You really are unbelievable.
There is a right to protest you realise.
That is true.
However we only saw a brief few seconds of footage, so we don't know what led to the punch up at the gates.
I am not defending either side because i don't know the whole story but i am increasingly suspicious of the way news is being presented by the mainstream media.
This is why i sometimes like to play devils advocate.
These days protesting is a full time job for some people. A few years ago i got a job doing security at an oil drilling test site.
We were employed to protect the site from environmentalist protesters who had set up camp at the front gates.
They treated the whole protest as a party, they would play music into the night and have barbecues, when a lorry or van would arrive at the site, the protesters would shout and blow whistles but they never got violent.
We got used to seeing different groups of what we called recreational protesters, they would come and go at all times of the day and night.
After about a week, a group arrived who weren't local, they had Southern Irish accents, the police told us that this group were full time professional protesters who were on a wage, it was then things began to change, the professionals as we called them started to organise the crowd to try an gain access to the site, when a lorry would arrive at the gate, the protesters would rush the gate to try and gain access once it opened.
Their aim was to get in and chain themselves to the drilling rig, at night they would try and cut through the security fence, we noticed that the professional protesters were inciting the crowd to become more aggressive, they would come up to the gates and start shouting abuse at us, the police told us that this was a common tactic by these type of protesters, they try to provoke an overreaction and then film it, the film is then edited to create a different impression of what really happened.
www.bbc.co.uk
