Saturday saw the 6th Anarchist Bookfair in Dublin, once more in Liberty Hall, the HQ of the largest Irish union. It’s always a hectic time as a huge amount of work has to be done in terms of promotion and organisation, not helped this year by the removal of 70% of the posters we put up, we presume by the Garda. This has some impact on numbers, I noticed that I at least vaguely recognised a much bigger proportion of the people who attended then at last years’s bookfair and we think the numbers were down by a couple of hundred. I’ve no time to say a lot about the bookfair but here are some photos I took during the day along with the advance publicity material we produced.
Saturday saw the 6th Anarchist Bookfair in Dublin, once more in Liberty Hall, the HQ of the largest Irish union. It’s always a hectic time as a huge amount of work has to be done in terms of promotion and organisation, not helped this year by the removal of 70% of the posters we put up, we presume by the Garda. This has some impact on numbers, I noticed that I at least vaguely recognised a much bigger proportion of the people who attended then at last years’s bookfair and we think the numbers were down by a couple of hundred. I’ve no time to say a lot about the bookfair but here are some photos I took during the day along with the advance publicity material we produced.
I’d guess somewhere in the region of 600 people came through the doors (a 25% drop on last year) and the level of participation at the meetings was very good. On the negative side the platforms were all very male dominated, partially reflecting our composition and partly reflecting the speakers we were able to get. An issue to look at again for next year although not one we have really found a consistent solution for.
The removal of the posters is almost certainly connected with the visit of the British queen to Ireland over the next few days. This has seen a lunatic ‘security’ overdrive by the state, at one point two squads cars full of Garda arrived outside the bookfair and hung around while two of them went to talk to the venue owners before departing presumably after being told to mind their own business. It’s unusual to have uniformed police doing this sort of thing, more normally its a role left to the secret police.
2 replies on “Images from the Dublin anarchist bookfair 2011”
I’d guess somewhere in the
I’d guess somewhere in the region of 600 people came through the doors (a 25% drop on last year)
Any idea why the drop? Was last year unusually high in attendance? Or is this year unusually low?
As I say in the article part
As I say in the article part of the probable reason was the police removing at least 60% of our 200+ posters after they were put up. That and the general security lock down due to the visit of the British Queen. It’s also possible its a reflection of the general demoralisation due to the hammering people have taken but I think that might be over interpretating things.
Last year and the previous year seem to have roughly the same attendance as each other. Up to last year there had been sizeable growth each year.