The above article contains a quite astonishing number of lies and misrepresentations.

The numbers involved in the attempted direct action amounted to in or around 200. The claim of 700 is a fantasy.

The Irish Anti-War Movement has a steering committee of fifteen. There are three SWP representatives but they form a small minority.

The IAWM did not endorse the Grassroots Network Against War's planned direct action. It felt that the plan had little chance of success and that it could only result in a potentially disastrous stand-off with the cops.

Any violence at a demonstration would be playing into the hands of the Irish establishment and the media, which have been trying as hard as possible to scare people away from the anti-war movement with red-scare tales and accusations of violence. Worse still, the Irish cops have a long record of causing trouble at demonstrations.

In the event the media scare stories about violence had their intended effect (along with the dreadful weather). Only about 1,000 people attended the IAWM march and at most 200 attended the GNAW event. The cops, as expected, behaved in a highly provacative way but luckily the protestors kept their heads and didn't provide the expectant media with any pictures of violence. Also as expected the planned direct action was entirely unsuccesful.

Again, with statements like "any violence at a demonstration" we see the Trot tactic of talking up the possibility of violence.

These scumbags did their best to first of all try the typical tactic of calling their march on the same day as the Grassroots Network Against War. Then they spent hours posting "crocks of shit" to indymedia about how the Gardai "have a history of violence" in order to scare people away from the Direct Action.

SWP = March, sell papers, recruit, back up Labour.

SP = March, sell papers, recruit, wait for the Big Workers Strike in Never Never Land.

The Trots are integrated wholeheartedly into the Capitalist system. It couldn't function without them.

Icepicks all round!

Try to make your points without the gratuitous abuse.

There was a possibility of violence. The media wanted violence, the establishment wanted violence and the cops have a long record of starting violence at demonstrations in Ireland. Even just by acting in a provocative manner the cops will always have a fair chance of getting trouble going if some idiot loses his head.

Luckily, nobody did. Although some people did the next best thing by masking up and providing the press with wonderful pictures of goons in balaclavas. Just what the state wanted people to see in their Sunday papers.

Let's look at the factual outcome of the GNAW action:

1) 200 people fail to carry out their action in the face of overwhelming police numbers.

2) The media was able to run a week long campaign, portraying the anti-war movement as being made up of violent nutters.

3) The numbers involved in anti-war activity on the island fell from nearly 150,000 two weeks ago to less than 1% of that on Saturday. Given that the main strategy of the establishment was to scare as many of those people away from the anti-war movement as possible it would appear that GNAW gifted them with a wonderful opportunity.

Well done.

There is always a possibility of violence. There is on anything whether it's walking down the street, selling your newspaper, attending a march or taking part in a direct action. What the IAWM spokesperson (Richard Boyd-Barrett of the SWM) did was to emphasise and hype the chance of that violence. He did this deliberately while also claiming that the GNAW DA was "badly organised" and would "fizzle out".

Contrast this to the behaviour of GNAW that explicitly encouraged people to attend the IAWM protest if that's what they wanted to do, encouraged people to attend the Feb 15th demo (of c.100,000) in Dublin and call for diversity. No attacks were made by GNAW on the IAWM.

If one goes further and looks at the newswire of indymedia.ie it is easy to see that the Trots spent the better part of a week attacking the GNAW organisers. The best examples of this came from members of the Socialist Party (who, to give them credit, put their names on their posts when they made these attacks) who emphasised the possibility of violence by talking about armed Gardai and undercover armed cops.

What actually happened on the day was that there were about 3-400 people involved in the attempted direct action (not 700 as claimed in the first post, my error, but I'm not good at crowd counting and that's what it felt like to me. I accept the revised estimates as 3 other people had independently counted).

There was 1 incident in which a chap had a balaclava on and we asked him to take it off and calm down and he did. There was 1 incident where a Garda smacked someone in the nose. There were 10 arrests as we jostled with the fence.

Overall a far cry away from the massacre that Trots predicted.

I invite anyone to look at the indymedia.ie newswire and judge for themselves whether or not "Non-aligned peacenik", "Anti-war activist", "Ann McGrath" etc are deserving of abuse or not. Personally I thought the previous post was over the top, but not by much. The SWP and SP have done serious damage in attempting to create a split in the anti-war movement in order to retain control. In doing so they've aligned themselves with Labour and the Greens and other liberal-capitalists.

Not a proud day to be a Trot.