Ciarán Cannon hits out after 'bag of sh*t' thrown at him and Anne Rabbitte
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“Nobody died but it wasn’t nice,” is how Fine Gael TD Ciarán Cannon described the incident on Wednesday night in Gort, Co Galway.
Mr Cannon, along with junior minister Anne Rabbitte, had a “bag of sh*t” thrown at both of them at a public meeting in the town.
The matter is now under Garda investigation.
The meeting at Sullivan’s Hotel in Gort, which was thronged, was called to discuss the decision by An Bord Pleanala to allow a major biogas plant to be located on the edge of the town.
Along with Ms Rabbitte and Mr Cannon, another local TD, Sean Canney, was in attendance, as well as a number of local councillors.
The public meeting was organised by the Gort Biogas Concern Group, which has voiced substantial opposition to the project.
At the start of the meeting, perhaps sensing something might happen, the chairman called on all present to be respectful of other people’s views during the meeting.
The man who threw the excrement was the second to speak. He got up and railed against the failure of local TDs to stand up for the area “against the Government”.
As he concluded, he first approached Mr Cannon with a ziplock bag of cow manure and threw it at him and then approached Ms Rabbitte with another small bag of excrement and threw it over her.
Instead of intervening, sources have said a small number of people present applauded and no one confronted the protestor or demanded he leave.
As is common even with large public meetings, there was no Garda officer present.
The man who Mr Cannon described as “an idiot” then left the room for a number of minutes but returned and stood quite close to Ms Rabbitte for the remainder of the meeting.
“It was intimidating for her,” Mr Cannon told the .
“I fear that a very precious aspect of our Irish democracy, the easy access we have to our political representatives, is under threat and has been for some time,” he added.
Mr Cannon, himself a former junior education minister, said it was a most unsavoury episode but at the end of the day, thankfully nobody was seriously hurt.
“We need right-thinking people to call out this toxicity, to say that they won’t stand for it. That’s the only way it can be stopped in its tracks, for it to become socially unacceptable for people to make derogatory comments on social media, because that’s where the toxicity, the aggression, gains traction,” Mr Cannon said.
Sources have said Ms Rabbitte was quite shaken and upset by what happened.
Mr Cannon said it was a shame the incident overshadowed what otherwise was a very positive meeting, which raised €20,000 to fund a potential judicial review against the biogas plant.
However, he said he was concerned the accessibility to politicians in Ireland will have to be limited if such incidents continue.
“I fear we are on a slippery slope here and I had Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney down here recently. They were able to duck in and out of shops and talk to people. I would hate to lose that,” he said.
"All part of the job you might say, but I can understand why fewer people want this job," he said.
Ms Rabbitte is known to have reported the matter to gardaí and in a statement to the , officers confirmed they are investigating "all the circumstances" surrounding the incident.
"An Garda Síochána is investigating all the circumstances relating to an incident that occurred at a public meeting in Gort, Co Galway, yesterday evening, Wednesday 4 January, 2023."
Ms Rabbitte said the incident left her fearing for her safety.