Behind bars with the Shannon One
On the day of my visit, a week ago, D’Arcy wears white trainers, grey tracksuit bottoms, a matching hoodie and a raincoat, and her hair is tied back. A small wooden partition separates visitors from inmates. She peers at her guests – myself, and Zoe Lawlor and John Lannon of Shannonwatch – through round-rimmed spectacles. Other visitors have included Sabina Higgins, the wife of President Michael D Higgins.
D’Arcy and Farrell say they occupied the runway at a time when no flights were scheduled to land. The court heard that two delayed passenger flights had to go into a holding pattern because of the disruption.
D’Arcy’s absolutism and sense of certainty seem unusual at a time when pragmatism and ambivalence define so much of our politics. She is a daughter of the turbulence of the 20th century. Her father, Joseph, was a tenement child from Henrietta Street in Dublin and was active in the IRA during the War of Independence. He later met Miriam Billig, a Jewish Londoner whose parents had fled Odessa, when they were both finding their way in London.
D’Arcy’s son Finn Arden, who now lives in Galway, has observed his mother’s activism up close since early childhood. “She’s a very strong-minded person. She could have signed the bond, yes, but she would have seen that as an infringement on her right to protest against something she feels strongly about. For all of her life she has been against imperialist violence around the world.
It is Arden who now tries to orchestrate the number of people wishing to visit her in prison. He also passes on good wishes in the six-minute daily phone call she is permitted. D’Arcy’s many visitors must go through a rigorous security system: photographic ID, pat down, mouth check, sniffer dog and X-ray machine. No pens or phones are permitted, and visitors are not allowed to wear scarves. A member of the prison staff sits in on the conversation.
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Margaretta D’Arcy has been a peace activist for most of her life, and neither cancer nor prison appears to deter her. We visit her in Limerick Prison, where she is controversially serving a sentence for an anti-war protest at Shannon Airport
She is an unlikely inmate of a medium-security prison. The peace activist and writer Margaretta D’Arcy lights up Limerick Prison’s sparse visiting room in a blaze of conviviality. Leaning on a cane as she is escorted in, she half-chides the warden for not having carried an umbrella to shield them from the light rain that is spitting over Limerick. “I’ve never met you before, ma’am,” he says evenly. “I’m sure we can get you something for the way back.”
D’Arcy is 79. As well as being an activist, she is an actor, writer and member of Aosdána. On October 7th, 2012, she walked on to the runway at Shannon Airport with Niall Farrell, of the Galway Alliance Against War group, to protest against the airport’s use by the US military. She was subsequently found guilty of illegal incursion on a runway and given a suspended sentence of three months.
And there it might have ended. But D’Arcy refused to sign a bond committing her to uphold the law and to stay away from unauthorised zones at Shannon. This led, last month, to her early-morning arrest at her home, on St Mary’s Terrace in Galway city, and her transfer to jail.
As Minister for Justice Alan Shatter has observed, her signature on the bond would lead to her immediate release. “I do not believe the individual concerned should be presented in a heroic guise or that it is in the public interest that she be so depicted,” he says. “The rule of law must prevail even when it creates difficult circumstances.”
From a legal perspective this is inarguable. But her sentence has split public opinion. Some see it as an inevitable punishment for breaking a law and, arguably, endangering the public. Others believe that, in a country where moral and financial scandals have gone unchecked, it is shameful to imprison an elderly woman who has demonstrated unwavering moral courage in committing to a selfless cause. Some say she should be pardoned.
“But pardon me for what?” D’Arcy wonders when asked if she would accept such a gesture. “It seems that you can observe a war. You can comment on war. But you can’t stop war. I am a person who is trying to stop war. I would like the Minister to explain that. So it would depend on what the pardon was for.”
On the day of my visit, a week ago, D’Arcy wears white trainers, grey tracksuit bottoms, a matching hoodie and a raincoat, and her hair is tied back. A small wooden partition separates visitors from inmates. She peers at her guests – myself, and Zoe Lawlor and John Lannon of Shannonwatch – through round-rimmed spectacles. Other visitors have included Sabina Higgins, the wife of President Michael D Higgins.
Even in the casual clothes D’Arcy has something of the society hostess about her. She talks not as a helpless prisoner but as though she wants to make a personal project of improving the place, a classically bleak mausoleum on Mulgrave Road that has served as a lock-up for almost 200 years.
She stands rather than sits at the bench and trades information with her Shanonwatch colleagues. She answers questions about her wellbeing but is more animated when discussing the shortcomings of life in Limerick prison.
“It’s the sensory deprivation that is shocking. Not getting to see the moon, the stars. That is terrible for people in here. There is nothing to do. In Holloway Prison, for example” – she spent time there in the 1980s, during the Greenham Common anti-nuclear protests in the UK – “the library was well stocked and the recreation room had things to do. Here, when you are out for exercise, it is just as you see in the films, with people walking around in circles.
“I was walking down a corridor the other day and looked through the window of a door and saw a picture of a dog, and I was overjoyed, because for a second I thought it was real. That sounds cracked, I’m sure, but that is what happens when you are deprived of . . . anything. It needs to change here.”
Surprisingly, she fully agrees with Shatter about one aspect of her case. In his terse response to the moral question of imprisoning a pensioner who is being treated for cancer, he said that age cannot be a consideration.
D’Arcy expresses a similar view. “A person’s age is not relevant when it comes to taking a stand,” she says in her rushed, sweeping way. “I may well have fewer commitments to family now than a younger person would, and this gives me the opportunity – as well as the duty – to act. It’s important to realise that people can be effective regardless of age. And, you know, you have to follow something through. It’s no good having a big march and 100,000 people turning out and nothing more is done about it. The principle is important.
“I am surprised that there haven’t been more complaints along the lines of, ‘Oh, she is just doing this for drama or publicity.’ I’m encouraged that people seem to be reacting to the principle of what we are doing and what I’m here for.”
D’Arcy and Farrell say they occupied the runway at a time when no flights were scheduled to land. The court heard that two delayed passenger flights had to go into a holding pattern because of the disruption.
D’Arcy had fully expected to be removed immediately from the tarmac by airport security. “But nobody noticed us,” she says. “We had to go back to the fence to tell the others in our group to ring security and alert them to the fact that we were on the runway. What was security doing? Even the judge was shocked when he heard that.”
D’Arcy’s absolutism and sense of certainty seem unusual at a time when pragmatism and ambivalence define so much of our politics. She is a daughter of the turbulence of the 20th century. Her father, Joseph, was a tenement child from Henrietta Street in Dublin and was active in the IRA during the War of Independence. He later met Miriam Billig, a Jewish Londoner whose parents had fled Odessa, when they were both finding their way in London.
Neither parent would ever elaborate on their exotic backgrounds. “They would be scornful and dismissive of my attempts to explain them: they’d say it was rubbish,” D’Arcy wrote in Loose Theatre, a baggy and slyly humorous memoir of her hectic life, which she published in 2005.
D’Arcy was born in 1934. As children she and her sisters learned to avoid using the word “nice” at the dinner table, as it was enough to set their father off. He was by nature reserved, but something about the word, she later understood, infuriated him. “It was a red rag to a bull; he associated it with the self-effacing Catholic gentility, which he abhorred,” she recalled in Loose Theatre.
In her adolescence D’Arcy moved between the “treacherous forest” of Ireland and England. She immersed herself in theatre and met the Barnsley playwright John Arden, author of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance. The pair married in 1957 and responded instinctively to the social and political issues of their time.
She became a parent herself, and her four boys lived in London, in India and on an island in Lough Corrib before they were through their teens. They saw their mother imprisoned in Shillong Jail, in northeast India, and, later, in Armagh for refusing to pay a fine incurred during a republican rally. During the Greenham Common women’s peace camp, which existed from 1981 to 1990, she spent two days in solitary confinement at Holloway Prison for refusing to adhere to the strip-search policy.
D’Arcy’s son Finn Arden, who now lives in Galway, has observed his mother’s activism up close since early childhood. “She’s a very strong-minded person. She could have signed the bond, yes, but she would have seen that as an infringement on her right to protest against something she feels strongly about. For all of her life she has been against imperialist violence around the world.
“I was probably hauled along to more rallies and propaganda films than I can remember,” Arden says of his formative years. On the Lough Corrib island, their home had no electricity and no phone line. A neighbour would shout messages from the mainland, and they cycled into Oughterard for groceries. “I sometimes wished for the childhood my friends had – homes with a television,” says Arden.
“I suppose we were a bit embarrassed by their lifestyle when we were young kids. We would go about in bare feet and that kind of thing. Our friends just accepted it, and when we were a bit older, in our 20s, they would often talk with her about the activism she was involved in.”
Arden participated in the “occasional CND” march but says that none of the boys became involved in peace activism with the same passion as their parents. They worried about the violence, the emotional toll and the long absences, and spoke to her once or twice about easing off. “But it was pointless,” he says.
“Even now, asylum seekers come to the house, and she writes letters and helps in every way she can. She gets too involved in other people’s problems sometimes . . . You can’t help wish she would look after herself.”
He says D’Arcy managed to give up smoking only recently, and he is concerned that her time in Limerick Prison will cause her to take it up again.
It is Arden who now tries to orchestrate the number of people wishing to visit her in prison. He also passes on good wishes in the six-minute daily phone call she is permitted. D’Arcy’s many visitors must go through a rigorous security system: photographic ID, pat down, mouth check, sniffer dog and X-ray machine. No pens or phones are permitted, and visitors are not allowed to wear scarves. A member of the prison staff sits in on the conversation.
D’Arcy cheerfully says that some of the women she has befriended think she is bonkers for not signing the simple piece of paper that will get her out of there. But, a fortnight in, she has no intention of doing so. Instead she is organising. “Busy,” she says brightly when asked how her days pass.
She has asked Lelia Doolan, the film producer and a longstanding friend, to persuade the bookshops in Galway to donate books for the prison library. She laughs a lot and sometimes talks about her situation as if it is a bit of a lark. She says the food in Limerick Prison is wonderful, as is her cellmate, a Hungarian woman who sings opera. D’Arcy herself is using her prison time to improve her tin whistle-playing. A musical collaboration between the cellmates would seem inevitable.
“She’s indomitable, really,” Doolan says. “People sometimes think of Margaretta as a person without a sense of humour, but if you read her memoir you see the absolute hilarity with which she views life, while at the same time being very serious about it.”
Her on-off treatment for cancer appears not to have slowed her down. Even the death of her husband, in 2012, did not dissuade her from the vigils at Shannon. “She brought a lot of experience in activism and obstinacy too,” says Lannon of her role in the vigils that are held near the airport once a month. “A real determination. Some days we would have five people, some days 50, but Margaretta would normally be there.”
Her husband often accompanied her, sitting in a wheelchair in his latter years. “If he were here he would be giving out to me about all the things he has been left to do while I am in this place,” she says with a laugh. “But he would absolutely support me in this.”
She admits to being pleased by the attention her imprisonment has generated and by the fact that it has highlighted the quiet, stubborn presence of the Shannon activists. If that leaves her open to the accusation that this is all a publicity stunt, then so be it.
“She absolutely is doing it for publicity,” says Doolan. “And that publicity is about trying to stop warlike events happening on our land when we profess to be neutral. What she is doing from jail is a very classical thing: she is ensuring that the struggle for peaceful means goes on, and she is trying to engage as many people as possible.”
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International Global Women's Strike statement supporting Margaretta at:
www.globalwomenstrike.net
Many others have added their signatures and it will be handed into the Irish embassy in London. To sign, email: gws@globalwomenstrike.net
For more information and to find out what you can do, go to: www.margarettadarcy.com
Free Margaretta D'Arcy! Free Shannon from the US Military!
www.globalwomenstrike.net
Many others have added their signatures and it will be handed into the Irish embassy in London. To sign, email: gws@globalwomenstrike.net
For more information and to find out what you can do, go to: www.margarettadarcy.com
Free Margaretta D'Arcy! Free Shannon from the US Military!
3
As far as the use of Shannon is concerned, it would be wonderful to discover that Ireland had finally developed a moral backbone in relation to this aspect of foreign policy. Yes, we might suffer economically but aren't some things more important such as not facilitating torture or unnecessary foreign wars by granting access to airports. Maybe even the US might begin to grow a moral backbone if little old Ireland refused to support America in this regard.
2
While there is is much to admire in her principled stand against US militarism, you can't but be affected by her son's comments about what it was like to grow up with an activist mother. It reminds me of the character in Bleak House who is so preoccupied with helping impoverished foreign people that she forgets to look after her own children. Sometimes activism can become an excessively selfish endeavour where the cause becomes everything, trumping even family commitments.
1
When I look at many youngsters who grew up in the materialist Ireland of recent times, who are surrounded by 'stuff' (mostly plastic junk), parents probably maxed out on credit, and who have absolutely no idea about the real value of anything, I think that on balance growing up in an activist family is probably the better deal. There is good and bad in every family situation.
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Only by speaking out against the cruelty of war and the killing of others for profit can she and we protect her own and our own from the same fate.
As for “The rule of law must prevail even when it creates difficult circumstances.”from the justice minister he seems unaware of the unconstitutionality and unlawfulness of taxes and charges that take proportionately more from the low paid and poor than from the higher paid. What he's unwittingly implying really is that he should be in prison not her for failing to face the difficult circumstances of upsetting the higher paid by violating the constitutional rights of citizens and preventing the rule of law from prevailing.
As for “The rule of law must prevail even when it creates difficult circumstances.”from the justice minister he seems unaware of the unconstitutionality and unlawfulness of taxes and charges that take proportionately more from the low paid and poor than from the higher paid. What he's unwittingly implying really is that he should be in prison not her for failing to face the difficult circumstances of upsetting the higher paid by violating the constitutional rights of citizens and preventing the rule of law from prevailing.
1
Be more in line if Kenny and Co lock up the bankers instead of a fine human rights worker who stood her ground Shannon is a public airport not to be used by uncle Sam to bomb the hell out another country.We are run by a right wing elite who will do what the USA tells them what to do.Freedom is another country.
5
Margaretta embodies ' having the courage of your convictions' - Shatter embodies being an ass ( as in donkey). There is an old pun : '' I am not an ass 'though I go to bray'' , and bray he does. As everyone with an ounce of sense points out the real villains are living free and rich having wrecked the Irish economy - absurd and an insult to us all. Brava Margaretta.
2
That is the Margaretta d'Arcy I know. She has been very supportive towards me. Any time I bump into her around Galway, she is always asking how I am doing and encourages me to pursue certain avenues I have spoken to her I am interested in.
Whatever people think about her methods she is a woman of the utmost integrity and has to be admired. such qualities are sadly lacking in many of the leaders in today's society.
some would do well to emulate her rectitude.
Sorry about the split post.
Whatever people think about her methods she is a woman of the utmost integrity and has to be admired. such qualities are sadly lacking in many of the leaders in today's society.
some would do well to emulate her rectitude.
Sorry about the split post.
3
I have known Margaretta for over a quarter of a century but it's only recently I have got to know her better being involved with her in the promotion of the "Welcome to our World" DVD highlighting the problems people in wheelchairs have in getting around Galway.
In the above article her son Finn states "she gets too involved in other people's problems sometimes....You can't help wish she would look after herself."
In the above article her son Finn states "she gets too involved in other people's problems sometimes....You can't help wish she would look after herself."
“The rule of law must prevail even when it creates difficult circumstances.” Why isn't the same criteria applied to the elite who wrecked this country?
5
Because capitalists rule, fascists rule and everything is such an hypocrisy . I you know that and I know that and everybody knows that .. She is an inconvenience because she speaks out for thousands of people that know well what is going on in this airport is a crime and breaking the law but it is swept under the carpet
2
the reason the banker have never been prosecuted is they have politicians in their pockets
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Are you looking for a Kangaroo court?? What rubbish. There is thankfully laws in this country and they decide and not politicians. This is just another one of those stupid comment that really is not worthy of response.
A great and noble woman. Shatter should hang his head in shame but of course he doesn't have any, steeped in arrogance as he is. Too arrogant even to take a breath test when requested to by a Guard.
It is Shatter and his predecessors whom should be in prison for the terms prescribed for those public officials who facilitate torture in direct contravention of the Criminal Justice Act 2000 and the UNCAT.
It is Shatter and his predecessors whom should be in prison for the terms prescribed for those public officials who facilitate torture in direct contravention of the Criminal Justice Act 2000 and the UNCAT.
5
The Feb. 2003 attack on US warplane at Shannon, by the Catholic Workers Pitstop Ploughshares was however inspiring and did awaken the ‘sleeping Irish’, albeit briefly: remember over 100,000 people marched in Dublin. Nonetheless, reflecting in 2008 one of the protesters, Ciaron O’Reilly, wrote of his dismay at “.. an Irish society so integral to facilitating the killing yet so disengaged with the escalating and expanding war.”
1
Margaretta D’Arcy rightly stands as an embarrassment to our consumerist, celebrity-obsessed, consensual Ireland, which has a poor tradition of dissent from prevailing, orthodox views. And an even poorer record of organised civil disobedience and in’ Speaking Truth to Power’. For all our so-called ‘revolutionary’ tradition, I find this intriguing
Not often you come across someone who is prepared to do jail time for something they believe in. If her sentence does nothing more than reopen the debate about a supposedly neutral country's role in facilitating imperialist wars, Margaretta D’Arcy will have achieved something.
Given all the political baggage, I was reluctant to use the word 'imperialist', but how else to describe wars/occupations of other sovereign states instigated by a global power in order to gain control of territory with strategic value in terms of energy resources?
Given all the political baggage, I was reluctant to use the word 'imperialist', but how else to describe wars/occupations of other sovereign states instigated by a global power in order to gain control of territory with strategic value in terms of energy resources?
It's actually a high security prison that was confirmed to me by a staff member, when I visited her.
Finn Arden ( her son)
Finn Arden ( her son)
how long can they legally hold her in prison. The fact that they have put her in a high security prison is a bit of an overkill.
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Another propaganda article encouraging a professional protester who has broken the law in England and Ireland. As Shatter said sign the document and she would be out immediately. Why oh why is so much publicity given to her when there are far more important topics such as HSE & Irish Water plus some real facts about the need for electricity connectors as against perception that's all for England??
2
I stand with Margaretta like thousands of others. She has exposed the complicity of successive Irish Governments who turned a blind eye to the warmongering of the US Government by facilitating the US military and rendition flights through Shannon civilian airport.
1
I understand she plonked herself on the runway to stop the war, but the article doesn't say whether or not it worked.
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