Several thousand people protested in Dublin on Saturday afternoon against vaccine passports and other Covid-19 public health measures.
They marched from Parnell Square to D’Olier Street before turning into Westmoreland Street and returning to the General Post Office for a rally, according to The Irish Times.
At one stage, the top of the march was at the GPO while its tail was passing the Gate Theatre.
Speaker Rachel Ní Faoláin said she was against Covid certificates and the encouragement of discrimination against “a new minority”.
She said those who are unvaccinated are no greater a risk to society than those who have been double or triple jabbed with a Covid-19 vaccine.
Cheers
There were large cheers from the crowd as Ms Ní Faoláin criticised the treatment of those who did not have vaccine passports.
“Over the past twenty months, our society has evolved into a dictatorship, a totalitarian dystopia,” she said, speaking from a platform beside the Spire.
“It has become intolerant... hate speech towards unvaccinated people has become the norm and is now rising exponentially.”
Ms Ní Faoláin also criticised the Irish media for their coverage of the public health measures.
Many of those attending the march for “Truth and Civil Rights” carried placards critical of the reporting on the pandemic.
One woman, who did not want to give her name, told The Irish Times that she was at the march because she was in favour of informed consent, and believed that for consent to be meaningful, it had to be without coercion.
At the moment, she said she believed people are being “firmly coerced” into getting the Covid vaccine.
She said had not attended any marches against Covid measures before this, partly because of how they were labelled, but she felt a line had been crossed with talk of mandatory vaccination and children having to wear masks in school.
The protest disrupted traffic and Luas services in in the city centre for a number of hours.
The World Health Organisation has said that the seven Covid-19 vaccines it has decided meet the necessary criteria for safety and efficacy “provide a high degree of protection against getting seriously ill and dying from the disease, although no vaccine is 100 per cent protective.”
It says getting vaccinated is a safer way to develop immunity than getting sick with Covid-19, and that even those who are vaccinated should continue to take precautions because vaccinated people can still get ill and pass the virus to others.
