Ireland – Fri 9th – Sun 11th July 2010

The Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) used the opportunity International Boycott Weekend to launch a two-week petition drive seeking to enlist Dunnes Stores customers in Ireland to support the call for a boycotting Israeli products. Our aim is to gather more than 4,000 signatures in this short period calling on Dunnes Stores senior management to no longer stock Israeli products. IPSC members and supporters took to the streets outside Dunnes outlets in Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Limerick, Galway, Newry, Wexford, Waterford, Bantry, Enniscorthy, and Sligo – and will continue to collect signatures for the next two weeks.

It is now a quarter-century after Dunnes was at the centre of a bitter two-year campaign of boycott and pickets, when it sacked a group of workers who refused to handle South African goods. Dunnes was on the wrong side of history then, siding with the South African apartheid regime against its own workers. This is a chance for it to put itself on the right side of history. We believe it is an achievable victory, especially as many of the outlets we stood outside had already stopped stocking Israeli products since the Flotilla massacre – but our aim is to make it an official and permanent policy of Dunnes.

A media event will see the collected signatures will be handed in to Dunnes” head office by one of the anti-Apartheid strikers on Tuesday 29th July.