Irene Rigau: “on February 6 we must show we’re not afraid”

BarcelonaNext Monday Irene Rigau (Banyoles, 1951) will sit in the dock of a Barcelona court next to former president Artur Mas and fellow cabinet minister Joana Ortega. The first hearing of the trial for the non-binding vote of November 9 2014 is due to begin on Monday 6. All three defendants have been charged with disobedience and neglect of duty. If found guilty, they may be banned from office for nine years.

I must start by asking you how you are keeping up.

I’m very much at ease. In politics you must be willing to accept the consequences of your actions. A suspension is a harsh penalty and an inconveniece, but we did what we did because we owed it to a nation that is alive and willing to stand by our side next Monday.

How will you travel to court?

I’ll walk with the other defendants from the Generalitat Palace, together with everyone else who was a cabinet minister in 2014. It’s a lovely gesture. Our government has shown a great deal of solidarity and the other ministers said: “we were also a part of that and it was a collective decision”. We must show that we are not afraid of anything.

In a nutshell, the basis of your legal counsel is that you are accountable but not guilty. What’s the difference?

We managed the preparation of the vote, the network of volunteers, the online registration system, the polling stations … All that had been sorted before the Spanish Constitutional Court intervened to stop the ballot. From then onwards, it was the people who took over, everyone who had signed up and had already been given instructions. The network of volunteers is powerful but, actually, there are no grounds for such a serious offence —disobedience— because we never took further action, such as acknowledging that we had received a court order. None of that ever happened.

I was asking because if you truly feel that you can be held accountable, then you shouldn’t care if you are found guilty.

When you intend to disobey a court’s injunction, you realise that you will need to go all the way. But that’s not what happened. As soon as the injunction was issued, the wheels stopped spinning.

You cancelled the advertising campaign on TV.

We cancelled everything to do with the development of the law on consultations. We cannot be charged with passive neglect of duty because when you neglect your duty, you adopt a resolution which you know is unlawful. But now we are being accused of not adopting a resolution. What’s more, you will recall how Palau Robert remained open as a polling station for days and the Prosecutor did nothing about it.

People were allowed to cast their ballot for as long as ten days.

Quite. So what did the court injunction accomplish? It made the vote a success. The day before the polls Rajoy stated —and I remember it nearly verbatim—: “This is not a referendum or a consultation or anything”. When, on the eve of the vote, you hear the Spanish prime minister claim that “this will have no effect”, should you tell your president to stop everything? Not at all, because it’ll be inconsequential.

Seeing 2.3m people go to the polls was quite something.

That was the start of it all. If there had been only 324 of us, we wouldn’t be where we are now.

Madrid has warned that the Catalan government may see some of its powers suspended and polling stations may be locked up to impede the independence vote scheduled for later this year.

They are the desperate words of desperate people. President Puigdemont made it very clear: you cannot lock up democracy. If we cannot use schools as polling stations, then we will use churches, health centres, homes for the elderly … We are being driven back to the days immediately after General Franco’s death.

That’s when the Catalan Assembly had to use churches to hold their meetings.

We might not be able to, nowadays, but if this is about finding suitable premises, then the Catalan authorities have a range of options available to them. Deep down, they wish to strip our government off all its powers in education. They have always believed that schooling and education provide a sense of belonging, so they feel that certain powers must be reclaimed in order to preserve Spain’s unity.

How come the so-called “Operation Dialogue” has been so short-lived?

By “dialogue” they mean silencing us. They refuse to acknowledge that Catalans long for self-rule: they have studied us as a Spanish region and they treat us like a colony. They are worried about the new party, PDECat, born out of Convergència Democràtica. When separatism was a fringe movement, it posed no threat. But when the middle classes shift towards it, they try to frighten us and they tell us that we are following the CUP’s diktat.

Endavant, one of the political parties that form the radical left coalition CUP, has put up posters which show a nurse smacking Catalan Health Minister Toni Comín.

There are two social models at odds with one another. I can understand that some within the CUP oppose the coalition’s decision to support the 2017 Catalan budget, but I could never agree with anyone who condones violence. Claiming that budget cuts are a form of violence trivialises violence.