The women of the Communist Party of Ireland would like to offer our deepest solidarity with the Mothers against Genocide group, we share the outrage felt across the solidarity movement at your horrific treatment.
In your fight to expose the genocide currently being carried out by the Zionist occupation against the Palestinian people, you have been targeted in the most disgusting display of Irish state-backed violence against women in our living memory.
Police brutality against women is not an aberration. It is a violent manifestation of the state’s patriarchal, misogynistic and repressive machinery. These vicious acts are not the work of “a few bad apples”, but the logical outcome of an institution designed to protect power and property, not people.
No member of An Garda Síochána was ever prosecuted for sharing footage of Dara Quigley, while she was in a Garda station and the five Gardaí who were at the centre of the Shell to Sea rape tape controversy never faced criminal charges.
Across the world, women, particularly activists and those already marginalised by ethnicity, sexuality, etc face systemic violence at the hands of law enforcement: from sexual assault to gendered harassment, such as strip searches and the weaponisation of “public order” offences to suppress dissent. This violence is used to silence us, to make us feel afraid and weak and alone, but we are none of these things and we will never be subjugated.
Solidarity sisters!
We must name this violence for what it is: a tool of oppression that reinforces gendered subjugation and capitalist control. Solidarity demands we dismantle the structures that enable it and fight for a world where justice is not wielded as a baton against the vulnerable, but a cudgel we raise in our defence and the defence of our class.
“We are out for justice and we have assailed or contested no just liberty. We know our duties as we know our rights and we shall stand by one another through thick and thin…”
James Connolly, Irish Worker, 1913
