brought to Sundrive Road station.
She says she was led to a cell by a woman garda who told her to remove her coat and jeans, pull down her knickers and pull up her bra. When she did not pull her underwear down far enough or up far enough, the garda told her to lift them some more, she says. The mother of three was later released without charge after she formally accepted a caution as she was under pressure to collect her children from school.
“As if I’d have had a weapon hidden on me when the reason I was there was because children are being blown to bits and Ireland is allowing weapons to go through its airspace that are being used to kill them,” she said. TDs Ruth Coppinger, Richard Boyd Barrett and Paul Murphy raised the issue of the strip-searches in the Dáil on Tuesday . They said one woman, who was from Palestine, had been told to take off her hijab, which was temporarily “confiscated”.
In her own words, she said she was told to strip naked and she was touched in “all my sensitive parts”. Gardaí denied her assertion that she was “cavity searched” and said the searches were conducted according to the Treatment of Persons in Custody in Garda Síochána Stations Regulations. In response, Mothers Against Genocide re-stated their original claim about both kinds of searches.
Neither point is germane to the unsettling question as to why a decision was taken to employ the relatively rare measure of strip-searching women who had been peacefully protesting against the massacring of children. In contrast to how the women were treated outside Leinster House, the corridors inside the building were echoing with government accusations that Opposition parties had been “sexist” to the first woman Ceann Comhairle, Verona Murphy . The word “misogyny” got flung around too.
Either TDs need dictionaries or they need to stop weaponising allegations of sexism for their own cynical purposes, thus undermining its seriousness. The night after the women’s arrest, RTÉ’s Prime Time broadcast a video diary recorded in Nasser Hospital, Gaza, last month by Morgan McMonagle, an Irish trauma and vascular surgeon, while he was volunteering with Medical Aid for Palestinians. His film showed the surgical ward reduced to smouldering rubble in the immediate aftermath of an Israeli air strike.
McMonagle lifted up the little leg of a four year old boy showing the flesh on the back of it hanging in a bloody mess. More worryingly, the boy was bleeding from behind his abdomen. The child lay in bed crying to go home, unaware that he was the last surviving sibling from his family.
“We spent the first 20 minutes pronouncing people dead,” McMonagle said. The majority of them were children. The youngest child I passed dead was probably four or five months old.
” Two children aged four and five were dead on arrival from bullets fired from an Apache helicopter. A non-stop production line of surgeries the doctor performed in the following hours included the removal of a 14-year-old girl’s kidney, a six-year-old with wounds to the chest and abdomen who subsequently died, a four-year-old with a shredded artery and an 11-year-old girl with severe upper and lower limb injuries whose father was also brought in and died during the night. Dr Nabeel Rana, a vascular surgeon with Med Global, has said most of those being killed since Israel ended the ceasefire were children.
“When you’re targeting the general population, civilians, children – we’re talking about children 12 and younger – how can you say the intent is not to wipe out this population?” she said on RTÉ Radio 1 Drivetime. A March 13th report by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory said Israel was engaged in “a genocidal act under the Rome Statue and the Genocide Convention” with the intention of destroying Palestinians in Gaza. Basma IVF Centre, Gaza’s largest fertility clinic housed in a stand-alone building, was shelled by a tank in December 2023.
The UN said about 4,000 embryos and 1,000 sperm samples and unfertilised eggs were destroyed. Meanwhile, mothers calling for the passage of the Occupied Territories Bill – which was supported by all parties during the general election campaign – and an end to weapons flights transiting Irish airspace are arrested outside Leinster House and strip-searched. In the circumstances of children being slaughtered as part of a strategy to resettle Gaza, would it have been too much to ask those privileged few with access to Ireland’s most exclusive car park to walk into the campus through the separate pedestrian gates on Monday morning?.
