Last weeks Events – Background facts to the injunctions - Corrib Campaigners occupy Dempsey’s Office

mayo | rights, freedoms and repression | news report Thursday June 30, 2005 14:08 by Roisin DeRossa

Injunctions to jail Corrib Gas protestors breach planning laws. "Stop Shell Hell in Mayo"

Last week a group of seven small farmers from North West Mayo, who have successfully fought off three of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies, occupied Minister of Communications, Marine and Natural Resources ‘ headquarters in Dublin on Monday, to secure a meeting between themselves and the Minister. A spokesperson, Mary Harrington, school principal from Rossport, explained to a packed meeting in Dublin, on Monday evening, they wanted the minister to explain why Fianna Fail and PD Government have allowed the national resource of Gas at Corrib to be given away with no apparent gain to the Irish nation, with severe environmental hazards to local people. They also wanted to know why they face jail, under a High Court injunction, in the pursuit of their just demand for a proper evaluation of the risks of the Shell Consortium’s plans to run a huge raw gas pipeline, in front of their houses and across their land, when the Minister’s own evaluation of safety aspects of this unknown new technology has not yet been completed.

The Campaign
Local landowners have successfully fought, over the past five years, a battle to stop the Shell led consortium experiment with a new, untried and they believe highly dangerous method, which puts their lives at risk and promises to destroy their environment, to process the raw Corrib Gas onshore – not as is the established custom, to process at sea, and only draw in the cleaned and processed gas at reasonably low pressures.

The consortium, including Marathon and the Norwegian, Statoil, and Shell which owns 47%, intends to try out, for the first time ever, a raw gas refining plant on shore in bog land at Ballinaboy, Co. Mayo. The plant will be 9 kms in from the sea in one of Ireland’s most beautiful beaches, an environmentally protected area.

Dangerous Experimentation
As Denny Larson, an expert in Shell’s adventures around the world stated at Monday’s meeting, "It is dirty and dangerous, in an environmentally highly sensitive area." He went on to explain that the technology does not yet exist to do this safely. The Corrib plan is just experimentation, with the lives and safety of "a few North Mayo inhabitants". with a technology that Shell wants to test for use, because it will reduce its capital costs by _360 million , and its operating costs by 40% per annum.

"The shell plan means a rigid and fixed gas pipeline through bog land, which is estimated to be between 70 and 90% water, where the raw gas is under huge pressures of 2 ton per square metre – around 400 times the normal pressure in the national grid gas pipeline.

The danger of a huge explosion is ever present. Furthermore an ‘umbilical pipe line’, which carries highly toxic chemicals out to the source at sea, in shallow waters, including Arsenic and Mercury, holds grave dangers of leakage. Shell also plans a huge storage tank of methanol at the on shore plant, placed on the moving bog land and table. As many speakers at the meeting pointed out, recent experience in Galway and Mayo have shown the ever-present dangers of bog land shifting.

Burke’s stinking ‘deal’
Padhraig Campbell, from the SIPTU Offshore Committee, who has worked on many of the consortium exploration rigs off Ireland’s West Coast, explained at Monday’s meeting, that the ‘deal’ that Fianna Fail, and their notoriously corrupt minister Burke, first lobbied for back in 1985, was finalised by Ahern’s government in 1992, gave away the national rights to this huge gas reserve, (estimated between 3 and 7 trillion cubic feet of gas), a minimum taxation rate of 25%, all of which could be written off against costs, zero royalties, and an agreement that Bord Gais would finance the pipeline of the gas from Ballinaboy to the grid and interconnector, for sale.

As Padhraig went onto explain, each trillion cubic foot of gas, represents, from the Grampian (Scotland) experience) a £1 billion input into the local economy which services the off shore rig. £1 billion input into one of the poorest and most economically disadvantaged areas in all Ireland, would represent a huge input to reverse the ever-increasing impoverishment of North West Mayo.

But, he explained, with on shore processing, as Shell intends, there will be absolutely no return to the local economy – only dirt and danger. The base for construction and operations will be Aberdeen, in Scotland, he said.

Why did the government sell out?
Why is the government doing this, Padhraig asked Monday’s meeting. "There were more oil men in the Fianna Fail Galway Race tent than there were builders," he said. Denny Larson, who jointly authors the "The Other Shell Report", spoke of the current difficulties which face Shell management, which was forced to sack its CEO, Phil Walls, when Shell was caught lying about the oil reserves in Nigeria, reserves they didn’t have. Share prices tumbled. Denny Larson is over from California to attend the two shareholders’ forthcoming AGMs in London and The Hague.

The delegation from Mayo visited Shells’ head office in Dublin to meet with the CEO on Monday. The CEO refused a meeting, and agreed only to talk with them on the street. Denny Larson explained that the mayo delegation treated this insult with the contempt it deserved.

And it was not the first time Shell has lied about its results. "Shell lied about the results of its ‘wild catting’ (prospecting) sample results to show ‘poor results’ off Corrib in the mid- nineties. We were out there on the rigs, and although we were sent off to do painting jobs to divert our attention, we saw the results – we know they were doctored. There was huge prospectivity for hydrocarbons off shore. A corrupt Minister (Burke) and his government (Fianna Fail) threw it all away."

The Ogoni Operation
What is new? As Sister Majella MacCarron, well-known campaigner against Shell’s genocidal practices in the Niger Delta, reminded people on Monday evening. "Nine people were hanged, including Ken Saro Wiwa, in 1995, as they campaigned for the protection of the Ogoni peoples’ rights to their land, environment and oil reserves."

The group also want to know why those defending their right to a safe environment have been put under immediate threat of jail by the granting of an injunction in the High Court, to the consortium, whilst the Minister’s own evaluation of the safety aspects of the pipeline, has still not reported to him.

Minister Dempsey was obliged to order an independent review of the Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) of the pipeline, which is to go straight across the unstable bog land beside their houses, when it emerged that the previous company which had carried out a review of the safety aspects for the department was part-owned by Shell itself. The minister has suspended final approval to install and operate the pipeline until this report is received.

Illegality of Shell proceeding
Despite the fact that QVR is not yet done, the High Court judge, Justice Finnegan. in granting Shell the injunction against the Mayo landowners, commented " we can always remove the pipe line, if the QVR shows the technology is unsafe." "What sort of respect is that for the law of the land? When the court defies its own planning laws?"

Meanwhile the people from Mayo face jail if Shell claims their representatives are not let enter the peoples’ land to start work on the pipeline. "We will go to jail," said many of the Mayo people who attended Monday evening’s meeting. The meeting organised action should the campaigners and their supporters be imprisoned for contempt of the injunction.

"This cannot be allowed to happen. Shell, Statoil and Marathon, working in collusion with corruption in Government are destroying our environment, risking our safety, and robbing, to no benefit to the Irish people, our valuable gas resources." Speakers at the meeting called for support from political parties, the Greens, Sinn Fein, independents, and "all the people who care about the future of the West, and of our country."

The last word went to Majella who reported that a meeting of 100 young people has determined a logo for the campaign "Stop Shell Hell in Mayo. There were nine deaths in Ogoni. How many in Rossport if shell is let to build this dangerous experiment with our lives?"