Saturday July 1st saw the annual anti-choice parade and yet again RTE (state ran media) reported a grossly inflated figure of the number marching. They headlined it as ‘tens of thousands’ and in the body of the article quoted the organisers claiming 70,000 without further comment, appearing to endorse it. As we are going to show below at the very least that’s a tenfold exaggeration, in fact by our count about 5300 people took part. And while that estimate might be out by 10 or even 20% its physically impossible for it to be out by up to 1500% as that would require ten people too fit into a one meter square space.
We use the same counting methodologies (see below) for almost every demonstration that takes place in Dublin, from huge anti water charges protests to smaller but still significant ones on a huge range of issues. We do these sorts of counts more than a dozen times a year. We don’t always publicise the numbers we reach – organisers always tend to overestimate somewhat, most often guessing a figure that is twice what actually attended. Generally we agree with what the demands of a demonstration are so we don’t want to appear to undermine it by publicly providing real numbers. But we do count, we do use those counts internally in the WSM and we often communicate them directly to organisers.
