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cork |
anti-capitalism |
news report
Wednesday July 06, 2005 10:55
by Kevin Doyle - WSM, Cork
corkwsm at eircom dot net
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Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15Photos of blockade
Not much news. A solicitor for 2 other injuncted people (not the lads already in jail) tried to bring a motion that the injunctions were invalid as Shell hadn't the consents.
The judge put it off till next wednesday. About 50 protestors outside. Meantime, according to the media, Judge Finnegan (president of the high court) made remarks to teh effect that even if teh injunction was invalid teh 5 in jail would still have to appologise!
According to Terry from Rossport the blockade theer continues and don't forget the march in Dublin tonight
Big up Cork Crew!
krosise
Oil trucks were prevented from entering and leaving the Shell Central Oil Depot in Cork this morning in solidarity with the Rossport 5 blockade.
Outside Shell Depot In Cork City
Top Oil Refused Entry Into Depot
Gardai Intervene
.
Judge warns five Co Mayo men over contempt 06 July 2005 13:51 The five Co Mayo men jailed for refusing to obey a High Court order in relation to the Shell Corrib gas field development were warned by a High Court judge today that their fate was in their own hands and it was up to them to purge their contempt. Mr Justice Finnegan issued his warning when he fixed next Wednesday for the hearing of an application by solicitor Greg Casey who is seeking to have the court order discharged. Mr Casey claims there is no ministerial consent for the laying of the Corrib gas pipeline and that Minister for Natural Resources, Noel Dempsey, confirmed this in the Dáil last week. Advertisement This has been denied by Shell, which states that what Mr Casey is saying is misleading. Patrick Hanratty for Shell E and P Ireland said that the company does not want anyone in jail but does want to build a pipeline. The five men, brothers Philip and Vincent McGrath, Willie Corduff, James P Philbin and Micheal O'Seighin were not in court today and remain in jail in Cloverhill. Family friends and public representatives of the men demonstrated outside the Four Courts during today's brief hearing. The men were jailed after obstructing the building of a gas pipeline through their land in the Rossport area, thereby refusing to obey an injunction not to do so granted to Shell.
Mr. Adams said:
"The continued detention in Cloverhill Prison of these five men is disgraceful and is in stark contrast to the treatment afforded to Shell by the Irish government. Not only Corrib Gas been handed over to Shell, they can write off all their tax, pay no royalties and then sell the gas back to the Irish state at market value.
"And if that isn't bad enough the so-called independent review of Shell's risk analysis was conducted by a company half owned by Shell.
"These five men need to be released from Cloverhill Prison immediately. Work on the project needs to be halted until an independent review of health and safety is carried out and all aspects of this project are investigated including the terms agreed between former Minister Ray Burke and Shell."
FREE THE ROSSPORT FIVE
The party is continuing its campaign to free the Rossport Five and an end
to Shell's landgrab in Co Mayo. Ógra SF successfully closed down three
Statoil garages over the last week and will continue their campaign over the
coming days. Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams was refused permission to visit
the men in Cloverhill prison on Saturday and there was a strong presence of
Sinn Féin activists outside the jail. The Sinn Féin team on Dublin City
Council put an emergency motion to the Council meeting on Monday condemning
the jailings and calling on the Council to end its contract with Shell who
supply fuel to all city council vehicles. There are a number of events this
week that we are calling on all areas to support.
Wednesday 6th July 7.30pm - march and rally assembling at Parnell Square and
march to the Norwegian Embassy, Molesworth Street. Please bring cumann
banners etc.
Friday 8th July - SF National Day of Action - Boycott Shell - Free the
Rossport Five
A series of protests have been organised as part of a Day of Action in
support of the Rossport Community between 5-7pm. The following have been
confirmed:
Dublin North East - SHELL garage at Clare Hall,
Dublin North Central - Statoil Garage across from Donnycarney Church
Dublin Central - SHELL garage at East Wall
Dublin Central - SHELL garage at Glasnevin
Dublin Mid West - SHELL garage Lucan by-pass Palmerstown
Dublin South - SHELL garage Taney Road Dundrum
Dun Laoghaire - SHELL garage in Dalkey
Dublin West - Castleknock, Hartstown Statoil stations
Thurs. 7th July Dublin Sth Central - 6-7pm SHELL garage Kylemore Road
If they want more people to turn up for them! All they have to do is Publish and choose Event as the type (instead of OtherPress/OpinionAnalysis etc in the drop down). Otherwise not as many people will see it.
if onyl this had happened for top oil
How can you have honest and open dialogue with people you've jailed?
Shell construction site spokes man appealing for calm at protest and going about 300 counstruction workers stopped from working. Great pictures of lines of large trucks doing, nothing, no more peat being removed.
IT is a background many young men would play down in their sophisticated city lives, but the sons of Rossport, North Mayo, wear their heritage with pride.
They are bogmen.
Francis Corduff, 24, stands in the drive of his family home on the edge of Sruwaddacon Bay, surrounded by the black stuff.
It sits in piles by the side of the road, stacked in sods for drying before it is carted off in sacks to hearthsides and fuel sheds all over the region. It lies exposed in giant slabs where earthmovers have peeled back its scalp for commercial operations. It hides beneath a rough, reedy pasture which years of careful cultivation have created for the sheep and cattle to graze.
"There's blood, sweat and tears in that field," he says, nodding to the reclaimed land beside the house where a white pony tugs at fresh shoots of green.
Francis's surroundings are common across the region. It is a land of undulating hills and hollows, dips and drumlins, rivers, inlets, estuaries and lakes, dotted with homes and barns. This creased and creviced landscape lies on top of a saggy, uneven old mattress of bog prone to shifting, sliding and waterlogging. Directly across the bay from where Mr Corduff stands, the hillside of Pollatomish is still scarred from the shocking landslides of September 2003.
It is through this type of land that Shell want to thread a pipeline. The people of Rossport are baffled.
Christopher Philbin, 27, the eldest son of one of the Rossport Five, begins "Of all the places" but his musings are interrupted by a mobile phone.
John Monaghan, son-in-law of another of the five, Micheál Ó Seighin, breaks the news with a suppressed smile. Two excavators working for Shell have apparently sunk in bog up at Bellanaboy so that their cabs are now level with the road. The three young men look to the ground and try to stifle their grins.
Francis breaks first. "And we know how to handle bog," he says, mimicking a Shell man.
There has been little occasion for laughter of late in Rossport. Francis's father, Willie, is in prison for opposing Shell, along with Christopher's father, Brendan; brothers Phillip and Vincent McGrath and Micheál Ó Seighin. John Monaghan lives in Rossport, but Christopher is an industrial designer in Dublin and Francis works in construction in London. "I got a call from the brother. 'Pack your bags,' he says. 'You're wanted at home'."
Since returning, he has been catching up on the five years of campaign work carried out by his father and the other men since they first learned that Shell's big plans for the Corrib gas field lying off the Mayo coast could have big consequences for their farms and families.
The gas lies beneath the ocean and Shell wants to pipe it ashore in its raw state, pipe it past homes in Rossport, refine it at a new terminal at Bellanaboy and pipe it further to Galway for sale. Nowhere else in the world does Shell bring ashore unrefined gas, as it is usually processed at sea. And nowhere else in the world does it lay pipes through bog.
To the Rossport Five, the combination of a volatile mix of unrefined gas and impurities, a high pressure pipeline which pumps with a force many times greater than that used along the familiar Bord Gais network, and unstable bog as a building base, represents an unacceptable risk.
"If the ground shifts or the pipe ruptures, I want to be standing right on top of it," says Mr Monaghan.
"At least that way I won't know anything about it."
The fear that an accident along the pipeline would cause a devastating explosion and all-consuming fireball is common among the protestors who have been gathering daily outside the Bellanaboy terminal construction site since the Rossport 5 were jailed a week ago.
It gives rise to an obvious question. The people of Rossport may know bogs but don't Shell know pipelines? The company didn't get to its position as one of the world's most successful fuel merchants by incinerating innocent communities and it doesn't pull precious resources from under the oceans without advanced technology.
Could it be that the people of Rossport and their placard-waving, slogan-shouting, protest-mounting supporters are worrying needlessly? The majority of Rossport residents thought so at first and signed up to an agreement with Shell allowing it to lay its pipes through their lands in return for a payment of E35 per linear metre of pipeline.
The opposing stance by the Rossport Five plus their neighbour, Brid McGarry, was a source of tension and division, but those divisions disappeared the moment gardaí were ordered to escort the Rossport Five from court last week.
"There has been reconciliation and thank God for it," says Ms McGarry.
The 31-year-old chemistry graduate, who now lives and farms with her widowed mother, says people signed up to the deal without understanding what it involved. She would have benefited most of any individual landowner, with 722 metres of pipeline through her land, but she wouldn't even consider it.
"People thought this was like a Bord Gais pipe, that it was clean, safe gas. It isn't. They believed it would create jobs. It won't the workers are mainly foreign. They were told it would be good for the region. How can it be when it takes a natural resource, pipes it straight through to another area and sells it somewhere else, leaving us with the environmental impact, the pollution and the danger?"
Ms McGarry was about to fax a letter to Shell, responding positively to an invitation to talks three weeks ago, when she got a call from the Philbin household to say company representatives were at the farm seeking access to begin fencing and surveying. The company was given compulsory acquisition powers over the land and an injunction by the courts preventing interference with those powers. However, she was stunned that the firm would try to act on them when they had just invited the landowners to talks.
She met 11 representatives of the company at the foot of one of her fields and demanded to see all their documentation. They couldn't meet it and called the gardaí. The pattern was repeated at all six holdings but only the five men were ordered to court for breaching the injunctions. "For equality reasons, I should be in jail too," she says.
She believes Shell were reluctant for public relations purposes to imprison a woman and leave an elderly woman at home alone. The protestors are concerned about public relations too. There are rumours that radical elements from outside the area have offered to sabotage Shell installations and there are fears that an expected arrival by eco-warriors might change the character of the protests.
There are also local men working on security or as general operatives on the terminal site and while there is a determination on both sides of the perimeter fence not to cause a rift in the wider community, there have been moments of tension.
Fr Michael Nallen, parish priest at nearby Aughoose, keeps an eye on the daily gatherings but has seen nothing so far that worries him.
"These are ordinary, decent people that just want listened to," he says. "Local people are put through every obstacle when they want to build a house in this area yet a big company like Shell is given every assistance."
There is another feeling permeating the protests that this can't go on indefinitely. People have jobs to go to and families to attend to and the longer the Rossport Five stay in prison, the more costs Shell can claim to rack up. "It will clean us out," says Ms McGarry of the legal fees and damages Shell could be awarded. "But if we let them go ahead with the pipeline, they will ruin us anyway."
Brid and her mother, Teresa, built their modest home five years ago. If they had known what was around the corner, they would never have laid a brick. "This area is called Gortacragher, the field of the thief," she says. It was named after a cattle robber but in times to come, it will be known for Shell. We feel robbed of our future."
At first I agreed with Phuq Head's point about the Shinners maximising numbers at those stations but the more I think about it the more I think we should be doing something else.
If Sinn Fein say they're going to close down those stations then they're going to do it and probably don't need any help from anyone else to do it. But they can't close down every station in Dublin.
If there's a group of four or five activists wondering what to do instead of helping the Shinners shut down a station they'd shut down anyway without your help, identify a station they HAVEN'T covered, and shut that one down.
The amount of people at each protest or station isn't important, only whether they're shut down or not. If you can close three stations with three groups of eight, better than those 24 people converging and shutting one station while the other two continue to trade.
Fair play to the Shinners though. They seem to have woken up in the last week or so.
ACTION (Second Blockade) AGAINST SHELL IN CORK
(This) Tuesday, July 12th
Solidarity with the Rossport 5.
Please Note: Car Pool Will Leave City Hall (Anglesea St) For Shell Terminal at 7.30 am (sharp).
Or go directly to the Shell Terminal If you know where it is.
Contact people and let them know. There are three large gates, we need to blockade all three to be effective.
Make them listen, get to City Hall on Tuesday morning, spread the word.
Bring placards, banners and noise..._
Last Wednesday (6th July), a very successful blockade of the Shell Terminal at Centre Park Rd was carried out. In view of the continuing aggression of Shell Oil and the Irish State, we are calling for a repeat this Tuesday morning.
Called By Cork Shell To Sea, Cork Harbour Action Group and the Workers Solidarity Movement
Inf. and local news provided by Workers Solidarity Movement - Cork
Email: corkwsm@eircom.net Ph: 087-6805517
Visit our web site at http://struggle.ws/wsm/cork.html
_______________________________________________
>From the
ainriail mailing list
Join or leave at
http://www.struggle.ws/mailman/listinfo/ainriail
http://struggle.ws/wsm/cork.html
DEAR protesters,
i dont see why us retailers should have to suffer becaues you have a problem with shell uk ltd they are just our suppliers and dont tell me to change them (suppilers) as all big oil/petrol compaines are the same and do all the same bad things.
shell uk ltd just take a fixed royalty (one fixed payment per month) it dosent matter how much fuel is sold or not sold we still have to pay that fixed that amount pledged by shell, so you see you are not hurting shell uk ltd you are hurting us retailers and makeing us lose lots of money needed to pay bills and staff althogh i own a cluster of petrol stations (19 sites) i am still strugeling with the payments due believe it or not. i owe aprox £600,000.00 to my bank and my annual income is aprox £35-40k and for that i work my arse off meening 11hrs a day and 7 days a week and so dose my partner! all im trying to do is make an honest liveing for myself and my patner.
i do support what your saying but there is nothing anyone can do about because shell and other oil companies are so much bigger than people like us, i did join a protest out side shell uk ltd head quaters (HQ) however i WOULD'NT do it on someones forecourt because im in the same boat as them and i would'nt like it being done to me as i put myself in thier shose.
and dont tell me to complain to shell uk ltd because shell dont give a shit i remember a phone call i made to them when it first happend to me and i will qoute what the simon grimshale (uk and irland sales and opperations manager) i explained that i lost a substantial amount of money due to protest on site (arnos castle/bristol and in downend on badminton road/bristol) he said "well what do you want me to do about it, you still till have to pay fixed royalty anyway" and he put the phone down on me!
if you whant me to call shell uk ltd it is: 0800 731 9000 (i didnt give you that ok!)
please leave the following petrol sations alone:
SHELL TONYPANDY
SHELL SKETTY
SHELL SWANSEA BAY
SHELL HIRWAUN
SHELL CRICKHOWELL
SHELL HALFWAY
SHELL NEWPORT
SHELL EASTVILLE PARK
SHELL ARNOS CASTLE
SHELL CWMBRAN
SHELL CASNEWYDD
SHELL CRIBBS CAUSEWAY
SHELL CORK
SHELL CHELTENHAM
SHELL CROSSHANDS
SHELL FAIRFORD
SHELL OLDBURY
SHELL GILWERN
SHELL ARLE
many thanks
C L Jones
area franchisee of 19 petrol stations
Christopher, Can you clarify some things for us in Shell to Sea?
(I hope you don't me doing this here, but since you don't give an email address I have to. If you want to reply privately please feel free to email us at the address above).
1 Are you saying that you are the Franchise Holder for a Shell petrol Station in Cork Ireland?
2 Are you dealing direct with Shell for your supply of petrol, and not through an intermediary?
3 Are you free to change the brand of your forecourt without penalty- for instance could you simply take the Shell sign down and deal with someone else like Top or Texaco?
4 Is it possible for you to sell petrol or diesel from another supplier while keeping the name Shell on your forecourt?
5 You seem to be saying that you have to send them a set amount of money each month whether you sell any of their petrol or not. Are you contractually obliged to buy a certain amount of fuel from them every month?
Thanks for your help with this.