Interview with Ploughshares Activist Parents in OZ

international | anti-war / imperialism | news report Monday June 30, 2003 12:42 by Pit Stop Ploughshares

Interview with Ploughshares Activist parents

Interview with Parents of Pitstop Ploughshares Australian
by News Ltd, Monday June 30, 2003 at 09:31 AM


THE Brisbane parents of a peace activist are proud of their son but worried he may be facing a jail term in Ireland. On Tuesday, Ciaron O'Reilly, 43, will stand trial with four others on criminal damage charges arising out of the disabling of a US Navy aircraft during an anti-Iraqi war protest at Dublin's Shannon Airport in February.

Mary O'Reilly, 72, and her husband Garrett, 75, said their devout Christian son had dedicated his life to peace and they fully supported him.

While Mrs O'Reilly could not help feeling a mother's anxiety for her second son, she said: "I've just accepted that this is going to be the way it
is."

She admitted that friends and others in Brisbane who had seen their dreadlocked son in protests over the years did not understand why he
had turned his back on a teaching career to live a life of poverty and protest.

"I'm quite sure the majority of people don't know what he's on about and what motivates him to do this," Mrs O'Reilly said. "He definitely has a
spiritual side to him."

Irish-born Garrett O'Reilly said Ciaron and his brothers Sean, a nurse, and Brendan, a hospital administration officer, were brought up to think
about less fortunate people in the world.

"As very young kids they went collecting door-to-door for the handicapped," he said.

Mr O'Reilly said he was disgusted that, in a supposedly neutral country like Ireland, US planes destined for the war in Iraq were allowed to
refuel at Dublin's Shannon Airport. He said he understood his son's protest action.

"All of us admire martyrs. We wouldn't want him any other way," he said.

Mrs O'Reilly said Ciaron was a "rather charming" child who was good at sport, especially soccer, and became a teacher at St James's College in
Fortitude Valley, where he was educated.

Ciaron was involved in the protest movement from the time he was in Year 12 and Mrs O'Reilly remembers seeing him standing on a soapbox in
the Queen St Mall in the 1980s speaking to the crowds.

In 1991 Ciaron spent 13 months in prison in the United States for destroying and conspiring to damage US Government property, after
damaging a B-52 bomber in New York with other members of the ANZUS Ploughshares group during a Gulf War protest.

"We didn't know it was going to happen," Mrs O'Reilly said.

"He could have been shot on the spot."

But she said his US jail experience has given him the strength to cope if he was again sent to prison.

The couple, from Mitchelton in Brisbane's northwest, proudly showed off press clippings about their son's protests and an autographed photo
of US actor Martin Sheen, who plays a US president in The West Wing television series.

In Ireland recently, Sheen gave a press conference supporting the Pit Stop Ploughshares activists, declaring he would give them all "a
presidential pardon".

http://www.ploughsharesirelend.org


www.thesundaymail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,6631926%255E2765,00.html