Shell restart haulage to Glengad

Occu­pa­tion stops work, road block­ing delays haulage

On Tues­day the 13th of Novem­ber reports had come in that Shell had begun expand­ing the Glen­gad com­pound. Around mid­day few of us at the camp house decid­ed to head down for a look, and to see what could be done.

When we got to Glen­gad we could see two of the sec­tions of pal­isade fenc­ing had been opened up, and dig­gers were mov­ing bog mats out onto the field adjoin­ing the land­fall com­pound.

As walked down through anoth­er field and crossed over a cou­ple of fences to get to the work, the dig­gers urgent­ly began to with­draw back into the com­pound and replace the sec­tions of pal­isade fenc­ing. A team of 10 IRMS secu­ri­ty guards had mobilised to pro­tect the gap in the fence as the work­ers were restor­ing it. With the fence in place the IRMS with­drew into the com­pound all work at Glen­gad stopped.

We were hap­py to hang out on the plat­form and dis­cuss what had hap­pened — how did we stop work so eas­i­ly?

First­ly, we were on pri­vate prop­er­ty — far inside the fence and not a pub­lic place — so the Gar­daí can’t use the pub­lic order act down there. More impor­tant­ly the field isn’t owned by Shell — all they have is a CAO — Com­pul­so­ry Acqui­si­tion Order — over it to lay the onshore pipeline through it, so they may have no right to ask us to leave or for IRMS to use force (but we’ll see about that).

We went walk­a­bout around the com­pound to see what we could see — only loads of green pal­isade fenc­ing and secu­ri­ty cam­eras every­where.

Shell have big plans for Glen­gad

They’ve said in a recent com­mu­ni­ty let­ter that the cur­rent mobil­i­sa­tion is to build the LVI — Land­fall Valve Instal­la­tion. The LVI is an add-on mak­ing a bad pipeline design even worse, includ­ed in Shel­l’s last plan­ning appli­ca­tion for the onshore pipeline in 2010. It’s sup­posed to be able to iso­late the off­shore pipeline from the onshore pipeline to keep the onshore pipeline pres­sure below 100bar (still extra­or­di­nar­i­ly high), but what real­ly came from the last oral hear­ing is that it actu­al­ly increas­es the like­li­hood of pipeline fail­ure.

Also at some point Shell will need to build a tun­nel bor­ing machine recep­tion pit a cou­ple of fields over, in a field they recent­ly bought. This will require a mas­sive mobil­i­sa­tion of lor­ries for months, again chok­ing up the L1202 road to Glen­gad like they did this spring.

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After a few hours down in the field we head­ed for home. Over the hill in Pul­lath­omas we met a few friends on the road and just as we stopped we spied anoth­er con­voy of lor­ries approach­ing with a new load for Glen­gad. There was noth­ing for it but to stop them — putting a Mayo Coun­ty Coun­cil traf­fic cone to good use for once. All they had was an IRMS jeep escort­ing them, and they’ve no legal pow­er on the road.

After about an hour or so a Gar­da van showed up, but we were hap­py enough with the delay caused to Shell and head­ed off for the evening.

Note: By the way they are com­ing across the fields with bog mats already it looks like they want to fence off the whole area they have CAOed in Glen­gad and fence it off. It looks like they might be stuck legal­ly in mov­ing peo­ple from down there so its a great time to come and get a feel for what’s going on and for get­ting in the way of Shell.