Shell’s Drilling Work Stopped by Shell to Sea Campaigners in Ireland

Shel­l’s Sur­vey work was stopped for about three hours on Mon­day after­noon when peo­ple walked out at low tide and got under Shel­l’s drilling plat­form. This is a con­tin­u­a­tion of the ‘Beat the Bore­holes’ effort by Shell to Sea and the Ross­port Sol­i­dar­i­ty Camp to get in the way of Shell drilling bore­holes in the Sruwad­da­con estu­ary which is a Spe­cial Area of Con­ser­va­tion.

Shel­l’s Sur­vey work was stopped for about three hours on Mon­day after­noon when peo­ple walked out at low tide and got under Shel­l’s drilling plat­form. This is a con­tin­u­a­tion of the ‘Beat the Bore­holes’ effort by Shell to Sea and the Ross­port Sol­i­dar­i­ty Camp to get in the way of Shell drilling bore­holes in the Sruwad­da­con estu­ary which is a Spe­cial Area of Con­ser­va­tion.

At 12:30pm a group of about 15 peo­ple man­aged to get past the 20 or so IRMS Secu­ri­ty guard­ing the plat­form. The group formed a cir­cle around the drill and stayed until the gar­dai arrived on scene and used Sec­tion 8 and a lit­tle bit of force to get peo­ple out from under the drill. One per­son had locked them­self onto the drill with a chain, but even­tu­al­ly they were removed by the gar­dai as well. How­ev­er work still did not resume because peo­ple con­tin­ued to dash back under the plat­form for the next cou­ple of hours, often with­out much resis­tance from IRMS or the gar­dai. The gar­dai did use pres­sure points and some arm twist­ing to get two cam­paign­ers off of one of the drills at one stage, but no one had any last­ing pain or injury.

Over­all spir­its were high, and about forty cam­paign­ers remained either under or around the out­side of the plat­form for the dura­tion of the action. Once the tide came in peo­ple were sat­is­fied at hav­ing stopped work for three hours, and the cam­paign­ers left Shell to con­tin­ue their dirty work in the beau­ti­ful Sruwad­da­con estu­ary.