Shannon five 'trying to preserve life in Iraq'

Five Catholic Worker peace activists went on trial before a packed courtroom in Dublin this week for damaging a US warplane in Shannon in February 2003. Harry Browne reports

Ciaron O'Reilly of the Dublin Catholic Worker community faced tough cross-examination and was also frequently interrupted by the trial judge as he testified in the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.

Court 25 was packed on Thursday, with people sprawled on the floor, as O'Reilly told the jury he had acted "to enflesh the prophecy of Isaiah by beating swords into ploughshares" when he damaged a US Navy plane at Shannon Airport on 3 February 2003, about six weeks before the US invasion of Iraq.

O'Reilly and four others (Deirdre Clancy, Nuin Dunlop, Karen Fallon and Damien Moran), terming themselves the "Pitstop Ploughshares", are charged with criminal damage without lawful excuse to the Navy C40A plane and to the hangar in which it was housed for repairs. The plane had already been damaged a few days earlier in a separate incident.

O'Reilly said he had carried out the act to save lives and protect property, especially essential social infrastructure in Iraq – "hospitals, water-treatment works, what sustains life".

Conor Devally SC, for the prosecution, put it to O'Reilly that he had acted to publicise his views and maximise opposition to the then-impending Iraq war. Devally said it was a matter of "politics, and this was an expression of your politics". O'Reilly replied: "It was an expression of my faith as a Christian."

Devally also said O'Reilly had acted in the clear expectation that he would be arrested and further publicity would arise from this.

O'Reilly said he knew arrest was a "possibility", but that "police officers resonating with our action and joining us was a possibility as well". He said if he were "resigned to people not taking up an alternative path", he would not have acted as he had. He said he "was hoping the action would be an inspiration".

O'Reilly's testimony under direct examination by his counsel, Hugh Hartnett SC, was interrupted several times by Judge Frank O'Donnell, who said he was "not going to allow (O'Reilly) to go into his whole political agenda".

"I've no agenda," O'Reilly said. He described to the court his background in the Catholic Worker movement in Australia, the US and elsewhere, and his work with homeless people, drug addicts and victims of domestic violence.

He said that in the few days prior to their action at Shannon, with war believed to be imminent in Iraq, he and the other defendants had decided they had "two options": to go to Baghdad, or to "non-violently intervene in the preparations for this mass destruction".

They went to the retreat house at Glenstal Abbey in Co Limerick for several days to pray for "discernment", he said, then decided to act at Shannon. Early in the morning of 3 February, they entered the airfield, he said, and lifting the roller door a few inches on the SRS hangar, saw a plane with US Navy markings.

He said the US Navy had a "key role" in the enforcing of sanctions as well as in the first Gulf War, and so he believed this plane to be an important part of the "war machine".

The court had earlier in the week heard Garda evidence that O'Reilly and the others had attacked the plane with a large gardening "mattock", or pickaxe, as well as household hammers and a giant inflatable plastic tricolour hammer labelled, "Hammered by the Irish".

O'Reilly said they "intended to disable the airplane" and "preserve life in Iraq". When arrested, the defendants had gathered in a circle near the front of the plane and appeared to be praying, gardaí had testified.

The court had also earlier heard evidence of a "shrine" constructed outside the hangar by the defendants, with a Bible, a Koran and Rosary beads, photographs of victims of the US bombing of a home in Basra in 1999, and a pair of videotapes, which included Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq, John Pilger's documentary on the effects of sanctions and the ongoing US/British bombing campaign.

Asked by Brendan Nix SC, counsel for Karen Fallon, why they had left the videos, O'Reilly said they "speak of the suffering and deaths of children, who were created in the image of God, and the US Navy's role in those deaths".

In response to a question from Nix, O'Reilly agreed that members of the Catholic Worker Movement generally had a priest who counselled them, and that here in Ireland it was Fr Peter McVerry.

Much of Wednesday and Thursday was taken up with legal argument in the absence of the jury about the admissibility of certain evidence. Village went to press before the trial resumed on Friday morning, when the other defendants were expected to begin testimony. The trial is being heard in Dublin Circuit Court after the defendants successfully applied for a transfer from Co Clare in June of 2003.