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The banner featuring the face of Alan Ryan, left, on O'Connell Street today.

PICS: Tribute to slain Alan Ryan in O'Connell Street protest

The face of the murdered dissident republican appears on banner in Dublin today during protest about prisoners’ rights.

THIS WAS THE scene on O’Connell Street this afternoon in the midst of the bustle of Christmas shoppers and traffic.

A protest by a group called the 32 County Sovereignty Movement over the incarceration of “political prisoners” featured a banner celebrating three figures of the republican movement – including the recently-murdered dissident republican Alan Ryan.

Ryan, a leader of the Real IRA in Dublin, was shot dead in Clongriffin in Dublin in September this year. He had a conviction for taking part in a Real IRA training camp in 2001 and for firearms possession. His funeral featured a paramilitary-style gun salute and his cortege was attended by a number of republicans dressed in fatigues with faces hidden behind sunglasses and half-masks.

Ryan’s appearance on a banner being held by the group of about 15 to 20 silent protestors appears to elevate him to the status of martyr.

The other two faces featured on the banner are Cumann na mBan volunteer Josephine McGowan who was stationed in Marrowbone Lane during the 1916 Easter Rising, and Ronan MacLochlainn, a Real IRA member who was shot by gardai during an attempted armed robbery in Ashford, Co Wicklow in May 1998.

Onlookers said the group of protestors, who held other banners claiming the  imprisonment of Marian Price as a breach of human rights, stayed silent throughout. They were lined up along the central traffic island on O’Connell Street, with shoppers rushing in and out of Clerys department store behind them and a group of Christmas carol singers fundraising for a homeless persons’ charity on the other side of the street.

The case of Marian McGlinchey, also known as Price, is ongoing at the Magistrates Court in Derry. She was arrested in May of last year, charged with addressing a dissident republican rally. Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams and Stormont Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness have written a joint letter to senior US political figures and others, as well as lobbied the Irish and British governments, urging for the release of Marian Price McGlinchey. They say that she has been held mostly in isolation and that her health is deteriorating swiftly.

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    Mute Chris O Neill Cabra
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    Aug 17th 2015, 12:12 PM

    ”That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

    The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

    Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

    The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

    It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

    Carl Sagan

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    Mute Deborah Behan
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    Aug 17th 2015, 3:28 PM

    Amazing quote.

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    Mute Rehabmeerkat
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    Aug 17th 2015, 6:13 PM

    that’s not a quote it’s a short story

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    Mute Norman Hunter
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    Aug 17th 2015, 11:45 AM

    Amazing picture.

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    Mute luke frankus
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    Aug 17th 2015, 12:00 PM

    it makes us look like a giant marble…

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    Mute Gary
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    Aug 17th 2015, 12:30 PM

    Luke, you mean like a giant ellipsoid or an oblate spheroid.

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    Mute luke frankus
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    Aug 17th 2015, 12:32 PM

    that’s exactly what I mean, Gary.

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    Mute Bobby Neary
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    Aug 17th 2015, 11:53 AM

    I’d say he wished he brought some LSD….that would be some light show then ..

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    Mute Lindsay Price
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    Aug 17th 2015, 11:55 AM

    Yeah cause it’s not like he’s working or anything.

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    Mute Brendan
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    Aug 17th 2015, 11:50 AM

    Seen these for real and magical is the way I would describe them

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