Shell to Sea revisit RPS office

Thurs­day Jan­u­ary 17th 2008

Yes­ter­day, over 30 local peo­ple again vis­it­ed the RPS office in Bel­mul­let to again let it be known that under no cir­cum­stances would they accept raw gas run­ning through their com­mu­ni­ty. Even though RPS group direc­tor PJ Rud­den claimed recent­ly to media that he was “pleas­ant­ly sur­prised” by the reac­tion to the short list­ed routes, he will be in no doubt what the major­i­ty of peo­ple in Kil­com­mon parish think of the routes fol­low­ing this most recent vis­it. Four mem­bers of the group went in to the RPS offices to out­line some of their objec­tions to the cur­rent pipeline pro­pos­als. They also hand­ed in a peti­tion signed by mem­bers of the com­mu­ni­ty stat­ing their objec­tions to putting their pipeline any­where through the Spe­cial Area of Con­ser­va­tion (SAC) in Glen­gad or the Spe­cial Pro­tec­tion Area of Broad­haven Bay.

It also emerged recent­ly that the Coun­ty Coun­cil are once again doing their utmost to assist Shell in any­way they can. This time they have put in a plan­ning pro­pos­al to upgrade the road from the refin­ery site back to Glen­gad (via the Leanamore road). The upgrade of the road will cease imme­di­ate­ly after the gate down to land­fall leav­ing no doubt who the insti­ga­tors of this upgrade are. Approx­i­mate­ly 6 kilo­me­tres of the road will be widened while the whole of the road upgrade will be strength­ened with wire mesh to with­stand the increase traf­fic that the coun­cil forsee. This is yet anoth­er slap in the face to the local com­mu­ni­ty, who hav­ing been wait­ing for road repairs for years but must watch their Coun­cil spend their tax­es on Shel­l’s infra­struc­ture.

It also seems that Shell are con­tin­u­ing with their long held strat­e­gy of blam­ing any prob­lems they have on pro­tes­tors actions.

Dur­ing the Afri Hedge School that was held in Erris in ear­ly Novem­ber, a talk was giv­en by Fr Kevin O’Hara (who found­ed the Cen­tre for Social and Cor­po­rate Respon­si­bil­i­ty, which mon­i­tors oil com­pa­nies in Nige­ria). He stat­ed that in one case of an oil spill at which he was present, a Shell engi­neer upon turn­ing up at the spill loca­tion was straight away able to point out to oth­er employ­ees what had caused the oil spill as it had been a reoc­cur­ring prob­lem. How­ev­er offi­cial­ly of course the Shell excuse was that sab­o­tage had caused the oil spill. The only prob­lem for Shell was that the Shell engi­neer had been caught on film direct­ing the employ­ees to the fault in the pipeline, which was the true cause of the spill.

It seems as if Shell are using a sim­i­lar tac­tic here in Mayo. In the lat­est refin­ery ‘Envi­ron­men­tal Report’ (18th Dec 07) that Shell has com­piled, they admit­ted that one of their 4 dust col­lec­tion points showed a read­ing that was well above their lim­it for dust depo­si­tion (mea­sured 530mg/m2/day where 350mg/ m2/day is the lim­it). The dust col­lec­tion pots were in place for over a month how­ev­er Shell blame the high lev­el of dust record­ed on the fact that pro­tes­tors “pos­si­bly van­dalised” the dust gauge dur­ing an incur­sion on to the site on the 9th of Novem­ber.

See the Envi­ron­men­tal Reports (sic) here:
http://www.mayococo.ie/en/News/GasTerminal/Environmenta…2007/