The Political Wing of Providence Resources Launches Another Salvo At Shell to Sea

mayo | arts and media | opinion/analysis Thursday October 12, 2006 17:45 by Terry

Providence Resources are Sir Anthony O’Reilly’s oil and gas company. He owns the Herald, the Indo, the Star, the Sunday World, and many local rags. He owns 45% of Providence and his son is CEO.
They operate in Ireland and Nigeria and have a deal with Exxon-Mobil for exploiting fields off the coast of Clare.

Evening Herald, Wednesday October 11th.

First it was “sub-intellectual shawlies” (Myers Irish Independent), second it was “Sinn Fein thugs” (Williams Sunday World), now it is “tree huggers” (O’Carroll Evening Herald).

The headline screams ‘Rent-a-cause mob turn shell protest into farce’.

The first section of this article almost speaks for itself: “we’ve been hearing about how old people are living in fear in the west of Ireland”, “we’ve been told there’s just not enough gardai to police remote places in Mayo”, “Those vulnerable people can now rightly ask why a shower of protesters at Rossport can freeze up already sparse resources”.

O’Carroll seems to be unaware that the police have been drafted in from outside Mayo, at the cost of around a million euro, and his very point makes plain just what is the priority of the state, and why we cannot vest it with the power of control over health, safety and the environment.

He goes on to pontificate about how the Rossport Five are “decent people”, but are “looking misguided” and mentions unspecified non-existent instances of people throwing themselves in front of jeeps or threatening workers. “Misguided” he explains in a defence of the PIPELINE not managing to note that the protests are at the REFINERY site.
The jobs line is then trotted out. Apparently the Shell project offers 200 jobs. Actually Shell’s own figures - which have varied - have ranged between 27 and 60 permanent positions. Rather than this employment being a finger in the dyke preventing a flood of migration, as he suggests, the jobs in question will be either low paid (security/canteen) or specialist. As has been the case with construction specialist jobs are going to go to the companies’ international ex-pat teams and the few local jobs are the low paid ones.

We now come to the kernel of his article: “Whatever about the local protesters, I notice over recent days the arrival of the ’Rent-A-Cause’ mob, the same shower who fling themselves in front of any project which might promise progress on the dubious, and ill-defined, grounds of environmental protest.”

I like his “I notice” you would think that he had been hanging around the Ballinaboy refinery construction site. “Recent days” regular readers of indymedia.ie will be familiar with the fact that Rossport Solidarity Camp was founded in June 2005, the first report I put up from north mayo was in February 2005, while the first Grassroots Gathering event on the issue was in November 2003, and the situation had been publicised within Gluiseacht in 2002.

Ill-defined. Fair enough take it up with the E.U. courts who have found the Irish state in breach of the Habitats Directive over the Corrib gas project.

Being raised Catholic I’m curious as to how in a supposedly heavily Catholic country the desire to come to someones’ aid when they have a problem can be considered a negative act, I always thought it was what you were supposed to do.
But anyways that is premised on the notion the term ’solidarity’ means ’helping’. It doesn’t.
It means recognising that what might appears to be someone elses’ problem is actually your own, and fighting alongside them.

The Corrib gas project has no local consent, and neither does the incinerators planned for Ringsend Dublin and Ringaskiddy Cork, and 70% of the populace of Meath want the new motorway re-routed away from the hill of Tara.
It would be nice to live in a world where the Corrib gas project is some strange aberration in need of a few minor alterations.
The reality is it but one example of people and plant being crushed by profit.

O’Carroll talks about “dubious” and “ill defined” grounds of environmental protest, he would do well to familiarise himself with the twenty plus years of scientific study and inter-governmental reports on climate change, which give more than sufficient grounds to oppose any motorway construction, fossil fuel extraction, or airport expansion. See: http://indymedia.ie/article/73614

He writes “They were the tree huggers in the 90s at the Glen of the Downs..” actually on a point of fact, there is a similar proportion of Sinn Fein members in the residents’ wing of Shell to Sea as there have been ex-Glen people involved in the Rossport Camp. That is a very minimal proportion. Which again, as with Sinn Fein in a previous article, is not to say that their presence would be somehow illegitimate, we could do with more ex-Glen people, Sinn Feiners or anyone else.

I like the term “tree huggers”. I like the way the media uses this as a synonym for airy fairy dreamers not quite rooted on this planet (though that said it appears O’Carroll and his boss Sir Anthony are gonna find another planet to live on).
I like that because the actual origins of the word blows their sneers out of the water, demonstrates the practicality of environmental struggles, and that the dreamers are the people who think that the grow or die capitalist economy can go on forever.
The origin of the term is with descriptions of the Chipko movement in India in the 70s and 80s. This was a movement of peasants who resisted becoming ecological refugees at the hands of logging companies by hugging the trees of the forests they depend upon for irrigation water, fuel and other resources. They were getting in the way of chainsaws by hugging trees. In other words the original tree huggers were people who resisted the prospect of the industrial motor wiping out their livelihoods of pushing them to a marginal existence in polluted slum cities. They were defending their lives, lives which are dependant on the natural environment in which they live. The same as with the rest of us..

O’Carroll finishes off with a mention of “abusing the garda”. Just who is abusing who has been amply documented on this site, particularly in the new Revolt Video.