Category: Rest of Europe

7.03.2007
Today at 16:00 a peace­ful demon­stra­tion was held at the Shell Garage on Hoyle Street, Netherthor­pe in Sheffield. This demon­stra­tion was an act of sol­i­dar­i­ty with the peo­ple of Ross­port, Coun­ty Mayo, Ire­land and the cam­paign Shell­toSea, who are oppos­ing Shells plans to build a poten­tial­ly lethal high pres­sure gas pipe line and refin­ery in a marine spe­cial area of con­ser­va­tion.

The local peo­ple of Ross­port are suf­fer­ing bul­ly­ing and intim­i­da­tion tac­tics from both Shell and the Irish Gov­ern­ment.

A ban­ner declar­ing
“HANDS OFF ROSSPORT”
“NO PIPELINE”
and “Leave it as it is” writ­ten in Gael­ic, was hung from the garage roof by pirates bear­ing the Irish Tri­colour.

Fliers explain­ing the rea­sons for the action and the dan­gers of Shells pro­posed pipeline were dis­trib­uted to Shells cus­tomers with a request to boy­cott Shell.

For more infor­ma­tion on the local cam­paign please see:

http://shelltosea.com
http://www.indymedia.ie
http://struggle.ws/rsc/

or con­tact 07775752160

Text of Fli­er
===============

Boy­cott Shell

Shell,Statoil and Marathon, sup­port­ed by the Irish gov­ern­ment, wants to build a dan­ger­ous, exper­i­men­tal raw gas pipeline and refin­ery in north­west Ire­land. But they are being stopped…

* Health and safe­ty

The pipeline, at 5 times the usu­al pres­sure, would be built over unsta­ble bog­land, with a his­to­ry of land­slides and in very close prox­im­i­ty to peo­ple’s homes/ It would be 70m from the near­est home, 30m from a pub­lic house and 3 fam­i­lies would have to cross the pipeline every day to leave their hous­es. A recent inde­pen­dent safe­ty analy­sis by US based pipeline con­sul­tants found: “The Cor­rib pipeline is not a ‘nor­mal’ pipeline, giv­en its poten­tial to oper­ate under exot­i­cal­ly high pres­sures adn because of unknown gas com­po­si­tions asso­ci­at­ed with gas field pro­duc­tion. This can seri­ous­ly increase the like­li­hood of pipeline fail­ure.” The safe­ty analy­sis said: “pipeline rout­ing should be at least 200m away from dwellings and 400m away from unshel­terd indi­vid­u­als to avoid mas­sive casu­al­ties and/or mul­ti­ple fatal­i­ties.”

* Envi­ron­ment

The refin­ery will have nine chim­neys up to 140ft high releas­ing car­bon diox­ide and methane. 16 hous­es are with­in a 2km radius of the plant. Air and water emis­sions from the refin­ery would pol­lute the local envi­ron­ment. The emis­sions from the pro­posed refin­ery at Ballinboy will pol­lute Car­row­more Lake which
sup­plies the region with water. Broad­haven bay is where Shell plans to pump the waste from the refin­ery: includ­ing lead, nick­el, mag­ne­sium, phos­pho­rus, chromi­um, arsenic, and mer­cury. This bay pro­vides livli­hoods for local com­mu­ni­ties through fish­ing. Shell claim there is “no evi­dence that Broad­haven Bay is of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance to whales and dol­phins”, con­trary to the find­ings of a UCC study(commissioned by Shell). The UCC research team record­ed over 220 sight­ings of sev­en whale and dol­phin species, plus sight­ings of two seal species in Broad­haven Bay and north-west Mayo waters.

* The great gas give­away

The Irish gov­ern­ment has helped Shell in this project. In 1975 for oil and gas exploita­tion in Ire­land the terms were between 8% to 16% pro­duc­tion roy­al­ties to the gov­ern­ment and a 50% tax rate. In addi­tion there would be an up to 50% gov­er­ment par­tic­i­pa­tion in the exploita­tion of any find, as the estab­lish­ment of a gov­ern­ment ener­gy com­pa­ny was planned. More­over gas was sold to gov­ern­ment com­pa­nies at reduced bulk dis­count. Suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments between 1985 and 1992 whit­tled this away to a sit­u­a­tion where there are no roy­al­ties, no gov­ern­ment par­tic­i­pa­tion, and a 25% tax rate. Fur­ther­more there is a 100% tax write-off mean­ing multi­na­tion­als can count their pro­duc­tion, devel­op­ment and explo­ration costs as ‘tax’ and hence pay less tax, or even con­ceiv­ably no tax. Laws were changed to allow Shell to use pri­vate land through a Com­pul­so­ry Aqui­si­tion Order. Gov­ern­ment owned forestry was sold to Shell for the refin­ery site.

Essen­tial­ly this is a great gas give­away, while under­fund­ed pub­lic ser­vices go down the tube. The pri­vati­sa­tion of nat­ur­al resources is no aber­ra­tion, when the same is planned for An Post, Dublin Bus, and Irish Rail, with inevitable impact on jobs and ser­vices; indeed the down­grad­ing of the pub­lic health ser­vice is to the advan­tage of the pri­vate sec­tor. Big busi­ness enjoys very low tax rates and the super-rich ben­e­fit from tax eva­sion amnesties, while more than 85% of income tax is paid for by PAYE work­ers.