Ireland: Promoting Falun Dafa at the Special Olympics

The 2003 Special Olympics World Summer Games are being held in Dublin, Ireland’s capital city, from June 20 to 29. The Special Olympics was established for people with disabilities and is usually held in the summer prior to the Olympic Games. Delegations from 166 countries took part in this year’s Special Olympics, with 7,000 athletes and 28,000 of their relatives and friends.

On June 21, the opening ceremony was held at Ireland’s largest stadium, Croke Park, which can seat 80,000 people. As the crowds were entering the stadium, Falun Gong practitioners from Ireland demonstrated the exercises on the streets surrounding the stadium. The practitioners were dressed in golden sportswear and showed the Falun Gong exercises to delegates from all over the world, as well as the Irish public. They also exhibited a banner which read “Falun Gong practitioners welcome the Chinese athletes” in both Chinese and English. The Falun Gong exercises received a lot of attention from the crowds of people as they entered the stadium in joyful spirits for this Special Olympics opening ceremony. Some families took pictures in front of the practitioners’ banner. Drivers blew their horns to show their support. In addition, we distributed leaflets about Falun Gong. The leaflets included details of the many awards given to Falun Dafa practitioners by various governments for improving people’s physical and mental health and their moral standards in general. Also included were the facts about how practitioners have been brutally persecuted in China and an account of Jiang Zemin being prosecuted outside of China on a charge of Genocide.

Because Jiang’s regime covered up the facts about the spread of SARS in China, the Chinese delegation was at one time excluded from the Games by the Irish Ministry of Health. Later, those Chinese athletes who were not from areas with serious local transmission of the disease, as determined by the World Health Organisation, were allowed to participate in the Games.

During their stay in Ireland, Chinese delegates and athletes will see how Falun Gong is freely practised outside of China and peacefully fits into society. They will also realise that the Jiang regime has wasted an enormous amount of taxpayers’ money to brutally abuse innocent people, spread falsehoods, cover up the facts, instigate hatred among people and bring a calamitous and tragic circumstance to the whole country and the vast Chinese population.

Translated from Chinese at http://yuanming.net/articles/200306/21715.html