ABSTRACT
Looking down at the empty Peace Park at the junction of Grand Parade and South Mall in Cork (Ireland) from behind a thin layer of window glass, it seems so unreal that this small area overlooking the river Lee housed one of the longest running Occupy encampments in the world. Yet this unexpected occurrence was the reason why I was here, strolling carelessly around a warm flat as the town was waking up to a grim and wet morning. I have grown so used to Occupy’s ethic of care that I did not even realise that there was breakfast being made for me in the kitchen. ‘We’ve all learned how to make these amazing smoothies in Occupy’ – said a young woman handing me a glass of slightly mushy green liquid. Well-educated, bearing a certain amount of class guilt, she abandoned her upright body position and started bending toward a small coffee table when we sat chatting about Occupy. She looked focused, tilting her shaved head a bit backwards trying to remember what happened a year ago. She was not an obviously counter-cultural type – she had her hair cut to raise funds for the Occupy camp and, evidently, stayed that way. It was she who told me:
I have such problems with Ireland being called democratic when we have a choice of six political parties and all of them are the same. I felt really disenfranchised for the last three to four years and actively worked to get involved in campaigns that would fight against this force that made me feel very alone in this world. Occupy really did provide that for me and that’s why I found it so depressing when I was leaving. I found this base, these people to overcome that loss that was just created by the system that we are in right now. And I found it and then I foolishly broke away.
