It would be nice to think that somewhere in the office where the decision to prosecute Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh was taken a postmortem is being conducted along the lines of “what genius came up with that f**king stupid idea? Did you see those Fenian bastards cheering every time someone shouted “tiocfaidh ár lá[1]” and singing “Oró Sé Do Bheatha ‘Bhaile”. That’s the bloody song that Cillian Murphy’s IRA unit sings in that Ken Loach film. There was about 1500 of the f**kers outside one of the most important courts in London waving Palestinian flags and Irish tricolours. You went to a posh school, so you know what a pyrrhic f**king victory is Sebastian!”

As someone who had more than his share of Irish solidarity demonstrations wandering the streets of north London on wet January afternoons, including with some really dodgy people, I have never seen anything like this. For a start, the sun was shining. More importantly, a very large crowd had gathered outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court to protest against what is very obviously a political show trial. My impression is that the crowd skewed towards the ages of Kneecap’s members and there was a roughly equal mix of Irish and English people.

It is always a bit invidious to pick out the best speech, especially for me as I don’t generally tend to hang around for the speeches. However, I would single out Frank Magennis who called for a democratic secular Palestinian state for all the people who live in historic Palestine. As with some other speakers, he called for Starmer and Netanyahu to face trial for war crimes. This demand resonated with an audience which often feels powerless in the face of horror. Events like the demonstration are an essential way of breaking the sense of isolation when contemplating the daily slaughter by a genocidal state.

There is an obvious explanation why the cops would allow two supporters of the Gaza slaughter to stand inches away from the main demonstration. One of them was wearing a metal dog tag and the other was wrapped in an Israeli flag. A woman told me that she’d seen one of them before and was confident he was linked to Mossad. Clearly, they want someone to thump them so that they would be the story. The crowd was too smart for that.

Something with a less obvious explanation is why a bunch of entitled pillocks with drums turn up at these things. They did a much better job of disrupting the speakers and musicians than the Zionists did. More than once during their “performance” I found myself thinking wistfully about old Belfast ways of dealing with anti-social behaviour.

Liam Óg has been bailed unconditionally until August 20^th. The people who are providing political and legal support for the genocide have been humiliated by the movement supporting him. This was a great day for friends of the Palestinian people and unrepentant Fenians.

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[1] An old Irish peasant proverb which we can freely translate as “better days will come”. Something like that anyway.