Beat The Boreholes Continues to Disrupt Shell’s Plans

18th August 2010
Yes­ter­day lunchtime, nine kayak­ers from Ross­port Sol­i­dar­i­ty Camp, with their team of vol­un­teers and local cam­paign­ers in sup­port roles on dry land, suc­cess­ful­ly inter­rupt­ed Shel­l’s bore­hole sur­vey drilling pro­gramme in Sruth Fha­da Conn for sev­er­al hours yes­ter­day.

Opposed by twelve assort­ed Gar­da and Shell secu­ri­ty boats car­ry­ing upwards of six­ty per­son­nel, the Shell to Sea kayak­ers sal­lied forth deter­mined to stop the progress of drilling in the estu­ary. In spite of the vast dis­par­i­ty of num­bers and dis­ad­van­tage in ves­sels, drilling was indeed stopped for some time, at no cost in arrests and with­out undue risk to the action team. After one of the kayak­ers had his ves­sel delib­er­ate­ly cap­sized by Shel­l’s IRMS secu­ri­ty oper­a­tives, he clev­er­ly turned the tables on them by swim­ming under the drilling plat­form and cling­ing on to the bore shaft. It took a com­bined Gar­da and Shell/IRMS effort quite a while to remove the intre­pid camper from the shaft, and all the time he was there halt­ed drilling in its tracks. The camper was removed from his posi­tion only when an IRMS secu­ri­ty man dived in to the water to seize him and restrain him in water out of his depth for sev­er­al min­utes before being hand­ed over to Gar­daí.

The water-based action con­tin­ued for over an hour after that, with the kayak­ers play­ing a game of ‘cat and mouse’ with the Gar­da and IRMS ribs, which con­tin­ued to dis­rupt the sched­ule of works on the drilling plat­forms. For all the time of the action was in progress, the kayak­ers were watched over from land by Ross­port Sol­i­dar­i­ty Camp vol­un­teers and local cam­paign­ers with cam­eras, video equip­ment and ban­ners. Also on land there was a cast of sup­port­ing vil­lains (alas!), with three Gar­da minibus­es, about ten uni­formed cops, Det. Hugh Egan (plus side­kick), and Jim Far­rell, oper­a­tions head of Inte­grat­ed Risk Man­age­ment Sys­tems (IRMS).

Sev­er­al par­ties of tourists both Irish and inter­na­tion­al, stopped to watch the action on the estu­ary waters, and after hav­ing the local strug­gle against Shell explained to them, cheered on the kayak­ers along­side the gath­ered local sup­port­ers and Sol­i­dar­i­ty Campers.

All kayak­ers returned to camp safe and well, with the only equip­ment loss that of a head-mount­ed cam­era stolen by an IRMS secu­ri­ty man from one of the kayak­ers. No arrests hap­pened, and the camper that was tak­en by the Gar­daí was released un-arrest­ed to the camp halfway dur­ing the action. All in all, anoth­er suc­cess for the Beat The Bore­holes cam­paign and a fit­ting way to mark Niall Har­net­t’s release from Shell-man­dat­ed cap­tiv­i­ty on Mon­day.