On The March

A fellow photographer recently remarked that taking street photos on a protest march (or indeed a public gathering of any kind) is a bit like shooting fish in bowl. I tend to agree – but that didn’t deter me from joining a couple of recent protest marches in Dublin, armed with my camera. These marches are part of the ongoing public outcry at the imposition of water charges on residential properties in Ireland. While the recently amended and capped charges are not, in the grand scheme of things, overly expensive they are the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

Years of austerity budgets has finally taken its toll on the usually benign Irish public and the drive to have water charges abolished and the new utility company Irish Water disbanded, is not going away anytime soon. The big fear, which is not being adequately addressed by the government, is that Irish Water will be sold off to private enterprise in the coming years. It would be a simple matter of holding a referendum to copper-fasten in our constitution the public ownership of Irish Water. The refusal of the government to allow this only adds fuel to the view that the government is already in collusion with potential future private buyers of the Irish Water utility company. The coming months will be politically very interesting in Ireland.

Anyway, that’s the context. This blog is about photography so here are some of the shots I took on the anti-water charges / anti-government march in Dublin on Dec 10th, 2014.