Ciaron O’Reilly speaks on Budapest Radio

[Interview starts at 15:30]

This interview with a Hungarian radio station took place in late August 2013 following the sentencing of Manning to 35 years for exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Irish Australian Ciaron O’Reilly is a long time nonviolent anti-war resister from the North American Catholic Worker Plowshares tradition. He has been a defendant in five plowshares trials, a key solidarity organiser in ten such trials and also attended and supported other plowshare defendants in the U.S., the Raytheon 9 defendants in Belfast and the EDO 9 in Brighton. Ciaron served 13 months in prison, and was then deported from the United States for his participation in the ANZUS Plowshares disarmament of a B-52 Bomber at Griffis Air Force Base upstate New York on the eve of the first Gulf War. The B52 Bomber went from scramble alert status to beng put out of action for the length of that war. Other B-52s from the New York base were deployed to England following the action to drop napalm, fuel air explosives and cluster bombs on a daily basis on the people of Iraq.

Ciaron arrived in Liverpool in 1996 to undertake local organising for the remanded “Seeds of Hope Plougshares”, the first such group to be acquitted. Some plowshares activists have received sentences ranging up to 18 years imprisonment for their nonviolent disarmament actions. He initiated the Liverpool Catholic worker that sustained nonviolent resistance to BAe arms exports to Indonesia to fuel the then occupation of East Timor. Along with CAAT, the LCW was infiltrated by BAe agents leading to the eviction and closure of the community in 1999.

Ciaron has long history of prison solidarity work in Australia, US and Ireland. For the past 3 years he has been based at Giuseppe Conlon House in Harringay. The focus of his work has been generating on-the-street solidarity for Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning and Julian Assange. This included providing physical security for Assange has he entered and exited the High and Supreme Courts.

Ciaron is presently involved in fundraising for Manning’s Wales based family to defray the costs of prison visits to the U.S. Up to this point the family has received no financial support in their four visits to their loved one in Quantico and Ft. Leavenworth military prisons.

Vote him in. Get him out!

Although he’s a Christian Anarchist of 35 years who has only voted once – for himself – when he ran for Brisbane City Council at the age of 19, Ciaron is encouraging Victorians to vote for Julian Assange in the Australian Senate elections on Sept 7th. For more voting advice from Ciaron, see this article.

Julian Assange: Supporters protest 1000 Days in British Custody

Assange has been under various forms of British detention for over 1,000 days.

Around 15 people gathered on Monday 2 September to mark this occasion at a vigil that has been sustained daily at the Ecuadorian Embassy since June 2012 when Julian first sought refuge there. Monday’s vigil included Kiwis, Australians, Colombians, Peruvians, Irish, English, Greek, Portugese, American and Swedish. Representatives of WikiLeaks came out of the embassy to thank everyone for their support.