Category: Wilderness Defence

July 15th 2010
At approx­i­mate­ly 7pm last night a num­ber of Shell to Sea cam­paign­ers entered the water in Broad­haven Bay in kayaks and rafts in a peace­ful attempt to pre­vent Shell from bring­ing in a bore­hole drilling plat­form. They were met with 5 Gar­da water unit boats, with approx­i­mate­ly 16 Gar­daí on board.

Cam­paign­ers attempt­ed to approach the plat­form but were pre­vent­ed from doing so by Gar­daí who over­turned their kayaks.

One of the cam­paign­ers, Eoin Law­less man­aged to get close to the plat­form. When Gar­daí over­turned his kayak, he swam under the plat­form. A Gar­da then jumped into the water after him, and with­out giv­ing any instruc­tion pro­ceed­ed to drag him from the water into the near by Gar­da boat.

Mr. Law­less said, “I had told Gar­daí that I would leave the area but I was dragged from the water and they pro­ceed­ed to kneel on my back. I was not informed whether I was under arrest or why I was being man­han­dled. One Gar­da then pinched my throat with his two fin­gers and cut off my air sup­ply. He was obvi­ous­ly trained in how to do it. He held me like that for about 90 sec­onds, allow­ing me to take one or two gasps. He kept say­ing into my ear that he had my last breath in his hands.”

“It was ter­ri­fy­ing. I tru­ly believed he might kill me. We need human rights observers to come back down to Mayo as a mat­ter of urgency**” said Mr. Law­less.

Mr. Law­less received med­ical atten­tion at Bel­mul­let Gar­da sta­tion last night.

Shell plan to drill up to 80 bore­holes to sur­vey the Sruth Fha­da Chonn estu­ary for it’s pro­posed raw gas pipeline. The bore­holes are to pro­vide a sur­vey of the estu­ary to deter­mine the final plans for the tun­nel Shell plans to build under the estu­ary link­ing up the off­shore pipeline with the pro­posed inland refin­ery. The new route is still with­in 250m of sev­er­al hous­es and the local com­mu­ni­ty remains opposed to the plans. The estu­ary is a Spe­cial­ly Pro­tect­ed Area & part of the Broad­haven Bay Spe­cial Area of Con­ser­va­tion. The oper­a­tion will dam­age parts of the estu­ary & dis­turb the wildlife there, par­tic­u­lar­ly Atlantic salmon, otters & birds found on the inter­tidal areas.

Shell to Sea plan to try to stop Shell from drilling the bore­holes over the next few months through a cam­paign of peace­ful protest.

ENDS

For fur­ther infor­ma­tion or ver­i­fi­ca­tion please con­tact: Shell to Sea

NOTES TO EDITORS

Shell to Sea is a nation­al cam­paign with active groups based across Ire­land. The Shell to Sea cam­paign has three main aims. 1) To have the Cor­rib gas field exploit­ed in a safe way that will not expose the local com­mu­ni­ty in Erris to unnec­es­sary health, safe­ty and envi­ron­men­tal risks. 2) To rene­go­ti­ate the terms of the Great Oil and Gas Give­away, which sees Ireland’s 10 bil­lion bar­rels of oil equiv­a­lent* off the West Coast go direct­ly to the oil com­pa­nies, with the Irish State retain­ing a 0% share, no ener­gy secu­ri­ty of sup­ply and only 25% tax on prof­its against which all costs can be deduct­ed. 3) To seek jus­tice for the human rights abus­es suf­fered by Shell to Sea cam­paign­ers due to their oppo­si­tion to Shell’s pro­posed inland refin­ery.

* This fig­ure, issued by the Depart­ment of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Ener­gy & Nat­ur­al Resources (DCENR) in 2006, esti­mates the amount of gas and oil in the Rock­all and Por­cu­pine basins, off Ire­land ’s west coast, to be 10 BBOE (bil­lion bar­rels of oil equiv­a­lent). Based on the aver­age price of a bar­rel of oil for June 2010 at $75.34 or €59.61, this works out at a val­ue of €596 bil­lion. This does not take account of fur­ther oil and gas reserves off Ire­land ’s south coast or inland. The total vol­ume of oil and gas which right­ful­ly belongs to Ire­land could be sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er. Also, as the glob­al price of oil ris­es in the com­ing years, the val­ue of these Irish nat­ur­al resources will rise fur­ther.

** Front­line report: ‘Break­down in Trust’: http://www.frontlinedefenders.org/node/ 2474 (see p.51)

Join our resis­tance against the indus­tri­al­iza­tion of Europe’s last remain­ing great wilder­ness and take direct action against heavy indus­try!

The Strug­gle So Far

The cam­paign to defend Europe’s great­est remain­ing wilder­ness con­tin­ues. For the past five years sum­mer direct action camps in Ice­land have tar­get­ed alu­mini­um smelters, mega-dams and geot­her­mal pow­er plants.

After the ter­ri­ble destruc­tion as a result of build­ing Europe’s largest dam at Kárah­n­júkar and mas­sive geot­her­mal plants at Hengill, there is still time to crush the ‘mas­ter plan’ that would have each major glacial riv­er dammed, every sub­stan­tial geot­her­mal field exploit­ed and the con­struc­tion of alu­mini­um smelters, an oil refin­ery, data farms and sil­i­con fac­to­ries. This would not only destroy unique land­scapes and ecosys­tems but also lead to a mas­sive increase in Iceland’s green­house gas emis­sions.

Polit­i­cal Land­scape

Sav­ing Ice­land has rein­tro­duced civ­il dis­obe­di­ence and anar­chist ideas into Ice­landic grass­roots and demon­strat­ed numer­ous meth­ods of direct action, many of which were uti­lized in a high­ly suc­cess­ful man­ner in the ‘Kitchen Uten­sils Upris­ing´ of last year, where expe­ri­enced Sav­ing Ice­land activists con­stant­ly stood in the fore­front push­ing bound­aries. Sav­ing Ice­land and our work through­out the years was a major cat­a­lyst in top­pling the cor­rupt pro-heavy indus­try ‘Alcoa gov­ern­ment’.

How­ev­er, last year´s gen­er­al elec­tions were a major blow for the envi­ron­men­tal move­ment in Ice­land, with the ‘Left Greens’ boot­ing their own min­is­ter of the envi­ron­ment out for being gen­uine­ly con­cerned about envi­ron­men­tal val­ues. The leader of the par­ty denounced their own envi­ron­men­tal poli­cies for being too ‘puri­tan­i­cal’ to be applic­a­ble in such times of finan­cial cri­sis. With this and the con­tin­u­ing of the People’s Alliance in gov­ern­ment we are still look­ing at a heav­i­ly for­ti­fied pro-heavy indus­try gov­ern­ment, doing away with any pre­tence of the being green or even remote­ly pro­gres­sive. On top of this, cor­rupt labour unions are firm­ly in the grip of the alu­mini­um lob­by call­ing for job growth regard­less of the envi­ron­men­tal costs.

The Sit­u­a­tion Now

The deep finan­cial and eth­i­cal cri­sis that hit Ice­land in the autumn of 2008 caused the ener­gy com­pa­nies tem­po­rary dif­fi­cul­ties in obtain­ing for­eign loans for their projects, but the alu­mini­um lob­by­ists are more bloody mind­ed than ever. Now their argu­ment is that with the eco­nom­ic col­lapse, Ice­land can sim­ply not afford to take note of envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns. This actu­al­ly expos­es the under­ly­ing truth that the alu­mini­um lob­by have always been aware of the valid­i­ty of the envi­ron­men­tal­ists point of view. The alu­mini­um lob­by want to fur­ther their hor­rors, on grounds of a cri­sis which they are large­ly respon­si­ble for hav­ing cre­at­ed.

The bank­ing side of the crash tends to be overem­pha­sized while oth­er major dri­vers of the crash are often ignored. The report of the Spe­cial Inves­ti­ga­tion Com­mis­sion (SIC), which looked into the events lead­ing up to and caus­ing the finan­cial crash, has how­ev­er focused on the effects of heavy indus­try in a key chap­ter of their report. The expan­sion of Iceland’s finan­cial sys­tem beyond the country’s sus­tain­able lim­its, is unequiv­o­cal­ly traced back to the enor­mous projects of the heavy indus­try build-up. This chap­ter has been ignored by the media, and so has anoth­er chap­ter that stat­ed the media’s own cul­pa­bil­i­ty as unques­tion­ing ser­vants of the bank and indus­tri­al estab­lish­ments.

A fun­da­men­tal prob­lem with the SIC report and the gen­er­al atmos­phere of denial that greet­ed it is that the report comes from with­in the very heart of the rot­ten State of Ice­land. As such its real func­tion is to keep all the options for deal­ing with the huge amount of cor­rup­tion and democ­ra­cy deficit safe­ly with­in the sphere of the courts and par­lia­men­tary pol­i­tics: Firm­ly under the con­trol of the very estab­lish­ment that cre­at­ed all this pow­er abuse in the first place.

In case of the finan­cial frauds this will mean years of long, drawn-out court cas­es which will grad­u­al­ly loose all mean­ing to the pub­lic, which have been left to pay the mas­sive debts gen­er­at­ed by the frauds.

In case of the deep root­ed cul­ture of cor­rup­tion and the cli­mate of fear which the alu­mini­um cor­po­ra­tions and pow­er com­pa­nies so thrive in, the promis­es of trans­paren­cy and democ­ra­cy are noth­ing but a smoke­screen for an even greater cor­po­rate plun­der of the coun­tries’ ener­gy resources. This plun­der, sup­port­ed by restruc­tur­ing oblig­a­tions in loan agree­ments with the IMF, is a con­tin­u­a­tion of a deeply cor­rupt pol­i­cy of pri­vati­sa­tion and ruth­less indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion, the very same poli­cies that cre­at­ed the cri­sis.

Cur­rent action tar­gets
The Cen­tu­ry alu­mini­um smelter in Hel­gu­vík, tar­get­ed by Sav­ing Ice­land last two sum­mers, is still slow­ly being built. Where the elec­tric­i­ty for the plant is to come from is still uncer­tain, but it will require up to eight new pow­er plants, at least sev­en of which will be geot­her­mal on the Reyk­janes Penin­su­la (HS/MAGMA) and Hell­isheiði (OR – Reyk­javik Ener­gy). One of the geot­her­mal plants pow­er­ing Century’s smelter could be in Bitra, close to Hengill, and the eighth pow­er plant will prob­a­bly be a large dam on the beau­ti­ful Þjórsá Riv­er that Landsvirkjun (Nation­al Pow­er Com­pa­ny) is eager to build as soon as they can. Norðurþing is in nego­ti­a­tions with Alcoa about an alu­mini­um smelter in Bakki/Húsavík with ener­gy com­ing from frag­ile wilder­ness areas in the north. Plati­na Resources want to do gold and oth­er min­ing research in the East­fjords.

Take action!

This year, instead of orga­niz­ing a sum­mer protest camp, we call for resis­tance through­out the sea­sons. We espe­cial­ly call for Ice­landers to take action all year round but also envi­ron­men­tal­ists world­wide to come to Ice­land, where we will warm­ly wel­come any kind of indi­vid­ual actions against the alu­mini­um cor­po­ra­tions and the ener­gy com­pa­nies active in destroy­ing the envi­ron­ment.

Sym­bol­ic actions have turned out not to be enough to stop the forces of destruc­tion. The aim of actions should be to pre­vent any fur­ther rape of the land. Sav­ing Ice­land gives its whole­heart­ed sol­i­dar­i­ty to any actions that hit the alu­mini­um indus­try and the pow­er com­pa­nies where its most effec­tive.

Even if you can not come to Ice­land to do direct actions your help to our strug­gle with sol­i­dar­i­ty actions, dona­tions, trans­la­tions and by spread­ing the word will be invalu­able.