“All emergency legislation must go!” – Dublin January 22, 2022
Dublin City Saturday January 22, 2022
Thousands of people gathered at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin city centre on Saturday 22, January, 2022, calling for the immediate end of all covid legislation and the end of masks for children in schools.
While many restrictions were lifted on the same day (in a curious U-turn by the government), the legislation underpinning the restrictions remains in place until March 31.
Protesters united from all over Ireland and marched to the GPO to hear speeches from Dr Vincent Carroll, Rachel Whelan, Peter Dooley, teacher Leanne Conroy, special needs teacher Lea O’Brien, Kevin Quinn, and Diarmuid O Cadhla.
They carried banners that said: “Repeal the legislation” and “Stop destroying our kids’ lives and their future” and chanted “Masks off our kids” and “No vaccine mandates”.
Rachel Whelan, co-founder of Enough is Enough, began by thanking people who “came out to continue to fight for their children’s right to body integrity, and to fight for their freedom, and to push the government for the complete repeal of the primary legislation which at any moment could be used to reinstate the measures lifted today.”
She said: “The removal of some restrictions gave much needed relief to a hugely oppressed and discriminated cohort of people in this country. However, it is far from over and we are now calling for the immediate lifting of those remaining restrictions including the wearing of masks in schools.”
“It is now 17 months since the Dept of Education first issued face masks guidelines for secondary schools in August 2020. Throughout, this entire period, no formal review has taken place on the continued proportionality of this measure that secondary school children are required to wear face masks throughout the school day.
“Children have born the brunt of the past two years and we’re still forcing them to suffer. What the government has been allowed to do to these young people is abusive and cruel and create an imprint of irreversible trauma in years to come, some of who will never know the true impact until later in their lives.”
Rachel said it is unacceptable that adults can now socialize with no restrictions, but children still have to sit in freezing cold classrooms wearing masks. “There is no reason to believe this is over. In fact, we know it’s far from over. With the children still masked in schools and the talk of new variants and deadlier strains, the government’s nice way of reminding people that virus could emerge at any stage and they may just need to lock us all down again to keep us safe.”
“Are they trying to placate us? Sweeten us up before manipulating another situation whereby the people are willing to accept mandatory vaccines for the greater good?” Rachel finished by demanding accountability for the decisions made by the government and NPHET, an inquiry into the handling of the nursing homes, and calling on businesses whose segregation measures did not serve them to unite by saying: “Never again”.
The mood of the crowd was resolute, calling for the repeal of the emergency legislation and vowing to protest until all restrictions are ended.
Leanne Conroy was next on the stage, a fellow concerned mum and co-founder of Enough is Enough, calling out the psychological torture of the last two years, being “bombarded daily with case numbers and deaths, each one tragic and sad but had little relevance to our daily lives where we had children to take care of, jobs to go to, we had to pay our mortgages and get on with our lives, but we were tortured daily with numbers and numbers and cases and cases and lies.”
“There came a tipping point for everybody and for some people they couldn’t take it anymore and it tipped them over the edge. We’ve lost loved ones and we’ve lost friends and we’ve lost family to a mental health crisis that we have never seen before, and that became the real epidemic. We mourn the loss of every single one of them. But for some of us the tipping point was our turbo buttons and it filled our fire. We wouldn’t take anymore. With every daily case count we heard the fire burned brighter and with every new restriction that they announced we grew bolder and more determined to end this.
“They tried to punish us for not submitting but we grew stronger and we stood taller and the more that they pushed us the harder we pushed back. All of us have our red line issue; for some of us it was a lockdown, for some of us it was when your business closed its doors, for some of us it was when they put masks on our children. The urgency to some of those red line issues may have passed with the announcements that came yesterday, but the red line issue for most of us here today is the impact that all of this has had on our children. Adults have been given their freedom to go to pubs and clubs and restaurants and nightclubs; you can go have your pints but your children have to go to their classrooms in the cold with only a mask over their face to keep them warm. Shame on them. Shame on them.”
Leanne, a teacher, said she had recently returned to the classroom after having children, and found that “it was not the school that I remembered. They were not the children that I remembered. Their spirits were utterly broken, there was no joy on their faces because I couldn’t see their faces. It broke my heart to see that in our schools.
“I’m here today to stand up for them, for every child sitting in a classroom wearing a mask, for every child who has been marched to a vaccination center to take a jab to protect the adults in their lives, for every child who has listened to Micheál Martin announce to the country last night that they would have to continue wearing masks until all eligible children are vaccinated. No way, not my children! Can you imagine the weight of that on their shoulders to hear the leader of this country tell them that this rests on their shoulders? It’s not acceptable; our children don’t deserve to carry that weight. I don’t accept conditions to our freedom. There’s no freedom until we all have freedom.”
Special needs teacher Lea O’Brien then took to the stage, talking about protecting the childhood of children.
“We have a duty of care to protect the children. As an adult sits in a restaurant with their friends or goes for a coffee date, or rams themselves into a tightly-filled nightclub with no masks, the sitting masked child remains unprotected, not protected. My reason for taking my duty of care so seriously is because I understand them importance of childhood. I understand the foundations that are laid which will affect the adults they become.
“The children of today are the adults of tomorrow. Their childhood must be protected. I could come up here today and talk about all of the reasons why we should not mask or inject the children and believe me my list is endless. Instead, I wanted to take time to consider truly what is childhood and what does it mean. When I think of children I think of laughter, I think of discovery, curiosity, play, joy, social interaction, freedom, and most importantly, those booming little smiles. I think of precious times. Most of all I think childhood must be nurtured. Somewhere along the last two years these elements have disappeared. Now when I see children in their environments, I see a disappearance of those booming little smiles. I see restrictions, social distance not social interaction, yellow tape marks and cones to separate them into their bubbles, isolation, COVID-19 signs filling their school hallways and showing them everything they should not do anymore, reminding them further of the burdens they carry, confusion, and ultimately the repression of our children.
“Sick until proven healthy is not a normal childhood. Where is the risk assessment of these measures on children? Where is the analysis and data of how it will affect them? I asked INTO where is the risk assessment for the child’s emotional, physical, intellectual, and social development?
“Repeated experience of fear leads to trauma, children are not there to shield us, instead we have a duty of care as adults to shield them.”
“It is time to resist and if not for yourself, for your children and for their future generations. UNMASK THE CHILDREN.” The crowd erupted emulating the UNMASK THE CHILDREN chant.
Renowned doctor Vincent Carroll took to the stage, calling for the abolition of NPHET and the Irish Medical Council. “Where are the other teachers and where are my colleagues, where are the other doctors? It can be a lonely place when you look around and you see your colleagues ashamed of their behavior but not willing to speak up because of the enforcers within the Medical Council who police their profession who are now in the pocket of government.”
“When a doctor or when any person in the workforce is threatened with their livelihood, threatened with being subtracted from the income, from any function in society, and put on some form of a scrapheap, in fact worse than that, being disgraced through the newspapers and the media, you’re not going to speak up, you’re going to shy away.
“They should be stronger, they should be standing up, and at the end of all of this I’m going to call for the replacement of the Medical Council to allow doctors the freedom. We were told at the end of all of this there would be an evaluation, but I want accountability, I want I want there to be no dark shadows where people can scurry away to after this, I want people brought out into the light to account for their behavior. Otherwise, it will happen again and again and again, because the real experiment in society has been to see how society can behave when threatened with fear, and they scurry. Now those who would claim to be in charge of us are looking at that and saying we can do this again, but I say no we draw the line here.”
“There is no science behind any of this, only agenda. Anything that hasn’t gone the full range of its medical testing over a three-year period is experimental because it’s being given out in an unproven way.”
“We know the truth. We stand for truth and we stand for integrity.
“Everybody knows that upper respiratory viruses mutate, it’s in their nature to do so, and contribute to herd immunity.”
He finished by saying we should be ashamed of what we’ve allowed to happen to children in schools, with the masks causing communications and developmental delays in them, and impact their socialization skills. “We must not be bought off by false promises of an opening up of society. I don’t care if I can’t have a pint, I’m more concerned about children in schools wearing masks. You can’t purchase me, I’m not for sale.”
Peter Dooley took to the stage and welcomed people from all over Ireland and called for solidarity with teachers, international friends, everyone: “It’s important that we stand together as one, ordinary people standing for justice.” He led a moment’s peaceful reflection on those who had passed in the last few years.
“During the last few years, we have seen the biggest transfer of wealth in history towards the billionaires. Currently, in Ireland, we have 1 million people at risk of poverty because of government-imposed lockdowns. Over the last year, nine billionaires’ wealth have increased by 60%, up by 18.3 billion euro, the world’s richest have doubled their wealth while over 99% of people’s incomes have stagnated or fallen in the last year, and even globally there’s 160 million people at least have been pushed into poverty, so when people say COVID kills, lockdowns kill a hell of a lot more.”
“During the last few years, we have seen the biggest transfer of wealth in history towards the billionaires. Currently, in Ireland, we have 1 million people at risk of poverty because of government-imposed lockdowns. Over the last year, nine billionaires’ wealth have increased by 60% , up by 18.3 billion euro, the world’s richest have doubled their wealth while over 99% of people’s incomes have stagnated or falled in the last year, and even globally there’s 160 million people at least have been pushed into poverty, so when people say COVID kills, lockdowns kill a hell of a lot more.”
“There has to be a public inquiry into care homes. The emergency legislation should be repealed immediately. There should be a public investigation into everything that’s going on in the last two years and it should be independent and free of vested interests. The fines of people who have breached nonsensical COVID regulations should be immediately dropped.”
Peter called on people to stand together and be more tolerant and respectful. He continued: “We’ve moved into a technocracy, where the government advocated responsibility to so called experts such as privileged technocrats like Tony Houlihan; why trust a person with our public health whose track record on cervical cancer and swine flu vaccination is horrific? We have to look into creating a democracy by the people, for the people, and will represent the people.”
“The constant barrage of propaganda from the media has terrorized ordinary people. Nearly 50 million has been given in our money for advertising revenues through covid, and then they have the neck to say let’s up the licence fee. RTE are propaganda, we need a really truly independent unbiased news service that’s for the people and by the people.
“This is not over. The government want to move towards digital currency, that’s their end goal, they want to move towards digital IDs, so we have to stand together as people to demand democracy, to demand our rights. The future is not yet written, it’s up to each and every one of us.”
Kevin Quinn, who has a rare aggressive cancer and was advised against taking a covid vaccine, told his story of how he has been demonized next on the stage. “There’s 24,000 people dying of cancer in two years in this country, compared to 5,800 Covid deaths,” he said, saying how the government has failed people.
“We’re not anti-vaxxers, we’re civil rights. We are sticking up for our rights. We are not criminals that the media/government make us out to be.”
“The media has scared the living daylights out of our elderly. They’re scared to go out of their doors, and it’s the media I blame.
Kevin continued: “To the government, you have let everybody down. You say the hospitals are full, but I’ve been in the hospitals 4 times in the last 3 weeks, I’ve asked the nurses, they say they are quiet. Somebody is telling lies. You have failed the people of Ireland. Michael Collins would have turned in his grave to see what you have done to the people of Ireland. This is not the time to stop this fight, this is the time to stay fighting for our freedom and our rights. God bless you all.”
Lastly, Diarmuid O Cadhla, who was instrumental in starting the grassroots Campaign for Truth and Proper Healthcare, took to the stage, encouraging people to continue to protest and NOT to pay covid fines.
“Our fight is not over. We are heading towards March 31, which is when the emergency powers are due to expire. In the week or two leading up to that, undoubtedly, they have made it clear they want to extend these powers, so we must stand and march and protest and do everything humanly possible to stop them.
“We need to use social media as much as we can. Join in with our new platform. We’re going to build the campaign. Let’s take this up in every village and every town in Ireland, and before for the vote fill O’Connell Street. We need to let those people who betrayed us know that we are watching and we will not sit idly by.”
Link to full video https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=511663263552904
Worldwide solidarity
The Dublin rally coincided with countless worldwide rallies for freedom, in Stockholm, Paris, London, Brussels, Melbourne, Helsinki, South Korea, Austria, New Zealand, Germany, India, Switzerland. One attendee at the London protest, said: “It was amazing, the best march I have ever been on. It was a privilege to walk alongside NHS staff opposing vaccine mandates.”
