Cork protest organiser was jailed for unpaid fine
ONE of the organisers of yesterday’s anti-lockdown protest in Cork was an unsuccessful general election candidate who was jailed for failing to file a list of donations with the Standards in Public Office Commission.
The 60-year-old former county councillor from Co. Cork was also ordered to make a charitable donation last year after painting over the name of Queen Victoria on Cork street signs.
Diarmaid Ó Cadhla, who is a national secretary of the People’s Convention and a prominent Irish Water protester, said this week that organisers of the protest are ‘not virus deniers’ but he did not
‘Event was not a protest, but a public assembly’
expect people attending to wear masks. He said they would instead be inviting people ‘to exercise care in terms of public health’.
Mr Ó Cadhla who, on his website, says the debate around the HPV vaccine is ‘controlled by drug companies’ and calls for water fluoridation to stop, said that organisers had been
‘collaborating’ with gardaí in
Cork and that the event was ‘not a protest as such’, but a public assembly.
‘It’s a rally demanding that the Government should clarify to us why are they having continued lockdowns 12 months later while the WHO has said it is only justified in the short term in order for governments to allow themselves to get into the mode of dealing with the virus which is going around,’ he said.
The failed 2011 and 2016 election candidate was fined €300 by
Judge Olan Kelleher at Cork District Court in December
2014 for failing to make returns to the Standards in Public Office Commissionm, which supervises electoral matters.
The order was subsequently upheld by Judge Donagh McDonagh at Cork Circuit Court.
But Mr Ó Cadhla refused to pay the €300 fine and in 2016 gardaí executed a warrant for his arrest and brought him to Cork Prison to serve a five-day sentence for failing to pay.
During Mr Ó Cadhla’s Circuit Court appeal in 2015 Jacqueline Moore of SIPO testified that all candidates had to declare donations in excess of €634.87 received for election purposes and to declare all election expenditure within 56 days of polling day and file a return for that expenditure to SIPO.
Mr Ó Cadhla, from Upper Beaumont Drive, Ballintemple, Cork, said he wasn’t filing the returns as he believed the legislation was discriminatory against non-party candidates like himself in favour of political parties, who he described as ‘private clubs’.
Mr Ó Cadhla ran again in the 2016 election and got 869 votes.
The failed election candidate hit the headlines again late last year after he appeared in court for blackening out the name of Queen Victoria on Cork Street signs in 2017.
Mr Ó Cadhla and two other men denied causing criminal damage. The judge ordered the men to pay €250 to the Society of St Vincent de Paul as a charitable contribution.