On the Ground Ireland: Day four, the Monday picket, video and report

Fears on ear­ly Mon­day morn­ing. Rats. Big ones. Per­haps Bertie Ahern and his cor­po­rate bud­dies had stormed the camp, attempt­ed to make a prof­it nest under the com­mu­nal ben­der and, as usu­al, couldn’t agree on any­thing and began squab­bling, squawk­ing and squeak­ing, claw­ing out each oth­ers eye­balls.

Fears on ear­ly Mon­day morn­ing. Rats. Big ones. Per­haps Bertie Ahern and his cor­po­rate bud­dies had stormed the camp, attempt­ed to make a prof­it nest under the com­mu­nal ben­der and, as usu­al, couldn’t agree on any­thing and began squab­bling, squawk­ing and squeak­ing, claw­ing out each oth­ers eye­balls.

Video 190207_Corrib_picket — video/x‑ms-wmv 5.6M

The ear­ly morn­ing pick­et saw peo­ple gath­er­ing again out­side the main gates of the con­struc­tion site again, this time at 7.30am.

The Gar­da were out in ear­ly, two vans, sev­er­al patrol cars and an unmarked blue car full of grin­ning senior offi­cers, who drove up and down the road all morn­ing.

30 to 40 pro­tes­tors pick­et­ed the trucks, cars and bus­es bring­ing in the work­ers. But the Shell con­tract­ed work­force was now minus five, accord­ing to local peo­ple. Five more work­ers quit after the Fri­day morn­ing protest.

The pick­et last­ed sev­er­al hours, includ­ing a tea-break at the Shell-to-Sea infor­ma­tion hut. Then the “musi­cians” decid­ed to give the work­ers a lit­tle scare, and send the mes­sage the protest to this pipeline and gas ter­mi­nal was not going away. They ran to the front gate and fence and used sticks to ham­mer out as much noise as they could muster until the only remain­ing police van drove up out front. The musi­cal pro­tes­tors retreat­ed back to the infor­ma­tion cen­tre and then took up perch oppo­site the main entrance again and ham­mered out beats on drums and bar­rels.

For now, there seems no real retal­i­a­tion from the Gar­da. There was a lit­tle point­less shov­ing of sev­er­al of the known local mem­bers, but it amount­ed to noth­ing.