What an interesting discussion. History shows that changes have been made when people have deliberately broken the law. From Rosa Parks to Greenpeace to Poll Tax rioters, brave people have been willing to break the law, and as Tom McEnaney observed - accepted the consequences for that - and made history as well as new law. Furthermore, people have gone to jail for obeying the law when it was judged to have been a bad law. David Langwalner's example of the East German border guards who followed orders and shot dead people trying to escape over the Berlin Wall was a good one. They did their job but were  found guilty of murder because the court found the law was so unjust that they shouldn't have obeyed it. Disobedience, in other words, is proven to be both a morally correct and effective method of changing bad law.

But the question then becomes : how do you decide? The Shell to Sea campaigners, or the Turf cutters, fundamentally believe  they are the victims of bad law. But our planning process is transparent and lengthy. If that process decides the pipeline must go ahead; then the gardai must stop the protestors. The turfcutters are convinced of their case, but the law is there to protect our environmental heritage, and their individual rights are secondary to that. We agreed that you can't use numbers as a criteria for deciding when protest is acceptable, but I think Tom's point was helpful; you have to ask yourself if your case is about you as an individual or is there are a harm to greater society being done by the law.  But that's also a highly subjective argument. John Waters would argue that while he was personally inconvenienced by the parking fine, he wants to draw attention to the fact that the parking laws have had negative consequences for social and commercial life in Dun Laoighre.

So I'm not sure that we reached any consensus on the criteria one could objectively use to decide when law breaking as a form of protest is permissable. And this is vitally important because as we saw with our discussion on Syria, an illegal but moral intervention, could be on the cards. Personally, I wouldn't have waited for chemical weapons. I'd have gone in a year ago on a peacekeeping mission to protect those poor people.  The gap between legal and moral is too wide on that one. Sometimes you have to forget the law, and just do the right thing.