Freedom of the City - Obstruction of Truth

Oral

During Brian Friels play Freedom of the city we see many characters obstruct the truth by many different means. While some do it because it is there opinion and that is what they think happened, and others do it to try and inspire others or to make examples of what other protesters should do. The best way for me to tell you how and who obstructed the truth would be systematically, by going through each character individually.

Firstly the judge:

Judges have tremendous power in court-cases, as we expect they have the power to decide the outcome of these cases, and that they should haven't no opinion on the topic and should just look at the evidence presented to make a judgment. Although we all think this should happen as we see only after minutes of talking with a policeman the judge as already called the trio terrorist. Many times when the judge speaks he tries to push his point of view onto the jury and others that attended inside the courtroom, about how he can't accept that the trio just happened to walk into the guildhall and that the only way they could have gotten in there was if they planned it. When the judge summaries his report he talks about how he doesn't think that the soldiers would have opened fire first, again we see that he based this entire decision on his opinion and doesn't take in the evidence that no guns were found on or near the trio, and that when the trio came out of the guildhall they had their hands on their head which makes it a bit hard to fire a gun, another major piece of evidence that was pushed aside my the judge was the fact that no police officers would killed or injured which seems a bit weird when apparently the trio were the ones that came out shooting.

Now the Priest:

A priest is another character that we presume that they would tell the truth and not mislead people, but as we see this priest looks at the bigger picture, which might help the protesters to get what they wanted it still doesn't make it right. The Priest leads the trio out to be martyers, "dying for what they believed in", which we and him know is wrong and that they were just in the wrong place and wrong time.