High drama opens road to freedom

Paddy McCabe had been held for 36 hours at the Lille-Lesquin lorry drivers' blockade, and the Irish trucker from Dublin was fed up. At lunch-time his tormentors gathered in their tent to eat sandwiches and listen to the radio. Mr McCabe's Volvo refrigerated vehicle was parked at the head of the captive lorries, so he decided to make a break for freedom.

As he surged forward, two strikers pursued him, one pounding the white lorry from Dawn Farms of Naas, Co Kildare, with a shovel. A white Renault van tried to head him off. Mr McCabe swerved, and knocked down a striker who had run to block the lorry.

The video pictures of the next few moments, shot by the Paris company Impossible Productions, are among the most dramatic images of the four day-old strike. A Frenchman in a bright blue anorak lies on the ground while an angry mob of strikers pull open the cabin of Mr McCabe's lorry, shouting "Get out! Get out!" followed by the foulest obscenities in the French language. They tear Mr McCabe's clothing off his shoulder. The Irishman hangs on for dear life, afraid he's about to be lynched.

There are no bosses at the lorry drivers' blockades; in French revolutions, each man is a little commissar. An angry striker stands in front of the camera. "Earlier we let one foreigner go," he says. "That gave the others ideas. It's the fault of the police - for letting one guy go. It really messed up the system. We're on strike and we make barricades; they should leave us alone."

The injured lorry driver sits up, and his colleagues dab blood from the back of his head. Paddy McCabe has emerged from his lorry, chain-smoking and shaking like a leaf. "I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it," he murmurs in English. "What are they going to do with me? I have to go back to Ireland. I have to go back to Ireland. My wife is sick."

Veronique Gerard, a journalist with Impossible Productions, translates this dialogue of the deaf. "But he can't go back to Ireland," the strikers insist. "There aren't any ferries."

Above Mr McCabe's head, the stripes of the Irish tricolour are painted on the side of his lorry, which says, with unintended irony, "Gateway to Europe". His neck is bleeding where the strikers scratched him when they tried to pull him out of his cabin. "Get him out of here," one of the Frenchman shouts. "Because if that guy (the striker) gets up, he'll kill him (McCabe)."

A striker leads Mr McCabe out of sight of the injured lorry driver. Firemen bandage the injured man's head, bundle him on to a trolley and wheel him to an ambulance. He stands up, laughing, and climbs into the van unaided. It is high drama and farce, France's theatre of the absurd.

French police escorted Mr McCabe to the Belgian border. Late yesterday, he took the ferry from Rotterdam to Felixstowe, and is expected back in Dublin tonight. Mr Liam Queally of Dawn Farms says the company has extricated five of six drivers from France, two through the Channel Tunnel, two through back roads to Germany and Belgium. Now they're rooting for the last one, who left Barcelona yesterday.

The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, held a 25-minute telephone conversation with the French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, last night about the dispute. Mr Jospin indicated he was conscious of the disruption to Irish trade caused by the dispute.

The Fine Gael leader, Mr John Bruton, will talk to representatives of French trucking management and lorry drivers' unions in Paris today to impress upon them how much the strike is harming Ireland.