some meandering thoughts on RTS yesterday.

dublin | anti-capitalism | opinion/analysis Tuesday September 23, 2003 13:55 by ye olde one - disorganised.

what the title says.

Hmm. Well, lesson learned is in future that we dont advertise in future that we're going to repaint the streets, we'll just do it on the critical mass or whenever the chance arises. Right from the word go the pigs were coming up to everyone with a bag and searching it for paint and other shit we'd brought down. By the time we were actually leaving most, if not all of our paint had been taken off us, as well as our names and addresses.

And christ, what was with all the cops? How many of them were there? On my way there they were lined up ALL the way up O'Connell Street. Helicopters, 4 "mounties" (horses got very agitated very easily, I hate it when they bring animals along to these things, it really isnt fair), loads of senior Garda, undercover Special Branch goons, shady types in suits chatting to the Seargeants...

So we never got to paint our five locations. But it turned out OK in the end. Walking around town on a crisp September evening was nice. There was a good atmosphere and people were upbeat despite all the paint being confiscated.

The run up through Temple Bar was interesting. I dont think running on protests is a good thing because you can get split up easily but I suppose this was a small demo which was never going to turn nasty - at least not on our part anyway. It showed that the Garda really have no idea what people are going to do, or how to deal with non-hierarchical protest (STILL constantly asking who was in charge).

The Man & the Machine were excellent. That lad who makes the music with his mouth, jesus, he's just incredible. It was nice to occupy Dame Street for a while, perhaps a small slice of revenge for the bastards laying into the crowd in May 2002.

Wandering then towards Westmoreland Street, some muppet from the Dublin Cycling Campaign, who I recognised from previous occasions, caused a scene when trying to double back towards Grafton Street over the break in the road in front of the front gate of Trinity College. The Garda told him to get back but we refused, and loads of people swarmed around him to defend him. Eventually he went on, and people followed him.

Now, I'm trying to stay cool here, but the Dublin Cycling Campaign have to answer to this. This guy was trying to lead the crowd up the Dail - a favourite tactic of the DCC. They love their photo opportunity for the media. Now, contrary to the way it might have appeared, RTS had a route in mind for the repainting to go, and going up a normally traffic-deserted street to the Dail (which isnt even in session at the moment) was no part of it.

RTS, and the Critical Mass, suffer (or benefit) from a lack of coherent direction on them. So there's no muppet with a megaphone barking orders on what to do. This in turn leads to a bit of a vacuum. On a Critical Mass before (in July?), the DCC showed up and basically hijacked it, and brought the ride into Ranelagh so they could deliver a letter to the National Safety Council (who werent there at 7pm on a Friday evening).

They just assumed the CM would come along, which they did, but were a bit pissed off about. The DCC got their news coverage on RTE, they made their speech. What I love about the Critical Mass is that we usually dont know where we're going, and we just amble around town. If the DCC want to go somewhere on a bike ride then they should organise something themselves. They know damn well the Critical Mass is a separate thing to them (in fact they often take steps to stress that difference themselves, they dont like being associated the the CM much at all, and several people have been booted off the dublin_cycling Yahoo group for not toe-ing the DCC line).

Anyway, this guy from the DCC was leading the crowd up to the Dail, assuming leadership. Did the DCC help put flyers and posters out for this RTS? Did they offer us any advice? Did they do stencils around town? Did they help put the fake Dublin City Council flyers under car windshield wipers? Did they even offer us a donation for photocopying? Do they ever? DO THEY FUCK. I dont know this guy's name but he even had a Dublin City Council yellow jumper on for christ's sake. I think the DCC is more concerned with making empty political gestures rather than actually slowing down the traffic around town (which is one of the aims of the critical mass and RTS).

So we wound back around to Dame Street after some initial hesitation. Nothing much else happened up until the end in O'Connell Street. Some of us went to the bin tax march. There was a Homes Not Jails banner at the front, with about 40 (about half of whom were masked) RTSers shouting "2, 4, 6, 8, fuck the police state! arriving up to Parnell Square. Some of the crowd applauded us, but I think we freaked out a lot of them.

There was about 200 of us who joined in the bin tax thing, and added quite a large chunk to the crowd that was assembling (we arrived early). But what freaked out the Bin Tax people was the amount of Garda we had with us. There wasnt that many cops at the Garden of Remembrance, and all of a sudden there were loads, they surrounded the crowd on the path, and more vans arrived from the north side of Parnell Square. The Mounties were still in attendance as well.

The bin tax thing took AGES to get going. There were some incredibly boring speeches in the freezing cold, telling the crowd exactly what they knew already. Some guy from Eng-ger-land nearly put me to sleep, but I guess Mick O'Reilly was OK - at least he was calling for direct action and blocking the bin trucks. Its rare you hear a union official doing that. Most of the RTS crowd had melted away or just into the overall bin tax march crowd.

By the time it actually got going (crowd I would estimate at 3,000 or so, if you want to play the numbers game) we were cold and pissed off, and any energy we had for going to Mountjoy had dissipated with the speeches and all the muppet socialist paper sellers coming up to us trying to sell their shit. We got great entertainment from the Dublin West Sinn Fein branch banner. Loads of twee Oirish imagery, best one I think was a dove carrying an M16 in its claws. With the sounds of tired swocialist chanting in our ears, we knew there wasnt going to be any sort of a jail break attempt at Mountjoy (or anything interesting at all in fact), so we fucked off home.

So... RTS goes into its seven month hibernation until May again. And this has been discussed already - but seeing as how the government is holding street parties on May 1st next year for the EU summit, no doubt we may have to come up with some sort of different tactic on the day. But as the Black Bloc lad says in Berlusconi's Mousetrap - we have imagination, they do not. This is where we'll win.

P.S. this is not the views of the "RTS collective" (if such a thing exists), just an individual who happens to tag along now and again...