Riot police in Dunsink Lane

dublin | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis

Wednesday October 20, 2004 20:53

by Nina Ni Cheallaigh

Intimidation and racism in Dunsink

As most people saw on T.V.last night, yesterday morning's dawn raids on families in Dunsink lasted for a total of four hours and were carried out with the back up of 200 Riot Police. A Traveller woman I spoke to today in Ballymun told me about her husband having predicted last week that raids would be carried out all over Dunsink as a direct result of the recent protests.
'They need to let us know who's boss-they did it to punish'
The Garda spokesperson made it very clear that the public disorder needed to be punished and what better tactic than a massive show of might on the part of the State. I can't think of another community that has come under the level of initimidation and blatant discrimination by the State,that the Travelling Community has had to endure for so long. One woman from Dunsink Lane told me that she was stopped at three different checkpoints on her way to work and that her children's schoolbags were searched.
A wall is erected to 'solve a dumpiing
problem', checkpoints appear in a specific neighbourhood, children are searched and yet it is all accepted because anything visited on the Traveller Community must be deserved-after all they all have guns, and fireworks in their schoolbags and counterfeiting equipment in their outside toilets... They also have a life expectancy that is now just about approximating that of the Settled Communnity in the 1940s. The infant mortality rate is three times that of the wider community.
The barrier in Dunsink had been in the pipeline for months and the CIty Council reacted to being so publicly challenged by cooperating wholeheartedly with the cops, and no doubt pointing them in the right direction to ensure a 'successful operation' and a lot of very bad press for Travellers.