Shell to Sea protest at Bellanaboy and Belmullet

Feb­ru­ary 2 2008
To coin­cide with Shell announc­ing their annu­al prof­its (of around €18 bil­lion), yes­ter­day morn­ing around 80 peo­ple gath­ered at Bel­lan­aboy to show their con­tin­ued oppo­si­tion to Shel­l’s plans for Mayo. Fac­ing a bit­ing wind and show­ers of hail and snow, the pro­tes­tors high­light­ed the fact that even with all this prof­it, Shell still haven’t clean up their act. As if the ele­ments weren’t bad enough, the pro­tes­tors also had to con­tend with being out­num­bered by about 2 to 1 by the hero­ic guardians of the State. This local day of protest against Shell was met with a exces­sive Gar­da pres­ence of at least a 150 to act as pri­vate secu­ri­ty for Shell. Of course the whole Cor­rib project fails to ben­e­fit the peo­ple of Ire­land and all Shel­l’s con­struc­tion costs are writ­ten off against tax.

At around 9.30am a sec­tion of the pro­tes­tors went in to Bel­mul­let to con­tin­ue their protest and to hand out leaflets regard­ing Shel­l’s dead­ly record. Around 30 peo­ple stood around the main round­about and received a very pos­i­tive response. They wait­ed until all their leaflets were hand­ed out, before retir­ing for some well earned warm tea & cof­fee around 12.30pm. At first, the Gar­dai con­tin­ued to use overkill tac­tics but soon realised they can’t get away with this in the full view of Bel­mul­let. Despite the bit­ter weath­er, there was lots of sup­port and it felt a good suc­cess.

One dis­taste­ful aspect to the day was the fact that, for the first time, mem­bers of the Ross­port Sol­i­dar­i­ty Camp were pre­vent­ed from mak­ing their way to Bel­lan­aboy gates. On 3 sep­a­rate routes the camp van was blocked from mak­ing their way to the pick­et. Ini­tial­ly the gar­daí sought to open up the back of the camp van with­out quot­ing a nec­es­sary sec­tion of law. Under the Road Traf­fic Act, the guards don’t have author­i­ty to search a vehi­cle even though this has­n’t stopped them doing it on many occa­sions around the Bel­lan­aboy area. At the ini­tial road block, the guard also opened both the dri­vers and a side door before he was told that this behav­iour was not allowed. When ques­tionned, the gar­daí kept on quot­ing the Road Traf­fic Act and gave the dri­ver of the van the choice of either turn­ing around or allow­ing the gar­daí to search the vehi­cle. The dri­ver refused both these options and stayed where he was for a con­sid­er­able time on each occa­sion. As a mat­ter of prin­ci­ple, the dri­ver refused to allow a vehi­cle search unless they quot­ed a suf­fi­cient law. On numer­ous occa­sions the gar­daí direct­ed the dri­ver to leave. How­ev­er it shows the shaky ground that the gar­daí knew they were on as they nev­er cau­tioned the dri­ver that he would be arrest­ed.
Over­all the 6 camp mem­bers in the van tried for over 2 hours (from around 7–9am) to try to get to the gates dur­ing which time many cars were sim­ply waved through with­out being searched. They were stopped on 5 dif­fer­ent occa­sions and on each occa­sion any­thing from 3 to 6 gar­da vans and squads were around the van. At the Bel­lan­aboy bridge car park, pas­sen­gers in the van ques­tioned both one of the gar­daí who stopped them and an Inspec­tor in charge. At one stage the gar­da stat­ed the “Offences against the State” gave them author­i­ty to search the vehi­cle, while the Inspec­tor stat­ed that ‘Com­mon Law’ gave them the author­i­ty. The dri­ver con­firmed that the only law quot­ed at him was the Road Traf­fic Act which the Inspec­tor basi­cal­ly admit­ted did­n’t give them the author­i­ty to search.

The gar­daí often claim that they are there to uphold the right to peace­ful­ly protest but this event clear­ly showed a com­plete mis­use of pow­er. How­ev­er this failed to dis­tract pro­tes­tors from high­light­ing Shel­l’s €18bn prof­it at the expense of com­mu­ni­ty’s world­wide. Over­all it was a very pos­i­tive day and a nice start to the spring.

Relat­ed Link: http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/business_money/north+sea+safety+concerns/1460452
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Leaflet text:

Shell prof­its rise — Ire­land gets 0%

Shell has announced record prof­its of €18 bil­lion for the year, that’s €49.3 mil­lion per day! Shell has stat­ed that it is too expen­sive to refine at sea. How­ev­er, Shell’s prof­its clear­ly show this is untrue and unbe­liev­ably, the Irish law was changed so that all their build­ing costs can be writ­ten off against tax!

Increased cost to refine at sea = €360 mil­lion
That’s about one week of Shell’s prof­its!

It is clear that these vast prof­its come at the expense of the coun­tries, com­mu­ni­ties and envi­ron­ments that Shell oper­ate. Look at the dis­as­ters of Rus­sia and Nigeria…will you allow Shell to do this here?

In Texas, where Shell oper­ates a large oil refin­ery, med­ical sur­veys have found that 70% of the town’s inhab­i­tants have asso­ci­at­ed med­ical com­plaints.

Shell always put prof­its first
Shell in fact has the worse work­force death record of all the major oil com­pa­nies.

Com­pa­ny 2003 Deaths 2004 Deaths 2005 Deaths 2006 Deaths
Exxon Mobil 23 6 8 10
Shell 45 37 36 37
BP 20 11 27 7
Work­force deaths for the 3 biggest oil & gas com­pa­nies

If Shell care so lit­tle for the lives of their own work­ers, do you trust them to pri­ori­tise the safe­ty of our com­mu­ni­ty?

So far in Erris we know that every sin­gle water mon­i­tor­ing report car­ried out by Mayo Coun­ty Coun­cil is above the lim­its for alu­mini­um since Shell removed peat from Bel­lan­aboy. The water from the Bel­lan­aboy refin­ery site goes direct­ly into Car­row­more Lake. Shell acknowl­edged respon­si­bil­i­ty for this prob­lem and installed the Axon­ics water treat­ment plant. How­ev­er, it was unable to cope with the demand dur­ing Shell’s peat haulage and so the alu­mini­um lev­els have increased and the prob­lem has wors­ened.

The Scot­tish EPA (who has licensed numer­ous refiner­ies in Scot­land) has stat­ed that a refin­ery which falls with­in the catch­ment area of a drink­ing water sup­ply would not get per­mis­sion to oper­ate in Scot­land.

Con­sent can­not be bought
Shell has recent­ly announced their new wish “to be a good neigh­bour”. Send­ing 5 men to jail for try­ing to pro­tect their com­mu­ni­ty was not a great start! And things haven’t improved since then. Shell have not tak­en on board our con­cerns and con­tin­ue to ignore the peo­ple who are threat­ened with this exper­i­men­tal project on their doorstep. Shell is still intent on forc­ing through a raw gas pipeline through unsta­ble land in close prox­im­i­ty of hous­es and a school.

“No oth­er coun­try in the world has giv­en the oil company’s such favourable terms” Mike Cun­ning­ham, for­mer Sta­toil direc­tor

We deserve a bet­ter deal: Don’t take Shell’s crumbs!
Giv­en the obscene­ly gen­er­ous terms at which Shell got the Cor­rib Gas, it’s no sur­prise that Shell are hap­py to give out a few col­lege schol­ar­ships and grants here and there. Instead our nat­ur­al resources should be going to ben­e­fit our edu­ca­tion and health sys­tems and coun­try as a whole.
In the ear­ly 70’s, Nor­way chose to use their nat­ur­al resources to ben­e­fit their peo­ple and today the coun­try ranks as hav­ing the best qual­i­ty of life in the world.
Because all of Shell’s con­struc­tion costs can be writ­ten off against tax, the mon­ey Shell are try­ing to offer to our com­mu­ni­ty belongs to us in the first place! The per­cent­age giv­en back is noth­ing com­pared to the €50 bil­lion worth of Irish gas they own!

For more infor­ma­tion or to request a copy of the Chan­nel 4 ‘Polic­ing the pol­lu­tion’ film, please con­tact 0851141170.