A jailed Irish pro-Palestinian activist’s treatment in Germany has become a diplomatic issue for Dublin days before German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is due to visit Ireland.
A cross-party group of Irish politicians has urged Prime Minister Micheál Martin to send observers to the high-security trial of the so-called Ulm 5 and to raise Daniel Tatlow-Devally’s detention conditions with Merz when the German leader visits on Tuesday, July 28, The Guardian reports.
Mairéad Farrell of Sinn Féin said members of the delegation attended a hearing in Stuttgart on Wednesday and visited Tatlow-Devally in prison. “I was quite shocked by the treatment that he is receiving. He is 23 hours a day in his cell,” Farrell said.
She said Tatlow-Devally had only one hour of visits each month and described the conditions as excessive. “It just seems that there’s very harsh conditions that seem unwarranted for the scale of the fact that these people haven’t harmed people,” she said.
German prosecutors say Tatlow-Devally and four other activists trespassed at a site owned by Israel’s Elbit Systems in Ulm last September, shouted pro-Palestinian slogans, smashed windows and destroyed equipment. Prosecutors allege the damage totalled about €1 million.
The defendants, who are British, Irish, German and Spanish citizens based in Berlin, face charges of trespassing, destruction of property and membership of a criminal organisation. If convicted, they face up to five years in prison.
Court representatives have said the detention conditions are justified by the severity of the charges. Stuttgart’s higher regional court previously ordered continued pre-trial detention, citing “a risk of flight, which would not be sufficiently mitigated even by the posting of bail”.
Farrell said the Irish government should keep watching the case until verdict. “This isn’t the end for us. We will be keeping an eye on this trial.”
