SATURDAY after Saturday for the last three years an eclectic group of people walk from the Farmer’s Market in Skibbereen to the Maid of Erin.

BY PEADAR KING

And on Saturday after Saturday the horror of what is happening in Gaza is given full vent.

The horror, the horror to borrow from Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. It is what we are currently living through … the Heart of Darkness.

And it is a horror. Among those who regularly speak of that horror is Palestinian Nasser Omar. His strong voice echoes up North Street, curls it way west southwest along Main Street finding its way too west northwest along Market Street. A voice that often cracks with emotion and exudes a perplexed anger. How has it come to this?

When Nasser speaks there is silence. For him, this is personal. Visceral. Leaving those of us who stand in silence, trying to comprehend the unimaginable grief and trauma.

To know war, you must live war.

It is beyond our comprehension. How has it come to this?

All the while, Palestinian flags wave. The occasional car honks in support.

A genocide is unfolding before our eyes. What President Connolly calls “the erasure of humanity”.

An apartheid state, when we all thought we were done with that sort of thing following the democratisation of South Africa in the early 90s. How easily the lessons of history can be forgotten.

And now. The ugly shape-shifting face of institutional hatred. And that is what it is. The visceral hatred of the Israeli state for the Palestinian people that began in 1947 with the great Nakba; the expulsion of Palestinian people by an unapologetic Israeli government and their terrorising IDF army from their own land, an expulsion that continues to this day. All the while, the Israelis claim God is on their side.

If that is the case, then God help us all.

And all the while the world stands idly by. Except across this country week-in week-out people gather in solidarity with the Palestinian people to give witness to this horror. So too, the President of Ireland.

Addressing 90 students and scholars evacuated from Gaza at Áras an Uachtaráin, earlier this year, President Connolly also gave witness to that horror…

“And the catastrophic circumstances, you have experienced over 1,000 days of war since October 2023. Since then, nearly 75,000 Palestinians have been killed, and that figure only includes those accounted for. More than 1.9 million people remain internally displaced and many more we could refer to…”

Here in Skibbereen too, witness is given to that horror. After the march, clusters of conversations organically form.

I meet with Rasha Ataya, and Betty O´Donoghue. Wearing her black and white keffiyeh, a Palestinian scarf traditionally worn by Palestinian peasants and carrying a Palestinian flag, Betty told me that she comes here on Saturdays “in solidarity with and for the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom, equality and justice”.

It’s that simple.

Flags at the Skibbereen demonstration. (Photo: Pete Martin, Red Door Photograph)

Solidarity. It’s a recurring word. A word also used by Donnchadha Ó Séaghdha who joins us in conversation.

Echoing Nasser’s pain, Rasha talks about the existential struggles that so many Palestinian people live with every hour of every day.

“I cannot fathom how living in tents mothers in Gaza, watching their sick and dying children, cope with the trauma of genocide and the relentless bombardment, all the while exposed to scorching heat and winter cold without adequate food or medical and basic hygiene supplies”.

When I come here, she went on to say, I do so, so that “the Palestinian cause is kept alive and prevent it falling into oblivion”.

The weekly Skibbereen march is an open welcoming space, an open single-issue space. We walk for and with the people of Gaza and the persecuted Palestinian people of the West Bank.

It’s that simple.