We’re no strangers to a good student protest. Injustice at Trinity is met with immediate plotting and poster boards, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Students have always been at the forefront of social change. The Little Rock Nine and Greensboro Sit-ins were monumental steps in the Civil Rights Movement. The French anti-capitalist strikes and occupations of May 1968 are regarded as a social revolution that changed the course of the country’s moral and social history. More recently, March for Our Lives, Fridays for Future, and global university BDS encampments all demonstrated the power and influence students can have on the global stage. But what goes into planning a student protest? In order to find out, we took a look at an upcoming climate justice march.
Saturday November 16th will see a March for Global Climate Justice at 12pm, running from the Garden of Remembrance to the Dail. The protest focuses specifically on the ongoing genocide and ecocide in Palestine, an end to fossil fuel consumption, and in protest of the Shannon LNG development. Shannon LNG, a proposed liquid natural gas receiving terminal, has been brought to the forefront of climate discussions again given the High Court’s recent decision to overturn An Bord Pleanála’s ban on the proposal.
The march is being organised by several Dublin climate groups: the Climate Justice Coalition Ireland, Extinction Rebellion, and a recently formed TCD student group, Students for Environmental Justice. Speaking to them and other tenured student activists on campus offered an insight into the organisation of a successful protest.
The general consensus is that any protest must have three key components: a clear motivation, community, and coordination. Climate activist and co-organiser of last year’s series of “Time to Act” climate protests, Nathan Hutchinson Edgar, wrote that “the most important thing is to make it relevant and understandable to student concerns. Climate justice is a great framework for environmental issues because it’s so interconnected. Protests that are theory heavy –“democratise the university”– or unclear can be difficult”.
Conor Walsh, a representative from the Students for Environmental Justice group, stated the group’s motivations and hopes for Saturday’s protest are “to make sure that the government is held accountable for their climate targets/failing to reach them and to hopefully bring people’s attention to issues around climate change and environmental topics, particularly in Ireland such as Shannon LNG”.
Trust and community are often overlooked elements of the process. Little can be done with any speed without good communication and confidence in your group’s abilities and intentions. Walsh noted that the biggest hurdle in organisation has been in communication. “There’s so many different groups involved so just maintaining a good level of communication is difficult/important.” On community, Hutchinson Edgar emphasised that “building a coalition of relevant groups, staff and students is really important for big protests. That can be tricky, but if you’re looking to make a big flashy statement it’s needed”. Students for Environmental Justice have been building this coalition by reaching out to Trinity’s Environmental Society and plan to hand out flyers around campus to encourage discussion about the march. The group will also be holding a poster-making workshop the day before the march with the society.
The final hurdle to overcome is the planning and logistics of a protest. Smaller, more impromptu protests can be very effective. As Hutchinson Edgar said, “a small group doing something disruptive can honestly work. If you don’t have the numbers try to cause actual problems. It takes a surprisingly small group of people to shut things down!”. But even these events require a good deal of preparation, ensuring participants are aware of their legal rights, that the message conveyed is clear, and practical materials are gathered.
For larger protests and long standing campaigns, a great deal of administrative work is required. Thorough research from viable sources and Freedom of Information Reports must be conducted. In addition, in some cases the body being protested should be informed and given the opportunity to amend the objection before escalation. Then coming to a physical demonstration like this march necessitates liaising with police, finding stewards, speakers, a stage, sound gear, and most importantly, people.
A final addition, hope, is a crucial aspect for the longevity of any cause. Anna Crean, a final year PPES student who was heavily involved in the 2018 March for Our Lives protests, spoke on the biggest challenges she faced in their execution. Dealing with disappointment, Crean said “when you are so deeply entrenched in an ideology it can be incomprehensible that other people do not agree with you, especially in a life or death protest. While I was likely naïve since I was 15 and freshly traumatised, I didn’t understand that to some people, guns killing children was not sufficient enough to shift opinion”.
The aftermath of the protests could turn anyone into a cynic. “Not all of our policy points were met, and some ones that passed in state and national legislatures were later overturned” said Crean. But despite this Crean remains steadfast in her belief in popular power and protest: “I am not disappointed in the work we accomplished as a movement. Nor do I believe that anyone should ever stop working towards their goals in a cause just because it doesn’t all succeed. However, all activists come to a crossroads where they fail at their objectives and it is up to them to consciously decide that failure doesn’t stop their cause, rather it must invigorate them to try harder”.
Defeatism is a hard thing to avoid, and calls for hope can sound trite and naive. But the fact stands that student movements are effective. The Fossil Free TCD campaign ran for fifteen months and led to Trinity’s six million divestment from the fossil fuel industry. After five days of the BDS encampment, Trinity committed to divesting from Israeli and UN Blacklisted companies. Trinity students have and will continue to demonstrate stubborn shows of hope. Which, as Rebecca Solnit put it, “is not the belief that everything was, is or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and destruction. The hope I am interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act”.
