Civil and disobedient
Twice Cork woman Orla Murphy has defaced government buildings. She's also spent nearly five weeks in prison. What does she want? For people to wake up and get real.
The first time Orla Murphy defaced a government building in Dublin it was, she says, unplanned.
As Orla tells, it she was walking down Kildare Street in early December 2020. She had passed by the Dáil, when she came upon the Department of Agriculture where she saw the United Nation’s sustainability development goals on display at the front of the government building.
Something in Orla snapped.
And thus begun the east Cork woman’s path towards direct action and vandalism which would only a few months later land her in prison when she defaced another government building in Dublin.
Act 1
“It irritated me so much I was so angry when I saw that. These absolute bastards are not only killing us and doing nothing about it but they have the absolute cheek to plaster these goals about gender equality and climate action and water scarcity and all this shit up on this building as if they’re doing anything about it. It was an absolutely insane moment.”
And so Orla decided that the display needed an asterisk and an explainer. So she spray painted: “It’s all for show.”
And then she sat down. And waited.
Orla was never going to run, her intention was, as she says, “to take ownership of her action.”
“It’s not as impactful if you hide from what you did; I wasn’t ashamed of what I did and I did it for a reason. I was actually quite proud of it.”
And so she settled in on Kildare Street, just down the street from the statue of Lord Plunkett and waited on a cold December day for what was to come next.
While the act was all over in seconds, and was witnessed by staff in the building and passersby in central Dublin, it didn’t really have much of an immediate effect. Wind turbines kept on turning, ships kept on sailing, capitalism glided on unperturbed.
Orla waited, playing out what might happen. She decided she wasn’t going to call the police on herself, neither was she going to walk in to the reception of the Department of Agriculture and tell them what she had done - staff inside had just witnessed the vandalism - and so she waited around some more.
Eventually she was apprehended by staff at the Department of Agriculture - one man on seeing her red stained hands thought she had cut herself in her protest. It was, in fact, the paint.
He apologised and said he was going to have to call the Gardaí. About ten of them arrived thereafter Orla reckons and carted her off to Pearse Street Garda Station, where she was cautioned for her first offense.
However, the caution was promptly withdrawn and she was charged with a more serious offence as the damage had been done to a government building.
As part of her bail conditions she was banned from government buildings and central Dublin, and so Orla returned home to Cork.
When the case went to court in May of 2021, it was dismissed. But by then another act of vandalism had overtaken events and Orla had spent 34 days in prison in Dublin.
Home
Orla, 20, grew up in Whitechurch in east Cork. She has one sister.
“My father is a farmer which is ironic because I’m a vegan,” she says.
It’s also coincidental that the her first highly visible act of civil disobedience was to target the Department of Agriculture.
Orla’s mother, a nurse, always instilled a strong sense of social justice and social consciousness in her daughters.
But, as she says, her mother does not agree with everything she says or a lot of what she’s done.
“My Dad would be the same with his philosophy and ethics (about) doing the right thing. That was always in my family.”
They went to the occasional protest, but by no means were protests “their life.”
Mostly though, the journey to activism and jail has been Orla’s alone, and in getting there, she’s gone through a set of doors that most teenagers and young adults haven’t.
She suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, which she likens to having “your whole body being dragged down to the ground. It’s not a nice feeling at all.”
At one stage she spent three months in bed, and while her condition has improved she says she needs to “budget” her energy.
Because of fatigue and mental health issues she was unable to complete her Junior Cert and Leaving Cert.
Orla’s experience of systems - education, the health system - is that she hasn’t really fit into them. She says that doctors told her that her chronic fatigue syndrome was in her head.
“Whether I was lucky or unlucky is a matter of perspective, but I found out these systems don’t work fairly early in life, then that gave me a grounds to see what are we doing and how can we fix this, and this does need to be fixed. So let’s do something about this.”
A lot of Orla’s education came on her own terms.
“I was always interested in loads of stuff. I was able to cope relatively alright and was happy in my own company.”
She found videos to satisfy her curiosity on everything from philosophy to critical thinking, and those educational meanderings inevitably took in the climate crisis.
While the Leaving Cert is a huge force of pressure, it’s also weirdly a unifier. Not being in school and not preparing for it Orla recognises she was outside of that loop, one that consumed her friends focus and attention.
She did however stay engaged through Spun Out, an online information resource centre for younger people which provides a great deal of practical information on everything from saving, employment, education and relationships.
“That kind of got me involved in doing stuff and talking about issues.”
And then in 2018, Greta Thunberg, a hitherto unknown teenager started a weekly strike outside parliament buildings in Stockholm, Sweden. Her defiance, directness and perseverance garnered the attention of young people the world over. Her protest offered them a platform to speak out.
Around the same time Extinction Rebellion (XR) was setting out its stall, and they were from the start willing to take direct action, or using “non-violent civil disobedience” to steer the world away from the destructive path we are hurtling down.
The actions XR have taken in their protests include blocking traffic, gluing themselves to trains and the entrance to the London Stock Exchange. Over 3,600 XR activists have been arrested in the U.K. alone in the past few years.
Orla’s activism she says is best understood through a social justice lens.
“There’s the environment and the denuding of it. But for me it was the element of justice and how unfair it is. That there's these really wealthy people who have caused the crisis and as we’ve seen are trying to build rocket ships to flee the Earth. And they want to leave the rest of us behind.”
Orla’s rocket ships reference is to the slew of billionaires who are piling into space travel and exploration, and while she could be accused of overstating their intentions, the climate crisis is undeniably the biggest threat to humanity and the billions of species who live on Earth.
The climate crisis might also best be understood generationally.
Baby boomers and Gen Xers - those born after World War Two right up un until 1979 - largely spent decades in blissful ignorance and then denial that progress in nearly every sense was premised on degrading the Earth and destroying the atmosphere.
For Millennials, Gen Z and Generation Alpha, the climate crisis is the crisis that will define their lives, the entirety of them. If the Covid-19 pandemic feels long, imagine what living though a continuous cycle of storms, floods, desertification, hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, crop failures and a constant flurry of apocalyptic climate reports raising red flags as we edge nearer towards mass extinctions feels like?
You could ignore, dispute or deny what was happening, and we did a variation of all three for a long time, but now it’s impossible. It’s also irresponsible.
Is it any wonder then that in a recent global poll of over 10,000 young people, 45% of those questioned said feelings about the climate affected their daily lives, three-quarters said they thought the future was frightening and more than half think humanity is doomed.
Act 2
Part of Orla must like Dublin and the theatre of direct action.
When Orla went back to the capital to take more direct action earlier this year - this time her target was the Department of Foreign Affairs - she contravened her bail conditions. She was accompanied by Zachery Lumley, from Ballinlough in Cork, whom she had befriended in Extinction Rebellion’s Cork chapter.
As with the previous action, Orla had a message, but this time the pair were going public and to the world, with Zac broadcasting live on Facebook.
The broadcast starts out in St Stephen’s Green on a crisp March day with Orla introducing viewers to her two buckets of paint in two plastic SuperValu bags. The pair then walk across the road to Iveagh House which houses the government department.
“Best of luck Orla, you’re going to do amazing,” Zac says as Orla places her buckets in front of the building, pulls out a homemade poster, places it on the steps of Iveagh House and gets to launching the buckets of pink paint on the building and then spray painting “No More Empty Promises” on the front door.
Over the next few minutes Orla gives the Department of Foreign Affairs a fair old spray painting as Zac narrates and explains. At one stage he says, “this paint makes no difference,” before pausing and laughing at his misstep.
Orla takes over explaining but it’s hard to hear her given the poor sound quality.
At one point a passerby calls her a disgrace to which Orla shouts back the disgrace is that her generation has been led to this point “where our future is in jeopardy.”
“Don’t tell me about a disgrace, sir,” she shouts defiantly after him.
As a piece of theatre the ten minute act is amateurish, but that’s to miss the point.
Yes, Orla readily agrees, this is lawful criminal damage to an (important) building, but the world is burning up. Is that not also lawful criminal damage she asks.
Orla says her parents “weren’t happy to say the least” when they first found out that she had been arrested last December. (“My mother was flabbergasted” she says.)
“My Mam’s thing at this stage is it’s a just cause. ‘I can see that and appreciate that and that’s good, but I don’t agree with the methods you’re going about to do this’.”
Her father is very much of the mindset that Orla is her own boss, and as long as she doesn’t hurt anyone and accepts the consequences of her actions, then these are her decisions.
It’s this phrase - accepting the consequences - which I keep thinking about, partly because those consequences, a criminal record, prison time, court proceedings, and the court of public opinion - they are the consequences Orla has faced and will face.
But what about the consequences of our actions when it comes to the climate crisis - can we radically change our actions, or do we accept that we have handed younger generations a poisoned planet, and let them deal with it?
Act three - prison time
Following the Iveagh House incident, Orla and Zac were charged with criminal damage which media reports said cost thousands of euros to repair.
Orla refused to sign bail conditions and was instead kept in remand, where she was held at The Dóchas Centre, a prison for women in Dublin.
During the 34 days she was held in custody she was in and out of court as the country slowly emerged from the third lockdown.
She was released in May on the condition she signed on at her local Garda station, and stayed away from central Dublin and government buildings.
Prison time was a lot of things: “boring, yeah definitely.”
“You sit around some days and think, ‘What will I do today?’”
“When you have books it was grand.”
Because of the pandemic, much of the time she spent in prison was in a solitary cell. She had two six minute phone calls a day, one was a personal call, and one to her legal team.
Orla coordinated the day around meal times - as there was no clocks to tell the time, and obviously phones are forbidden.
With all that time on her hands, I asked Orla is she regretted her actions or felt sorry for herself or even lonely, but she was unequivocal on the first point.
“No, not at all.”
In the prison van coming form her first court appearance after vandalising Iveagh House and en route to prison, the impact of what she had done and where she was headed began to sink in.
“It’s just because you’re scared, of course you’re scared if you’ve never been to prison before and you have no idea what it’s going to be like and you’re in the back of a van and you don’t have control over anything that’s happening anymore. That’s a very scary place to be in.”
But she talked herself out of the panic, telling herself she’s been through a lot in her life. “You’re going to be OK and you’re doing the right thing and this what needs to be done.”
After that little pep talk she was OK. It also helped that the prison cell was much nicer than what’s on offer at Garda stations she says.
When she was finally released in early May, her mother was waiting for Orla.
“My Mam met me at the gate in Mountjoy, which is a sentence I’d never thought I’d say.” Orla wasn’t sure if was going to be there, or where she would meet her.
“I went over and I hugged her and I cried my eyes I was just so happy.”
Back on the outside at home in Whitechurch since last May, Orla says it was weird how quickly she adjusted to the routine of prison life and its solitude.
Earlier this month Orla and Zac’s case was back in court. The Director of Public Prosecutions has directed the case could remain at district court level if the pair plead guilty.
They have until the next hearing on October 12 to decide their pleas, otherwise the trial will move to the circuit court and before a judge and jury and potentially tougher sentencing.
Again and again and again
Given what Orla’s been through and what’s still to come, I asked her if she had any regrets and if on hindsight she would do it again, but she’s nodding before I even get to the end of my rambling question.
“Yes. 100%.”
“I don’t regret doing it and I will do it again,” Orla says, adding she won’t be doing it right now “because it doesn’t make sense.”
She reckons it’s not her last time in prison either, and she’s OK with that.
“But we need a lot more people doing it. Me going in and out of the Dóchas Centre, it’s probably not going to do much. We need to organise and mobilise and put up the fight of our lives, because that’s what it is.”
So, I try a different tack: what about advocating for climate justice, but by going down a different path that doesn’t lead to vandalism or prison. I grapple for suggestions before lamely suggesting planting trees.
Orla thinks the system is so broken that it can’t be fixed from the inside, that “it facilitates our murder.” Planting trees is grand and educating ourselves about the climate crisis is also necessary Orla says, but what she thinks is needed, and urgently is, “a gigantic public mandate in order to change our trajectory.”
And how does that come about? Continuous mass mobilisation on the streets demanding change.
One version of the future that Orla envisages - and she’s by no means alone here - is widespread social collapse and chaos as the effects of the climate crisis overtake our ability to control them or much less anything.
A less bleak version is that we use the small window of opportunity and we rise to the challenge of fundamentally changing our system of capitalism, energy production, agriculture and the conveniences we have grown used to while substantially and quickly driving down carbon emissions and in doing so “create a more equal society which is a good thing in and of itself and so that we use the scare recourses that we have equally.”
Growing up in the eighties I remember a “climate fright”, although we didn’t call it that. For a brief while there was major concern about a hole in the Ozone layer. Either my siblings or neighborhood friends told me that it was way up in the sky and it was day by day growing bigger and as it did so the likelihood that we would all be burned up increased.
How could we stop this?
Banning aerosol cans. At least that’s what the TV news said, and it worked, or at least the news cycle moved on, and the worry that this unseen hole way above us created by hair spray and discarded fridges, well the threat had been eradicated. I don’t think the word climate even came into it.
Weather was something we worried about, not climate.
For Orla’s generation, it’s different. The climate crisis is constant. And nothing is improving.
I asked her if, as with the survey, she feels more despondent or hopeful, or somewhere in between?
“I go through phases of different emotions. There is an overall sense of panic and terror but also a feeling that we could create something really amazing even if it's only for a little while.”
Editor’s note: Fridays For Future Cork, founded by Greta Thunberg, will hold a strike tomorrow in Cork, Friday September 24, between 1-2 p.m.
