Letter: Direct action protest is not always the best tactic but without it injustice, oppression, and cruelty would get a free run

I have mixed feelings about the use of direct action to highlight causes, but one can only admire people who put themselves in harm’s way in an effort to halt Climate Change, fight the all-pervasive might of the oil industry, or alleviate the heart-rending plight of animals.

The sight of a woman climbing onto a table at the World Snooker Championships bothered me far less that seeing someone throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, but that’s only because I have a passing interest in art and none at all in snooker.

But such protests are all about making us feel uneasy and getting our attention. When I watched activists storm the Grand National my thoughts strayed to a protest of another era, one that helped to change the course of history: At the Epson Derby in 1913 suffragette Emily Davison threw herself in front of the King’s horse.

She wanted to highlight the fact that women were denied the right to vote. She died of her injuries. That protest brought the suffragette campaign to new heights, and helped to win people a basic human right that should never have been denied to them in the first place.

Sitting on a “Whites Only” seat on a bus in Montgomery in 1955 resulted in Rosa Parks being arrested, brought to a police station, and treated as a criminal, but her action highlighted the injustice of racist laws in that part of the USA.

I’m not suggesting that every direct action protest is necessarily always the ideal “way to go”, but often the inconvenience occasioned by the protest pales to nothing beside the enormity of the issue being highlighted.

Youthful protesters invading the course at Aintree is less disagreeable, I believe, than the deaths of three horses at the same event. Likewise, a woman who glued herself to a railing at a greyhound racing track last month caused far less suffering to her fellow beings than those who abandon unwanted or underperforming dogs or kill them.

And the odd traffic-jam or hold-up due to a disruptive Climate Change demo ought to be worrying than the prospect of all life on the planet ending because we continue to pollute and poison our oceans, rivers and lakes and turn the very atmosphere into an invisible plastic bag to smother us all.

Unfortunately, pressure via high visibility action is necessary and it works. Without it every conceivable form of injustice, oppression, and cruelty would get a free run. But don’t expect any plaudits from the rich and powerful if you opt to rattle their gilded cages.

Doing the right thing can get you into a lot of bother!

John Fitzgerald, Co Kilkenny