Nearly 100 protestors seized the opportunity to voice their displeasure with State Speaker of the House Thomas Finneran’s alleged undemocratic practices yesterday evening at the National Speakers Conference kickoff event at the Copley Plaza Hotel.

The 11th annual conference is being held this week in Boston. The conference, to which all speakers of State House of Representatives are invited, is being hosted by Finneran.

A group of protestors congregated across from an entrance to the Copley Plaza Hotel. One of the protest organizers began to speak over a portable public address system when the police informed him he did not have a permit to do so and must desist.

Not to be mollified, the protest organizers passed out song lyrics to the crowd and were about to begin singing when Finneran emerged from the hotel to address the protestors in person.

“I’m coming to let you know that my fellow speakers wanted me to come out here,” Finneran said. “This is the true flavor of Boston. People speak, and sometimes, people disagree…”

Again the speaker was interrupted, this time by the opening guitar chords to the song “The Speaker,” written by one of the protestors. Finneran sang along with the rest of the crowd as they sang, “We got to overthrow him! Try to dethrone him! Gotta send him on his way – his time has come. We’ll never make any progress while he’s bangin’ down the gavel. We gotta push to overthrow him, ’til the job is done.”

When the song ended, Finneran bid farewell to the crowd and started back toward the hotel as the crowd yelled after him, “Hey Tommy, you going to go see your rich friends now?”

The protest, organized by Citizens for Participation in Political Action, featured a diverse group of individuals. Green Party candidate for governor Jill Stein was one of the featured speakers at the protest.

“We have to take the government back from the stranglehold of big money, and no one personifies that stranglehold more than King Tom Finneran,” Stein said. “Right now we don’t have a democratic state government and we need to take it back.”

Eric Weltman, the organizing director of Citizens for Participation in Political Action, addressed the crowd after the Speaker’s departure.

“The mess on Beacon Hill has a name, and it’s Tom Finneran. Tom Finneran represents the worst of Massachusetts, not the best,” Weltman said before introducing other speakers who included Stein and City Councilor Chuck Turner.

Turner elicited a cheer from his fellow demonstrators when he asserted, “We need to call on the Democrats in the House to dump Finneran!”

The protestors held signs and passed out literature which tried to chronicle Finneran’s alleged abuses of power. One flyer claimed, “under his [Finneran’s] rule, the House rarely meets and the committees are virtually powerless. Friends are rewarded and enemies punished. Legislation is buried and dissent is not tolerated.”