It’s Wednesday the 14th of May and Phil Kearney (74) hasn’t eaten since Sunday. He sits on a blue foldable chair at the gates of Leinster House with a sign that reads: ‘I’m hungry for peace in Gaza’. It’s not his first campaign; he fasted for five days in March, but decided Israel’s continued bombardment and blockade of aid called for a second. This time, he is joined by Tessa, Žana and Sieneke, who are also fasting and spend as much time on Kildare Street as their work schedules allow. Two students have stopped to ask what they are doing. They are from Gaza; two of thirteen given
scholarships from Trinity College to study here. “We really appreciate this,” they say. Their families are still there.
A man stops and stands nearby, watching from a distance. Then he walks up and, in an American accent, says: “we’ll stop the bombs when Hamas releases the prisoners”. Everyone shakes their heads.
“We are not Hamas”, the two students say. They aren’t surprised, like we are, by this point interruption; “we get this everyday”. Tessa looks at the man and gestures at the students. “They are not Hamas”, she says. The man repeats himself and walks away.
So far, this is the only negative encounter Phil has had.
“The quality of the people I meet carries me along”, he says. Phil sits outside the Dáil from 10 to 5pm everyday. He is rarely alone.
Tuesday, 12 pm
Members from Irish Healthcare Workers for Palestine (IHCW4P) arrive. The group was established “to stand in solidarity with our colleagues in Gaza and the West Bank”, a doctor at Naas General Hospital, George Little, tells me. He wears a blue scrub top and a stethoscope around his neck. “We could see that not only was the civilian population being targeted, but healthcare workers were being specifically targeted and killed”. A woman, also in scrubs, holds up a poster of a starving child in Gaza. “Look at this”, she says to a politician leaving the Dáil. She and George engage him in a heated discussion. The politician listens, but firmly defends the government’s action, or lack of it. They shake hands at the end.
A group returns from presenting footage from Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza to politicians and staff in the Dáil. Everyone gathers around. “It’s sad that we have to be in there telling them”, says one woman, changing from her scrubs into her regular clothes. Some leave to begin hospital shifts. “It’s been difficult for healthcare workers to raise awareness”, says George. “We’re not allowed to send emails within the organisation relating to Gaza or Palestine. We tried to have vigils in our hospital, and the hospital management team told us we couldn’t do it, that it was political, and that we should keep our political ideas outside.” So that is what George, and many others, did. They held vigils outside their hospitals for the civilians and healthcare workers in Gaza. “The representative bodies of all the medical organizations in Ireland have been extraordinarily quiet…anything that’s part of the establishment seems to have shut down.”
2 pm
A woman walking towards the gates stops by Phil and Tessa. For a moment, she cannot speak. She attended the IHCW4P presentation earlier. She is an advisor to a senator and has already written a speech today imploring the government to act against Israel. “And I’m going up to write another”. There was a sense that the presentation was being “preached to the converted”, as the majority were Oireachtas members already in support. “But I think we needed to hear it as well”. There is silence. She is crying. “The images, and the video footage, it was extraordinarily hard to watch”. She is currently part of a campaign to raise awareness about Teva, an Israeli Pharmaceutical company that is a major supplier of prescription medicines to the HSE and Irish pharmacies. “Contact your local pharmacist, and say, please give me an alternative.” She leaves to write another speech.
People have been approaching Phil and Tessa all day. Many take a photo with the sign “I’m hungry for peace in Gaza”.
A woman agrees to have her photo taken and then changes her mind. She is from Oklahoma. “Better delete that actually”, she says apologetically.
A double decker bus goes past and honks twice. Passengers wave. This has been happening all day.
A man on a motorbike stops at the traffic lights and looks over. When the lights change, he revs his engine and whizzes past with his fist raised in the air.
Wednesday, 12 pm
Members from Dubs For Palestine meet outside the Dáil. This is their 50th consecutive week. “We started outside the Israeli embassy and we closed that. Then we moved here and we hope to close this too”, chuckles David Hickey, who started the group. “ We had a group of former footballers who had a high profile in the city so we felt that we had an obligation to help Palestine for what they’re going through.” The group has since grown to include musicians, dancers, artists – people from “all over the country”. Hickey would like to see more students getting involved. “Spread the word”, he tells me. “You’re invited! You’re invited!”
They gather by the gates. Facing the busy road, a woman plays a violin. The crowd is silent. Everyone is listening. Hickey hands a megaphone to a woman from Northern Ireland. “Israel has murdered Mohammed Bardawil, a 12 year old boy”, she says. Bardawil was the only remaining witness to the killing of fifteen Palestinian paramedics by Israeli forces. In March, the bodies were discovered in a mass grave. Their ambulances were buried nearby. “He’d already given his first testimony, and he was due to give a second testimony, but he didn’t get to give that testimony”.
The megaphone is passed to Senator Chris Andrews. “I find it really difficult to listen week in, week out, to other senators, other TDs, saying that we can’t stand idly by and that’s exactly what the government are doing. We need to see real action. We need to see the Occupied Territories Bill. We need to stop flights going through Irish airspace. We need to see that the Central Bank stops selling genocide bonds.”
The genocide, in his view, started “long before” October 7th. “The genocide started with aid on the Gaza Strip. I was in Al-Shifa Hospital at least twelve years ago. Even then, it was harrowing to see the conditions. They had to use second hand equipment that was sent to them from Tunisia and Morocco. So this isn’t anything new. The genocide has just been escalated and pumped up.”
Behind the gates, a reporter is being filmed speaking. The crowd chants: “enact the Occupied Territories Bill, enact the Occupied Territories Bill” in their direction.
Another person takes the megaphone. “I’m from the North and we didn’t get peace by escalating the violence, we got peace by stopping the violence and by talking to each other”.
A man relates Ireland’s past to the Palestinian occupation: “We’ve encountered genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Cromwellian era. We’ve had famine, we’ve also had periods of rebellion followed by usually fierce oppression. In 1798 poorly armed peasants took on the greatest military force on the earth, the British Army…and inevitably it ended in defeat”. He takes his phone out of his pocket. “So I’m going to read a poem by Seamus Heaney, which commemorates that event”:
“Requiem for the Croppies:
….The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August… the barley grew up out of our grave”.
A guitarist sings: “I was born in the city of Gaza back in 1993. Under a brutal occupation is where I learned to walk and read. ….I was trying to get to school each day and make it home alive. As the bombs they kept on falling, I started asking, why? Oh, in the name of an Israeli state, a people had to die.”
During the songs, a man hands out flyers as part of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) that outline why the Central Bank of Ireland should not sell Israeli bonds “where the seller is being investigated under the Genocide Convention”. He offers one to a man leaving Leinster House but he waves his hand away and crosses the street without waiting for the lights.
3.20 pm
A group of schoolchildren leave the Dáil. They gather outside while their teacher conducts a headcount. A boy stares at Phil’s sign. He looks worried. He pulls a packet of Tayto crisps from his school bag and offers it to Phil’s friend, who is standing closest, to give to Phil.
Friday 10.14 am
Phil feels “elated”. So does Tessa, who swam in the sea earlier that morning. They have reached the final day. After five days of not eating, Phil looks forward to scrambled eggs on toast, and “possibly a pint”, in a nearby pub, a ritual he will continue from his first fast.
Later, they will meet at Tessa’s house where she is hosting a fundraising dinner cooked by two Palestinian men, Atef and Amir, to raise money for their families in Gaza and the West Bank. This is her fourth time organising and hosting, and so far over €10,000 has been raised.
Today they are joined by Phil’s friend and climate activist, Kathie (82), who eats just a bowl of porridge in the morning and evening for the five days.
She sits beside Phil and sews a skirt for her holidays. “Really whatever we’re doing, and feeling for our stomachs, it pales into insignificance with what’s going on in Gaza. It puts everything into proportion, the little we’re giving up and the lives that are being led in Gaza.”
12.55 pm
A woman cycles up to us, here as part of Fridays for Future weekly climate demonstration. More people arrive. Soon there is a crowd outside the Dáil waving a mix of “Hungry for Peace in Gaza” and “Beep for Climate Action” posters. This is their 336th week protesting.
2 pm
A man tells us that the act of fasting, or going on hunger-strike, dates back to pre-Christian Ireland where it was practiced as a way of “compelling a stronger party to justice”. The wronged person fasted, often on the doorstep of their offender, for a set period of time. It was expected that while the person fasted on their doorstep, those inside the house would stop eating as well. As we stand at the gates of Leinster House, someone remarks, “it’s a pity this practise doesn’t apply today”!
5 pm
Phil packs up and heads to O’Brien’s for his toast and scrambled eggs.
***
Earlier in the week, a man asked Phil: “what has led you here”? The phrasing struck him. He has yet to find the answer.
“It’s about contemplative action” and the power that fasting as a form of protest has to touch a lot of people. It’s also about showing that in a consumerist society, one is able to sacrifice something and to go without. However, that is not all.
A friend recently sent him a story:
During the Vietnam War, the Dutch minister and activist A.J. Muste stood outside the White House, night after night, with a candle. A reporter asked him, “Sir, do you really believe your little protest will change anything?” Muste replied, “I don’t come here to change them, I come here so they don’t change me. I will not allow the steady maddening onslaught of insanity to wear down my humanity.”
Another fast may occur soon. This might be the sanest thing any of us can do.
