Workers Solidarity Movement

Long time followers of this site will be familiar with these posts. For rather transparent reasons to do with North America funding the bigot brigade ridiculously exaggerate numbers who attend their anti-choice protests and then massively under estimate the numbers who attend pro-choice protests. They have to keep the yankee dollar convinced after all that the people of Ireland are with them rather than running as fast as possible in the opposite direction. No dollars, no full time paid positions, offices and very expensive advertising campaigns.

It was no different with tonights pro-choice demonstration in Dublin. We calculated 2000+ people were there, they claimed a bizarre 300. Normally its quite hard to illustrate the inaccuracy of their claims but as this was an emergency demo called at very short notice it was also small enough to almost get into a single photo. If you are gonna tell porkies about crowd sizes you need to scale down the magnitude for smaller crowds or, as here, you simply serve to expose what you are actually up to.

Tonight was easy to estimate as the spot at the Spire is a common gathering point for demonstrations, indeed it has been used most of the previous Saturdays for Gaza solidarity demonstrations which we have of course covered. We'd two member doing crowd size calculations, one based on that experience, the other on using a Crowd size calculator on a smart phone that works off marking out the area on a map. Both agreed that the crowd was somewhere over 2,000.

We sometimes upset others on the left by giving accurate counts rather than doubling or even trebling them as protest organisers of all types are so fond of doing. But hey, we reckon we are accumulating reputation here. They on the other hand, well perhaps they have so little reputation to lose they just reckon it doesn't matter.

For the curious you can read some of our previous 'Really YD' articles

WORDS Andrew Flood (Follow Andrew on Twitter )