REMAINING VIGILANT

Many Cata­lans will feel vin­di­cated by the re­cent speech given by Irish Euro MP Clare Daly to the Eu­ro­pean Par­lia­ment. It feels nec­es­sary to re­pro­duce it here:

“When I heard that there was a de­bate on the rule of law in Spain, I thought great, is this about State sur­veil­lance on jour­nal­ists and politi­cians with Pe­ga­sus? Is it un­der­cover po­lice tac­tics in­volv­ing in­ti­mate sex­ual re­la­tion­ships with ac­tivists to in­fil­trate so­cial move­ments? Is it peo­ple hav­ing their eyes mu­ti­lated by Span­ish po­lice rub­ber bul­lets? Or singers being sent to jail or exile for their lyrics? But no, of course not, as usual it is about Cat­alo­nia and amnesty for peo­ple who should never have faced per­se­cu­tion in the first place. Have you any idea how pa­thetic this looks to peo­ple out­side of here? This is a po­lit­i­cal issue. Po­lit­i­cal di­a­logue is some­thing that Spain has lacked for years, re­sort­ing in­stead to abus­ing a ju­di­cial sys­tem known for its du­bi­ous in­de­pen­dence. Self-de­ter­mi­na­tion and an end to po­lit­i­cal per­se­cu­tion are noth­ing but basic de­mo­c­ra­tic de­mands guar­an­teed by the char­ter and I sup­port them…” be­fore con­tin­u­ing in Cata­lan with “Hi ha massa gent aqui amb un greu prej­u­dici con­tra Catalunya,…” (There are too many peo­ple here with a se­ri­ous prej­u­dice against Cat­alo­nia,…)

Al­though her mi­cro­phone was cut off by the speaker at this point, Ms Daly has pre­vi­ous when it comes to speak­ing in Cata­lan in the cham­ber. Ac­cord­ing to La Van­guardia, in 2020 she quoted a Cata­lan trans­la­tion of George Or­well’s An­i­mal Farm, say­ing:

“Si la llib­er­tat sig­nifica en el fons al­guna cosa, és el dret d’ex­plicar a la gent allò que no volen sen­tir (If lib­erty means any­thing at all it means the right to tell peo­ple what they do not want to hear)”, while also stat­ing “it is ob­vi­ous that there is [sic] peo­ple in here who do not want to hear about Cat­alo­nia”.

Well, bravo Ms Daly, has to be my re­sponse to all that. It is pre­cisely what the Cata­lan in­de­pen­dence move­ment has been call­ing for since the Span­ish ju­di­cial sys­tem deemed it fit to charge and then im­prison Cata­lan politi­cians for hold­ing a vote on self-de­ter­mi­na­tion. Why is this un­de­mo­c­ra­tic be­hav­iour, sorry, that should read anti-de­mo­c­ra­tic be­hav­iour by an EU mem­ber state being tol­er­ated? How can it be that an at­tempt to hold a vote is pun­ished with im­pris­on­ment on the charge of sedi­tion? It doesn’t hold up, and never has, to any ra­tio­nal scrutiny, un­less we un­der­stand the de­mo­c­ra­tic process it­self as being sedi­tious in na­ture.

It ac­tu­ally feels kind of bizarre to still be talk­ing about all this at the gates to 2024, but of course, for those in­volved in the whole af­fair, their lives have been and con­tinue to be in­deli­bly marked by it, so it should not be al­lowed to dis­ap­pear slowly from the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion. With right-wing pop­ulists still gain­ing pop­u­lar­ity around Eu­rope, we need MEPs like Ms Daly to con­stantly re­mind the Eu­ro­pean Par­lia­ment, and in­deed Eu­ro­pean so­ci­ety as a whole, that our free­doms can­not be taken for granted.

OPIN­ION