May 2nd, 2019
Activists from Cork’s Extinction Rebellion movement held a climate vigil outside the Clayton Hotel yesterday evening while the Taoiseach was in a town hall meeting.
Protesters stood in silence outside the hotel holding placards and banners to show their dissatisfaction with the State’s lack of climate action.
Extinction Rebellion is a civil disobedience environmental movement whose focal aim is to draw the public and Government’s attention to climate change and biodiversity decline.
The crowd became more vocal as Leo Varadkar passed them by
on his way out of the hotel, chanting slogans including “system change, not climate
change”.
Speaking to The Green News, Oliver Moran of the Green
Party said that the Mr Varadkar needs to hear and listen to dissident
environmental voices across Ireland.
“I don’t think people are being heard anywhere in the
country. I don’t think they’re even being heard in Dublin,” said Mr Moran. “That
is why the Extinction Rebellion movement is springing up everywhere.”
Mr Moran, who managed to briefly shared his climate concerns with the Taoiseach, added that “social media” environmental campaigns are not enough and that climate demands need to be made on the streets.
Serge Vandenberghe, an artist and active member of Cork’s
Extinction Rebellion, said that the Taoiseach must realise that the group’s
organiser is a teenage mother fighting for the future of her child.
“The person who organised Extinction Rebellion in Cork is a
young lady, eighteen years old,” he said. “She is fighting because she wants a
future for her child in Ireland, I think she has to fight for climate action,
now.”
Wren Alice Ind organised a protest
in Cork in late April where hundreds of protestors staged a “die-in” on the
streets where around 200
supporters symbolically lied down on Oliver Plunkett Street to depict the
looming possibility of species extinction without urgent climate action.
Dublin city was also the scene of a large peaceful protest in April where XR campaigners brought traffic on O’Connell Bridge to
a halt for several hours.
The group’s protests in London has
made international headlines due to their consistency and creative acts of civil
disobedience carried out to draw attention to the scope of our age’s climate
problem.
Yesterday, the UK Parliament voted to declare a “climate emergency” in line with the demands of the movement, becoming the first country in Europe to do so.
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