Learning from Dublin Mayday - some organisational problems

ireland / britain | anarchist movement | opinion / analysis Saturday May 14, 2005 00:25 by Dec McCarthy - WSM

Part 2 of 3 articles on the Dublin EU Summit protests

It should be openly acknowledged that that in the process of organising for Mayday and in dealing with the aftermath DGN (Dublin Grassroots Network) was far from perfect. Many of the problems that we encountered were probably unavoidable and can be put down to lack of experience, bad or unclear decision-making or overwork. However, there are other issues that cannot be so easily dismissed-in particular the lack of accommodation and other facilities for visiting protestors and insufficient support for defendants from DGN following the protests. It is also worth considering if the loose organisational structure of DGN may have intrinsic flaws that exacerbated or caused some of these problems.

DGN fucks up with accommodation

A couple of days before Mayday the police discovered and shut down the squat that was intended to serve as a convergence/accommodation centre during the protests. Although the 100-150 or so international activists were all found somewhere to sleep this loss obviously caused difficulties. Without a proper convergence centre in which to debate and discuss issues related to the protests many of the international activists felt excluded and blamed and resented DGN for not providing what they regarded as basic facilities for a protest like Mayday. On the other hand, a large number of Irish activists felt they were doing their best in difficult and stressful conditions and that the visitors were treating DGNers as disreputable tour operators rather than comrades. Unsurprisingly, over the week a very discernible "them and us" attitude developed between some Irish and English anarchists. (It should be noted that the visitors were a very heterogenous group and some means only some)

This led to further difficulties when the Indymedia centre began to serve as the default convergence centre with people hanging around, eating and drinking. This was not what the Community Media Network had agreed to when it had made their premises available to Irish Indymedia and it ended up creating tensions and misunderstandings between people from CMN/Indymedia and people from DGN. CMN/Indymedia had no problem with meetings being held in the building but understandably felt that if the place was treated as a social centre it would undermine its role as an alternative media hub. On the other hand, some of the visitors believed that Indymedia, as a constituent part of the anti-capitalist movement, should make the space available to them because DGN hadn't provided any other options. This underlying tension flared up in innumerable little incidents. At one point tempers were so frayed that CMN activists were pushing to have the Indymedia centre shut down early because of the behaviour of some international activists.

The lack of solidarity and the rudeness of small minority of visiting activists was not the real cause of the problems though. The blame rests with us in DGN for not thinking through the consequences of issuing an international call out without having the capacity to provide the basic infrastructure for visiting protestors.

Why did this happen? While many people in DGN have had a lot of experience organising protests and campaigns of various sorts we had not until Mayday organised anything that included the sort of logistical support that an international call out demands and we underestimated the work that it would involve. The group dealing with accommodation provision was too small and included activists who were already burdened with an extraordinary amount of work. We should have collectively made much more of an effort to support them or made the decision that we were not in the position to provide accommodation much earlier. This highlights one of the observable drawbacks of the working groups model that we used when people are overstretched; difficult and problematic tasks, such as accommodation provision, get doled out as a way of taking them off the agenda rather than really dealing with them collectively. This "out of sight, out of mind" approach could, in the future, potentially create far more serious problems than we faced last year during Mayday.

Wisdom in hindsight is a fairly useless luxury but it is also worth reflecting on how we took an international model and applied it wholesale to a local context without entirely thinking it through and how that ended up colouring the perception of a good number of the visiting activists. As effective network building both between various elements of the Irish anti-capitalist movement and international activists is one of the secondary aims of events like Mayday this stands as one of DGN greatest failings over the weekend.

DGN's Legal support

Similarly, DGN's legal and defendant support work was more piecemeal than it should have been. The main reason for this is that once again we left an important job in the hands of too few people and we failed to understand just how much preparation and effort is needed to do such work effectively. Because of this going into Mayday we didn't have a proper bail fund and ever since Mayday a small number of people doing legal support having been trying to play catch up.

In the run up to the protests the legal team distributed thousands of bust cards with a solicitor's number and legal briefings to prepare people for the possible consequences of protesting. It appears though that many of the people who were arrested near the Ashtown Gate were new to politics and had never taken part in anything confrontational and did not have this information. This meant many of those arrested were processed without knowing what was likely to happen to them or whether they could expect support. This was further complicated by the fact that the Gardai refused to allow the arrestees to make a call until the next day which slowed down the speed of the response of the legal support group. Nonetheless, they were nearly all contacted one way or another over the weekend. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the media furore about the "riot" the vast majority of defendants contacted opted not get involved in a defendant support group or accept any help from DGN. For those who did opt to accept our solidarity money was and is continuing to be raised but there is no Mayday defendants group to speak of and it seems unlikely that one will emerge.

Two of the English anarchists arrested did ask DGN for solidarity but were unhappy with the level of support they received. DGN's lack of organisational coherence is part of this story because despite some individuals' best efforts on this score we failed to make defendant support a collective priority. Some of this is a question of experience but for something as important as legal support this is not acceptable and this aspect of the Mayday experience begs political as well as organisational questions.

DGN's failings as an organisational model

These problems were not just oversights they are serious political problems. We need to develop sustainable legal support structures within the libertarian movement but there are a number of obstacles to this not least the organisational form of DGN. One of the fundamental strengths of the DGN network model is that it is easy to get involved, have a say, work on a given issue and then, if you choose, take a break. This is very attractive in certain respects but as the network is primarily a network of individuals rather than groups it can lack organisational coherence and consistency. This is compounded by the fact that many of the people in DGN have only been working with each other for a relatively short period and the informal patterns of cooperation and interdependence that might compensate for such organisational weaknesses haven't fully developed yet. This has meant that problems and issues can present themselves at a time when DGN is not meeting very regularly or at all and often nobody takes up the slack. This is in contrast with more established anti-capitalist networks elsewhere, which consist mainly of groups that have had a longer experience of working with each other.

Potentially, this could create other problems- not least unclear decision-making, the development of informal hierarchies and a lack of accountability. It also seems as if the structure of DGN makes it impossible to plan political activity in a paced and strategic manner. For instance after Mayday many activists were completely burnt out during a period which saw an anti-immigrant referendum and Bush's visit to Ireland and this definitely hampered the libertarian campaigns in response to these two events. Politically, such an unstable network is also very unlikely to build the sustained links with communities and workplaces that could make anti-capitalism a genuinely subversive force. It is not clear at the time of writing whether DGN has a future or not in its current form but these very serious failings will have to be addressed by the anti-authoritarian community in the future.

These articles are greatly extended versions of an article to be published in Red & Black Revolution No 9. There are 3 articles in this set (as well as two further ones on the media published in RBR8 and half a dozen news reports published by the WSM at the time. Together this comprise some 30,000 words on the events of that weekend.

Looking back on the Dublin EU summit protests - Mayday 2004
In 2004 the Mayday weekend the libertarian Dublin Grassroots Network (DGN) organised a series of anti-capitalist events during the summit that marked the Irish presidency of the EU. Thousands took to the streets, despite police intimidation and a massive media scare campaign, to take part in a weekend of demonstrations, street theatre, direct actions and street parties.

Learning from Dublin Mayday - some organisational problems
Many of the problems that we encountered were probably unavoidable and can be put down to lack of experience, bad or unclear decision-making or overwork. However, there are other issues that cannot be so easily dismissed-in particular the lack of accommodation and other facilities for visiting protestors and insufficient support for defendants from DGN following the protests.

Learning from Dublin Mayday - anti-capitalism: where to now?
The experience of Mayday brings up us back to some of the perennial questions thrown up by counter summits protests: how do we broaden our movement and what role does direct action and confrontational tactics have in that process. The following article is a personal account of DGN's approach to such issues in relation to Mayday and goes on to argue for increased tactical flexibility from anarchists within the anti-capitalist movement.