Dubliner’s admission

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32531, 15 February 1971, Page 19

Dubliner’s admission

(N.Z.P.A. -Reuter—Copyright) LONDON, Feb. 12.

An Irishman said in the Old Bailey today that he had queued for four hours one day in July to get into the House of Commons, his pockets stuffed with canisters of gas to throw at the politicians assembled there. James Roche, aged 27, a labourer, from Dublin, said: “I just stood there, like everybody else. I bought a guide book, a map and a newspaper to cover the bulkiness in my pockets.” Roche said that when he did get into the Visitors’ Gallery, he threw two canisters on to the floor of the House, shouting: “If it’s all right for Londonderry and Belfast, it is all right for here. How do you like it?” When the gas bombs burst, he added, members of Parliament rushed, coughing and spluttering, for the exits. They had been in the middle of a debate on the Common Market.

Roche and a publisher, Bowes Egan, aged 28, of London, have pleaded not guilty to a charge of conspiring together, and with other persons unknown, between July 1 and 24 last year, to affect a public mischief by disrupting the proceedings of one of the Houses of Parliament.

Roche also has pleaded not guilty to the unlawful possession of two C-S gas grenades. The trial is continuing.