The German ambassador to Ireland has said he is taking the incident involving an Irish person who was assaulted by a police officer in Berlin “very seriously”, adding it is “now necessary to investigate” the matter.
Ambassador David Gill confirmed the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) contacted him on Saturday about the issue and he has also communicated with its German counterpart, the Federal Foreign Office.
Mr Gill took up his post in Dublin 12 months ago. He told The Irish Times “the embassy understands there is great sensitivity here in Ireland with regard to demonstrations” in relation to Gaza.
On Thursday, Dublin-born Kitty O’Brien (25) attended an unregistered demonstration in central Berlin to protest the killing of Palestinian journalists in Israeli air strikes.
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Video footage shows O’Brien was twice punched in the face by a German police officer amidst a jostle at the front line of the demonstration.
They were then detained by police during which time protest organisers say O’Brien’s right arm was “twisted with great force, snapping the bone”.
They were brought to a nearby hospital and had to undergo significant surgery to correct the bone, sources close to O’Brien told The Irish Times.
Mr Gill has said “the video [of the assault] is really awful” and “not easy” for him to view. “It is now necessary to investigate the situation, and it is on the Berlin police to do so,” he said, adding he understands investigations are ongoing.
“We will see what the consequences of this will be, and we will follow them very closely from Dublin,” he said.
The incident sparked a small number of protests across Ireland on Saturday. Taoiseach Micheál Martin said he was “deeply concerned” by the scene and that such an assault is “unacceptable”.
A protest was held outside the German embassy in Dublin on Saturday, at which O’Brien’s aunt, Catherine Stocker, a Social Democrats councillor for Clontarf, spoke.
Ms Stocker told The Irish Times her niece is “as well as can be in these circumstances”, albeit with “a broken arm and broken nose and fairly significant nerve damage” which will require “four weeks of follow-up physiotherapy”.
O’Brien has been active with the Irish Bloc Berlin, a pro-Palestinian activist group that organised Thursday’s demonstration, for more than a year. “For the police of a democratic state to violently attack a peaceful protest in that way is just outrageous,” Ms Stocker said.
O’Brien’s mother, Dr Cliona Hannon, has written to the Taoiseach and Tánaiste about the attack on her child and told The Irish Times that no Government official has contacted her as of Sunday afternoon.
The Irish Embassy is yet to make contact with O’Brien, according to Dr Hannon. A DFA spokesperson previously said they “stand ready to provide consular assistance to the citizen concerned, should they request it”.
Mr Gill said, “It’s their right to protest. It was against the police violence and our stance to Israel”, adding that having grown up in East Germany during the 1960s and ’70s, he respects this right.
“I would like to stress that in Germany, peaceful demonstrations are not suppressed,” he said. “Freedom of expression is a fundamental right and it is not under question in our democracy in Germany.”
When informed of protesters’ claims that they were non-violent and that Berlin police caused the chaos, Mr Gill said, “I have no information of how the violence started”.
