(Dublin: 19 May 08) Today the campaigners came together outside the conference venue as delegates were arriving to welcome them with a sea of banners and arms that showed the public support in their countries for the ban on cluster bombs. Then the (new) Irish Minister of Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin came out to receive 704,715 petition signatures gathered from around the world calling for a ban on cluster bombs. The total included 7,202 petitions collected from the New Zealand public (the 3,367 presented to Hon. Phil Goff on 20 February 2008 and additional signatures received since then). The conference is taking place at Croke Park, a huge football stadium in the north of Dublin. It takes at least five minutes to get from where the governments are meeting to the NGO area, basically a trip around the entire park. By the end of the day there were more than a few tired faces, including me as I must have taken more than a hundred photographs of this morning’s petition event! - Mary Wareham, Oxfam NZ/ANZCMC

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