They killed 15 people that day, including one of the football players. The attack followed the deaths of 20 British troops that morning in the North, and is openly known to have been a revenge killing by anyone you speak to here in Ireland.

87 years later England was to play Ireland at Rugby, I would tell you the league if I was could give a fuck about that. But I don’t, so I won’t.

And, being the patriotic little monkeys our sporting fans are, with their Belgium lager and flags made in Korea, they wanted to sing the British national anthem. God Save The Queen.

But save her from what? Nazi family ties? Interests in the Shell Oil corporation? Corgi shit on the carpets of Buckingham Palace?

So, Republican Sinn Fein marched from Crowe Park estate, under a heavy police presence, including some 40 riot cops. Chants of IRA support and calls for “Brits Out” dominated the march.

The Indymedia Ireland told me to keep my mouth shut, as my English accent was a dead give away, then persisted in making jokes about the idea of an English journalist being inside an RSF protest. And these protests were known for kicking off, big style.

But the interesting thing here was the number of protestors and the number of Guards.
Around 100 members of RSF protested that day and the police numbered around 70, over half in riot gear.

Yet, the Shell to Sea protests, outside the gas terminal construction site at Bellanaboy in Mayo and on the Bellanaboy road to the site, the police numbers have been in excess of 200. Sometimes more.

RSF, as far as I was briefed, as we rushed towards the meeting point outside a pub near Crowe Park Stadium, had a reputation for violence against the police. The news for days prior to the Rugby match that afternoon was filled with the controversy of playing the British national anthem for the first time in that stadium since the massacre.

So, it was obvious to most - including this journalist, who has only scratched the scab off Irish politics in my two weeks here – it was obvious RSF would try to protest, or do something. And the police were not prepared in any way shape or form.

And yet, in County Mayo, North West Ireland, for the last four dark winter months, over 200 cops have run riot, with no regard for law, order, or even human or civil rights, against peaceful local community members, both old and young, and those in-between. They have been beaten, dragged, knocked to the ground, thrown in ditches, punched, kicked and hospitalised.

Does anyone else notice something severely askew here? The numbers? The force of the policing?

In Nigeria the people who met violence, beatings, shootings and murder for opposing the Shell Oil Corporation, they referred to the police as “Shell’s Police”.

It just goes to show you who are really directing the police, who are calling the shots here.