The overwhelming evidence of Climate Change is causing me significant alarm, Extinction Rebellion is a response that has gained some traction but as I show here its 'beyond politics, declare a climate emergency' solution cannot deliver what is needed because capitalism and colonialism are the very political problems that caused Climate Change in the first place. [video]

This video shows all of the 2018 March for Choice pass down the quays in Dublin.  This year we had won the refrendum but much is left to fight for in terms of the details of the legislation and standing down the inevotable anti-choice attempts that will be made once the lefislation comes in to intimidate doctors,  as welll as women and pregnant who will finally be able to access free, safe and legal abortion in Ireland. [video]

As many as 10,000 people took part in the Stand for Truth rally yesterday, and marched in complete silence to the site of the last Magdalene Laundry to close on Sean MacDermott street [video].  In effect this was a counter protest to the Papal Rally taking place uptake road in the Phoenix park in the aftermath of Pope Francis pretending not to know about the institutions while talking to selected survivors.  In fact he met Philomena Lee in the Vatican in 2014, the Irish Times reporting at the time that afterwards, Ms Lee said: “I hope and believe that his Holiness Pope Francis joins me in the fight to help the thousands of mothers and children who need closure on their own stories.”

In May five houses on Summerhill Parade in Dublin were evicted on almost no notice with some 120 people being thrown on the street.  All were owned by the same landlord who in order to make super profits had packed people in, 6-8  to a room, charging them 350-450 each  per month for space on a bunkbed.  Last night, August 7th, as part of a direct action month around housing people marched from the GPO to Summerhill and occupied No 35.[see video]

On Saturday one of our photographers was assaulted and threatened at the ‘No’ campaigns’ anti-choice Rally for Life.  He wasn’t injured and although his camera was punched (see video) no damage was done but this is yet another example of how the No campaign, having failed to make any impact in the polls, are becoming nastier in their desperation.

The ‘Love Both’ anti-choice rally itself was very poorly attended, attracting around 1500 people.  The feeling in the crowd was one of tiredness and demoralisation with a few people even admitting out loud that the turnout was miserable.  Radical Queers Resist were holding a small silent counter protest opposite the entrance to the rally so after counting the crowd we headed over to this.

Saturday March 10th saw an anti-choice march pass through Dublin, part of their campaign to try to maintain the status quo where pregnant people and doctors can be jailed for 14 years for taking abortion pills in this country while others are denied control of their own maternity care. Polls show that few people support this position and its ‘let women die’ implications so the anti-choice campaign is trying to create the fiction of mass support in the hope that people will be more inclined to vote No.

Aware of this, WSM decided to put together a team to go out and document the march for ourselves including physically counting everyone who marched and using other techniques that give a good estimate of the numbers marching. Below we will bring you through the results of each of these counts and estimates but the headline item is that when the organisers claimed 100k had marched this was a blatant lie that we will show is even physically impossible.  We counted 8930 marchers. All of the other methods we used also limited the maximum size of the march to less than 15,000.

The March for Choice saw another another sinister anti-choice video crew in operation.  The last time on investigation they turned out to be an far-right crew who subsequently worked with Tommy Robinson, ex leader of the EDL.  This time the accents were American rather than British and on investigation we discovered they are an extremist anti-choice church, one of this crew has even told media they want women who have had abortions to be executed. [Video report]

As with the previous crew their method is to try and get participants to agree to be interviewed without revealing their extreme anti-choice views. As you will see in the video when challenged as to who they are they tried to vaguely pass themselves off as a TV studio and then Facebook stream.  When people agreed to be interviewed after a few sympathetic appearing questions they were suddenly ambushed with very hostile language in the hope that their targets either don’t notice or get flustered.  The goal is to then broadcast edited footage of flustered or hostile pro-choice people to try and dehumanise us and urge their own followers to fanaticism.

Saturday July 1st saw the annual anti-choice parade and yet again RTE (state ran media) reported a grossly inflated figure of the number marching.  They headlined it as ‘tens of thousands’ and in the body of the article quoted the organisers claiming 70,000 without further comment, appearing to endorse it.  As we are going to show below at the very least that’s a tenfold exaggeration, in fact by our count about 5300 people took part.  And while that estimate might be out by 10 or even 20% its physically impossible for it to be out by up to 1500% as that would require ten people too fit into a one meter square space.

We use the same counting methodologies (see below) for almost every demonstration that takes place in Dublin, from huge anti water charges protests to smaller but still significant ones on a huge range of issues.  We do these sorts of counts more than a dozen times a year.  We don’t always publicise the numbers we reach - organisers always tend to overestimate somewhat, most often guessing a figure that is twice what actually attended.  Generally we agree with what the demands of a demonstration are so we don’t want to appear to undermine it by publicly providing real numbers.  But we do count, we do use those counts internally in the WSM and we often communicate them directly to organisers. 

Every year in either Dublin or Belfast the pro and anti choice movements come head to head around the so called ‘Rally for Life’.  This year it was Dublin’s unwilling role to play host to the bigot parade.  It mattered more years than many as a referendum on the hated 8th Amendment that bans abortion is promised for next year.  It could be that the next Dublin bigot parade scheduled for 2019 will come after they have suffered a major defeat.

About 1000 people marched through Dublin this afternoon as part of the international day of action in defence of science. The March For Science is an international initiative to stand up for science and evidence in the face of an alarming trend toward discrediting scientific consensus and restricting scientific discovery.