THE OCCUPY Dame Street protest group is to hold another march today in Dublin city centre, starting at the Garden of Remembrance at Parnell Square at 2.00pm and moving down O’Connell Street towards their camp outside the Central Bank.
Today’s march marks the one-month point for the camp, which describes itself as “a people’s movement which stands in solidarity with and is inspired by nearly 1,000 sister occupations in the evolving global movement initiated by the people of Iceland, Greece, Spain and Tunisia”.
The group has indicated it intends to maintain its presence outside the Central Bank until at least the Budget 2012 announcement early next month.
Occupy Cork is also marking its one-month mark today.
US deaths
The international protests were sparked by the Occupy Wall Street movement which started in mid-September and spread within weeks to other US cities such as Oakland, Boston and Atlanta as well as a host of cities outside America.
Occupy Wall Street has planned a number of direct action workshops to help people plan their own action and civil disobedience protests.
Three people died this week at Occupy protests in the US. One man is believed to have died at the Occupy Salt Lake City camp yesterday from a combination of drug use and carbon monoxide poisoning, while another man apparently fatally shot himself at an Occupy camp in Burlington, Vermont on Thursday.
That same day, a man was shot and killed at the Occupy Oakland camp outside City Hall. The Californian city’s mayor called for the camp to disband, but members of the protest group claimed that the shooting involved outsiders.
Police in Oakland have issued a renewed order to the encampment to disband. Late last month, police fired tear gas in their pre-dawn raid to clear the camp, however the following day it was re-occupied.
The city’s Police Officer Association recently issued an open letter saying that the Occupy movement was pulling police away from crime-ridden areas and asking the protesters to leave the camp peacefully “with your heads held high”.
- Additional reporting by the AP
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