25 June 2013 The first direct actions of the Erris strug­gle against Shell took place 8 years ago when 6 locals were injunct­ed and then 5 of them jailed for refus­ing to allow Shell onto their lands.  In the 8 years that have passed there have been count­less direct actions, dozens of arrests, about two dozen jail­ings and hun­dreds of peo­ple attacked by Gar­da or Shel­l’s secu­ri­ty com­pa­ny IRMS.  But as the first two days of the week of action demon­strat­ed that intense lev­el of repres­sion over so many years has yet to end effec­tive resis­tance.

The cost to the local com­mu­ni­ty has how­ev­er been enor­mous.  Some peo­ple who would oth­er­wise nev­er have had an encounter with the law have spent at least time in jail.  Oth­ers have been beat­en up by the Gar­da, some left with per­ma­nent injuries.  And every­one has to endure the con­stant sur­veil­lance of every­one who pass­es Shel­l’s com­pounds which are now scat­ted across the area.  At key moments they have also had to live in com­mu­ni­ties that were under occu­pa­tion as hun­dreds of Gar­da have been deployed along with the gun boats of the Irish navy.  Along­side this are the even dark­er expe­ri­ences of cam­paign­ers being attacked in the night, in one case hav­ing a fish­ing boat sunk under them and the all too com­mon sto­ries of peo­ple who realised their homes and fam­i­ly were being spied on by uniden­ti­fied men.

Despite this there were a con­stant stream of peo­ple from the local com­mu­ni­ty vis­it­ing the camp and the social activ­i­ties arranged over the week­end along with a few who, 8 years on, are still deter­mined to take part in and indeed lead direct actions against, around and with­in the com­pound.  At this stage in the long strug­gle its true that a much larg­er bur­den of organ­is­ing and risk­ing beat­ings and arrest in such actions has fall­en on the shoul­ders of those trav­el­ling to Erris to stand along­side the local com­mu­ni­ties.  Very few ordi­nary peo­ple could sus­tain the lev­el of resis­tance of 2005 — 2007 over the years that fol­lowed, indeed the Ross­port Sol­i­dar­i­ty Camp itself has seen a com­plete change in per­son­nel at least twice now.

These changes have meant that the focus and meth­ods of the cam­paign have shift­ed in empha­sis over time.  Ini­tial­ly the dan­gers of Shel­l’s plan to run an exper­i­men­tal high pres­sure gas pipeline through the gar­dens of peo­ples house, lit­er­al­ly under their dri­ve­ways, was the key focus for many with mas­sive mobil­i­sa­tions of vir­tu­al­ly the entire local com­mu­ni­ty.  As the media ran a high­ly suc­cess­ful smear cam­paign against the com­mu­ni­ty the issue of the huge give­away of Irish Oil and Gas became cen­tral.  A huge cam­paign to inform the pub­lic of the rob­bery that was going on under their noses was con­duct­ed, over 120,000 copies of a 4 page book­let on the give­away were dis­trib­uted and an intense media cam­paign con­duct­ed.  The led to many peo­ple across the island real­is­ing that the strug­gles of a small com­mu­ni­ty far away in Mayo was also their strug­gle because every cent of prof­it Shell would take would be a cent less fund­ing for edu­ca­tion and heath­care.

The cam­paign built links with sim­i­lar strug­gles else­where and this meant that over time peo­ple also start­ed to come to Erris from out­side Ire­land to stand in sol­i­dar­i­ty with the com­mu­ni­ty.  This pushed the glob­al ques­tion of fos­sil fuel usage with­in the cam­paign and led to quite a few dis­cus­sions as a bal­ance was sought between fight­ing for real tax­a­tion on what was extract­ed and say­ing that our use of fos­sil fuels was a col­lec­tive insan­i­ty that was lead­ing the plan­et to envi­ron­men­tal cat­a­stro­phe.  In terms of tac­tics we also saw a shift from the mass block­ades involv­ing hun­dreds of local peo­ple and their sup­port­ers to more spe­cialised small group actions around lock ins and using tripods allow­ing small groups of peo­ple block roads for a long peri­od of time.  That shift was in part deter­mined by the use of vio­lence by the Gar­da to clear roads under their ‘no arrest’ pol­i­cy, a vio­lence that was near­ly always report­ed by a com­pli­ant media as if it had orig­i­nat­ed with the cam­paign.  You can just about get away with this when video footage shows lines of Gar­da baton­ing peo­ple stand­ing on the road but it does­n’t real­ly look very con­vinc­ing when peo­ple are sit­ting on the road with their arms trapped in steel pipes or dan­gling in mid air high above the roads sur­face.

All these strate­gies have forced the Irish state to back down on sim­ply forc­ing Shel­l’s orig­i­nal pipeline plan through and instead insist on sig­nif­i­cant changes in the safe­ty of the project.  Between such changes and the huge delays caused by the count­less direct actions Shel­l’s costs have soared from the ini­tial esti­mate of 600 mil­lion to well over 3 bil­lion.  Top Shell per­son­nel in Ire­land have reg­u­lar­ly been replaced as each in turn has failed to push through the project on time, the cur­rent esti­mat­ed com­ple­tion date is about a decade after the one intend­ed.  The gov­ern­ment has been forced to intro­duce changes in the amount future ener­gy finds will be taxed. 

None of these changes fix the prob­lems with the project,

• the exper­i­men­tal pipeline is still too close to peo­ple’s hous­es and run­ning through an area that suf­fers huge land­slides,
• the tax take on the project is still low and because of the way Shell is allowed write off expense it is prob­a­ble that not a cent in tax will ever be col­lect­ed,
• the loca­tion of the refin­ery threat­ens both the water sup­ply of the area and the pris­tine envi­ron­men­tal con­di­tions that make it attrac­tive to tourists and a sought after source for fish and shell fish,
• the count­less abus­es of human rights that have forced the project this far will nev­er be erased from the lives and minds of those who were jailed, beat­en or spied upon. 

But none of this should stop us acknowl­edg­ing the huge defeats that resis­tance has inflict­ed on Shell and the sig­nif­i­cant if incom­plete gains that have been won.

This is the con­text of the cur­rent week of action which is hap­pen­ing in what Shell must hope is the final phase of their con­struc­tion project.  The refin­ery is com­plete and most of the pipeline laid.  They got the Tun­nel Bor­ing Machine into the com­pound and it’s now at work under the estu­ary. Although their are con­stant rumours of prob­lems being encoun­tered and the sud­den appear­ance of deep and life threat­en­ing sink­holes on the sur­face must indi­cate unin­tend­ed sub­si­dence into and around the tun­nel beneath.

Shell and the Irish state though their inten­sive repres­sion of the local com­mu­ni­ty over 8 years must have hoped that active resis­tance was almost over.  That the pro­longed peri­od of jail­ing and bru­tal­i­sa­tion they had sub­ject­ed peo­ple to had sapped their will to con­tin­ue to resist as they need­ed to get on with the nor­mal rou­tines of work­ing and bring­ing up fam­i­lies that peo­ple else­where in Ire­land can take for grant­ed. So the fury of the assaults on the com­pound over the last cou­ple of days must have been a major dis­ap­point­ment for them, the quan­ti­ty of dam­age the direct actions result­ed in is prob­a­bly com­pa­ra­ble to that inflict­ed at the height of any ear­li­er point in the cam­paign.  Not only was sev­er­al days work destroyed but many of the com­pounds spy cam­eras were wrecked and equip­ment essen­tial to doing that work again put out of action.  It must also have become clear that the for­ti­fi­ca­tions erect­ed for this stage of the project are inad­e­quate when faced with a few dozen deter­mined peo­ple and that they can­not that those num­bers can­not be mobilised.

In a bet­ter world this strug­gle would have been won in 2005 when the deter­mined mobil­i­sa­tions of the com­mu­ni­ty should have result­ed in the nation­al out­cry that would have dri­ven Shell to Sea (the off shore refin­ery option which now would have saved Shell both time and mon­ey).  Or it should have been won in 2007 when thou­sands of peo­ple from all over the coun­try mobilised to block the roads and face the baton charges of the Gar­da.  But, with no small thanks to a media that was in one part cow­ard­ly to two parts being in the pock­ets of ener­gy cor­po­ra­tions, that out­cry nev­er emerged.  The state risked and got away with bru­tal­is­ing pro­test­ers and engag­ing a long term strat­e­gy of try­ing to sow divi­sions in the com­mu­ni­ty on the one hand and intim­i­dat­ing, beat­ing and jail­ing those who con­tin­ued to resist on the oth­er.

What main­tained the strug­gle at an intense lev­el was sol­i­dar­i­ty.  The sol­i­dar­i­ty of those who trav­elled from all over Ire­land to stand with the com­mu­ni­ty.  And the sol­i­dar­i­ty of those who came from fur­ther afield, in par­tic­u­lar the UK.  This is not a triv­ial thing, peo­ple from far away have spent for­ma­tive years of their lives in this small cor­ner of north west Mayo fight­ing for peo­ple and a place with whom there only ini­tial con­nec­tion was a shared sense of resis­tance and a strug­gle for envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice.  There have been dif­fer­ent phas­es in the strug­gle, some of these phas­es have prob­a­bly end­ed but the strug­gle against Shell in Erris and what the ener­gy cor­po­ra­tions are doing to this plan­et goes on.

Ross­port has become a byword for deter­mined resis­tance across Europe and beyond.  Books have been writ­ten, films made, babies born and we have had the sad­ness of friends and com­rades in the strug­gle dying.  Thou­sands, per­haps tens of thou­sands have vis­it­ed the area and stood along­side the com­mu­ni­ty.  Many brought lessons from else­where to this resis­tance and many have returned with lessons from this resis­tance to oth­er strug­gles.  In that sense the strug­gle has become much more than the indi­vid­ual issues it is com­posed of, it has become a sig­nif­i­cant part of the new world the peo­ple across the globe are build­ing in their hearts. In that sense it is a strug­gle that will nev­er end but will be remem­bered and car­ried for­ward long after the refin­ery is dis­man­tled and the pipes have rust­ed in the ground.