Pirates of the Corribean
by Michael McCaughan
“As I got to my feet I saw the Garda pull the local man who had spoken with the quarry owner to the verge at the other side of the road…they flung him to the ground with first two then one Garda kneeling on his back and (they) pressed his face into the dirt all the while hitting him with batons…there were four Gardai at least involved in this…both Inspectors Gannon and Robinson were there whilst this went on so also was Garda Gy65 and Connor O’Reilly.”
Sarah Clancy, extract from sworn statement made to the Garda Complaint’s Board (15/11/06) over injuries arising during a protest in Erris, Co Mayo on November 10th, 2006.
“The sea was there for me all along, I’d like it to be there for my children, you know? And for me to put a price on letting them fuckers in now, let it be a million or more, it’s not up to me, leave it, I’ll be gone out of here, God only knows when but it cannot be said that I destroyed what nature, what God left us.”
Pat O’Donnell, interview with www.corribgas.net
Fisherman Pat O’Donnell, the man with his face in the dirt, has little patience for the nuances of newspaper investigation; “You ask more questions than the Gardai”, he says, after yet another interruption to ascertain precise quotes, times and dates relating to the Corrib Gas project in County Mayo.
O’Donnell, alias ‘The Chief’, is a 52-year old native of Porturlin, Co Mayo, the second youngest of eleven children. He has powerful shoulders, a strong handshake, piercing eyes and a direct manner that does justice to his title. He also seems quite shy. On the day we meet, he looks pale and worn, anxious about the coming weeks. “I’m tired”, he admits, clearly unhappy that he is showing any sign of weakness at such a critical time in the campaign. Since the sinking of his boat last month O’Donnell has been sleeping fitfully, smoking excessively and appears to have substituted cups of tea for formal meals. We meet at his elegant, spacious home, perched on a hill overlooking majestic Porturlin Bay – a safe haven during these stormy times.
O’Donnell’s wife Mary and children Jonathan (23), Rachel (21) and Pat (17) all share Pat’s commitment to the cause, opposing the controversial high pressure gas pipeline and refinery scheme. Youngest daughter Aisling is in the middle of a profoundly pink phase, mercifully unaware of the tensions around her. At least that how it seems.
The Corrib gas project involves laying a gas pipeline to a refinery terminal along the sea bed and through lands that take it close to local homes. O’Donnell’s brush with the dirt is one of many documented incidents involving Gardai; he has suffered bruising, broken teeth and damaged ribs during protests while the windows of his fishing vessel were broken in March of this year by persons unknown.
O’Donnell has lodged one complaint after another but it is clear that his public opposition to the gas project has branded him a troublemaker in the eyes of the law. The situation escalated dramatically on June 11 when Pat O’Donnell and Martin Alex McDonnell were apparently attacked while working at sea and their boat the Iona Isle, was sunk. This incident is the subject of an ongoing investigation, amidst claim and counter-claim as to precisely what happened that night. (*This website is conducting its own investigation into the incident, its findings to be published when sufficient information has been gathered. It will be based on research rather than speculation)
The O’Donnell family refused to accept a compensation deal from Shell which would have netted them €120,000 for staying at home with their feet up after removing lobster pots lying in the way of the Solitaire. Some of the pots were removed and damaged last week by persons unknown.
O’Donnell and his son Jonathan were subsequently arrested for ‘loitering’ at their workplace on the sea, their boats confiscated, forcing them to sign on the dole this week. The O’Donnells employed four crew members while the family shellfish business, with seven employees, may be forced to shut its doors because there are no boats at sea supplying them with raw materials for their work. As the government laments the rapidly rising unemployment figures, this move against O’Donnell has affected thirteen jobs. The entire Corrib Gas project, by Shell’s own estimates, will create between 50 and 60 long term jobs. The Gardai claim they are enforcing a 500m exclusion zone around the Solitaire but that order was never formally issued by any government department.
In any other part of Ireland Pat O’Donnell would be regarded as a pillar of the establishment. At fourteen years of age he left school and faced a stark choice: take to the seas in a fishing vessel or emigrate on a boat to England. O’Donnell chose the fishing life and at seventeen he purchased his first vessel, against the advice of his father. “He thought I wasn’t ready”, recalled Pat. The teenage skipper employed a crew of three, including two men old enough to be his father. “They had to take orders from a child”, said Pat, “but it was a friendly type of set up. There’s a kind of freedom out there, being away from it all.” However the rewards are uncertain and the hours long. “You might go out today and you’d get nothing and you’d be down”, he says, “and tomorrow you might have a bumper haul and you’d be on a high.”
O’Donnell paid for his boat within a year, quickly discovering his vocation; “I knew at a very young age that I wanted to be a fisherman, because my father was at it, my brothers, and that type of thing and I thought it was the life that I liked.”
He now owns three boats (one is at the bottom of the ocean with no prospect of compensation as insurance assessors regard its destruction as “an act of terrorism”) and has a small shellfish-processing factory, also in Porturlin. That business won an industry award several years ago, ‘something about food’, recalled Pat, showing me around the state of the art facility. O’Donnell has a quick, dry wit and a self-effacing manner complemented by a certain courage which comes with doing daily battle in one of Europe’s angriest seas. In 1996 O’Donnell became a local hero when he responded to a distress call and helped save the life of a Garda diver who had got into difficulty during a rescue mission. Two other lives were lost.
O’Donnell received a letter of recognition from Michael Woods, Minister for the Marine, while the grateful parents of Garda Ciaran Doyle presented O’Donnell and his wife Mary with a voucher for a hotel and restaurant during their stay in Dublin.
O’Donnell came to greater national prominence last year when he refused to move his lobster pots out of the path of the Solitaire when it entered Broadhaven Bay. The gas project is now 80% complete but the offshore and onshore pipes have yet to be connected. Shell still requires approval for its onshore pipeline route which runs close to homes in a number of villages, including Rossport, where five farmers went to jail in 2005 for refusing access to their lands.
As a fisherman with three licences and 800 lobster pots in the area, O’Donnell and his son Jonathan enjoy the legal right to work the Bay as usual during the summer months. The family shellfish factory supplies crabfish meat to restaurants from Belmullet to Dingle and Dublin, and summertime is a critical sales period.
In mid June Shell E&P Ireland (Sepil) sent out letters to homes in the area, unilaterally declaring a 500m exclusion zone around the Solitaire. O’Donnell responded with a letter to the Gardai in which he demanded a similar exclusion zone around his pots and state protection for his boats. He correctly anticipated a repeat of last year when he was arrested twice at sea during the Solitaire’s visit and was only released minutes before his solicitor delivered a formal challenge to his detention. This year however the courts upheld the order to keep O’Donnell on dry land.
The chief wasn’t always against the Corrib gas project. “At first I was excited about it, because I thought the younger ones would have plenty of employment, they wouldn’t need to be emigrating”, he says. The project was expected to bring jobs, money and pride to this remote corner of County Mayo. “Then for some reason I got my hands on the offshore EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) which talked about the impact it would have on the sea”, he explained. The document was highly technical and difficult to decipher. “I couldn’t make fucking head nor tail of it because it was way above me”, he says.
O’Donnell and a group of local people located a marine biologist and asked him to analyse the content of the EIS. Two weeks later the biologist called Pat back with a chilling message; “If this goes ahead”, he said, ‘in its present form, you and your family better pack your bags and get out of there because people will die.”
O’Donnell circulated the report to the media but there was no reaction at the time. As a fisherman, O’Donnell has one particular concern. “The main thing I’d be against is what’s coming out of the discharge pipe, a mile off Erris Head”, he states. “There’d be a cocktail of chemicals out there. I’d be afraid it would get into the food chain.” Shell insists that the project is safe and that community concerns, including those around the planned onshore gas refinery, are unfounded. O’Donnell lives five miles from the refinery site. “From what I’ve heard, what comes out of these chimney stacks is not too healthy”, he adds.
The gas should have been flowing since 2003 but a sustained community campaign has challenged it every step of the way. A 2002 oral hearing by An Bord Pleanala, the only comprehensive inquiry into the project, concluded that it was ‘the wrong project in the wrong site’. When An Bord Pleanala announced a recent hearing into the onshore pipeline route, Shell put in a written request that Inspector Kevin Moore, the architect of the first report, be excluded from the process. Planning permission was eventually granted in circumstances that are widely regarded as unsatisfactory.
The Solitaire arrive into Broadhaven Bay flanked by navy warships, Garda water units and private security vessels, while some 300 Gardai and 200 private security employees keep vigil on dry land. Last year the arrival of the Solitaire turned the locality into a warzone as boats zipped around the bay, intercepting protestors in Kayaks (previously blessed by the local priest) and even surfers who took to the unpredictable waters to challenge the pipelaying process. The Solitaire eventually limped out of the bay due to ‘weather damage’, a development regarded as a major victory for protestors and an embarrassing setback for Shell.
This time round the government and Shell are taking no chances. in recent days Gardai have shut down access to public roads and beaches, refusing to explain the legal basis for their actions. Even swimmers have been arrested for failing to obey the orders of a Garda, an extraordinary and arbitrary power conferred on the police. Pat O’Donnell was arrested at sea and has been warned that if he sets foot on his boat he will be rearrested. Six Gardai keep permanent watch on his impounded vessel at Ballyglass pier.
The stakes are high. Rossport Solidarity Camp, set up at the invitation of local people, has filled up with national and international volunteers preparing for direct action at sea and on land. The individual in charge of the Kayak brigade is a Greenpeace veteran who has previously faced down the US navy during environmental protests. Talking to some of the Solidarity Campers, the motivation behind their commitment harks back to George Orwell’s reflections on arrival in Spain to fight fascism in 1936, when he wrote: “At that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.”
Peace and Justice organization Afri (Action from Ireland) has launched a UN-style monitoring and accompaniment programme which will observe events as they unfold and offer witness testimony should it be required. The local community is sharply divided over the project but the closer you get to the villages and townlands in the path of the pipeline, the greater the opposition to it. On the other hand, if you travel to Belmullet or Ballina, well beyond the affected area, support for the project increases, boosted by an estimated 900 beds occupied by project workers, who fill local pubs and eateries.
The role and responsibility of the Gardai in monitoring the project, and the resulting protests, has been the subject of considerable concern and more than one hundred public complaints. None of them have impressed the DPP. A local man, Terence Conway, has recorded many hours of film footage which make terrifying viewing, as Gardai punch women, throw people into drains and generally behave in a manner more akin to football hooligans than keepers of the peace.
This sense of a community under siege is so far removed from the dominant media perspective that it has created a sense of profound despair among local people. Global Community Monitor (GCM), an independent human rights group, sent a delegation to Erris which reached the following conclusion: “There is video evidence of women and the elderly being pushed and beaten by Gardai without provocation. Even high ranking officers were personally involved in beating up protestors.”
Similar concerns over the behaviour of British police during recent protests in London have prompted a public inquiry and the suspension of a number of accused officers. Not so in Ireland. At a meeting of the North West Mayo Community Forum, which brought supporters of the project together, Chief Supt Tony McNamara ‘refuted in its entirety’ any allegations that the Gardai ‘were protecting the developer and not the people.’
Pat O’Donnell is not surprised. “We are the enemies in all this, we are the criminals”, he says. Gardai arrested and charged Pat O’Donnell with assault shortly after he filed a complaint against the force for alleged brutality against him. The assault charge was thrown out on appeal but he was charged with obstruction, even though he was one of more than one hundred people protesting on a road at the time. On another occasion O’Donnell faced similar charges but the crucial seven minutes of Garda footage mysteriously disappeared when the case came to Court.
Gardai undoubtedly have a difficult task in policing protestors engaged in acts of civil disobedience. However their response in Erris too often seems disproportionate as apart from very rare physical challenges, protestors offer no resistance and have repeatedly stated their willingness to be arrested in order to draw attention to their cause.
The security issue is further complicated by the presence of Integrated Risk Management Systems (IRMS), a private security firm whose employees have engaged in abusive surveillance of local people, filming children as they undress on the beach at Glengad and aiming cameras into the kitchen of a nearby home. In a further twist to the tale, Irishman Michael Dwyer worked at the Shell compound in Erris last year. There he met radical Eastern European nationalists, who introduced him to Eduardo Rozsa Flores, a mercenary with a combat record in Croatia. Flores formed a militia and travelled to Bolivia, in a life and death struggle against democratically-elected President Evo Morales. Flores and Dwyer were shot dead in a Bolivian hotel room by Bolivian police who suspected them of plotting to overthrow President Morales. (For an in depth analysis of IRMS/Bolivia, see Andrew Flood’s ‘The Shadow over Erris: Shell, IRMS and Bolivia’, at www.indymedia.ie)
At least two more suspects in the Bolivian plot are believed to have been employed by Shell at the Glengad compound, fuelling fears that trained thugs are operating with impunity in their neighbourhood.
Another former IRMS employee, Richard Kinsella, was given a three month prison sentence this week for two public order charges arising from uruly behaviour in Ballina two weeks ago. Judge Mary Devins was surprised to hear that the defendant had a number of previous convictions, which resulted in jail sentences. Kinsella claimed his convictions had been overturned on appeal but the court had only his word on that matter. Devins wondered how someone with Kinsella’s track record could have got a job with IRMS, given the ‘stringent vetting criteria’ wich IRMS employees supposedly undergo. The people of Erris have been asking the same question for some time.
Pat O’Donnell has been singled out for exceptional attention by State authorities. Last year, just before the Solitaire arrived, two investigators were sent from the Marine Casualty Investigation Board (MCIB) to quiz him over allegations of dangerous navigation, made by a survey boat working for Shell. This complaint, if substantiated, could have resulted in the loss of his licence and with it his right to challenge the Solitaire.
“There was no incident, they just wanted to get me out of the water”, insists O’Donnell. The two men questioned O’Donnell at length in a manner he viewed as hostile and provocative. “They treated him like a criminal suspect rather than an experienced fisherman”, said John Monaghan, who hosted the meeting. “They were trying to talk him into accepting he had done something which he didn’t do”. Monaghan, an enthusiastic citizen journalist, had accompanied O’Donnell on the day in question and recorded the proceedings. He had footage from the precise time at which the navigation error had supposedly occurred. He gave the two marine investigators a disc with his footage and bade them farewell.
“That was the last we heard of them”, O’Donnell adds, with a smile. Corribgas.net has confirmed that the marine safety office found no grounds to pursue the incident any further.
“I’m only surprised they (Gardai) haven’t come to the house and accused me of sinking my own boat”, he says.
The latest pretext for keeping O’Donnell out of the sea is the alleged unseaworthiness of his boat the John Michelle. A marine inspector checked the vessel this week (Tuesday) and picked out minor technical points needing attention. The main issue was the absence of two life rings. O’Donnell claims these rings were in place when his boat was towed in by Gardai last week. After the sinking of his boat last month, O’Donnell is paying particularly close attention to safety matters. When it comes to the worthiness of his boat, O’Donnell points out that he renewed his Code of Practice (marine equivalent of an NCT) in April of this year, following an inspection of his boat.
“This is all about keeping me away from the sea until the Solitaire has done its work”, commented O’Donnell.
Like most fishermen in the area O’Donnell is unable to swim, but he sees no mystical purpose to this oversight. “I took the kids to Ballina and had them learn to swim”, he says, “this crack about fishermen not learning to swim is awful nonsense. Jonathan is a strong swimmer.”
Mary O’Donnell, Pat’s wife, is a resilient woman who keeps a firm grip on the domestic ship while also working on campaign strategy. The couple met at a dance in Belmullet, when Mary was still a teenager. They married a few years later. “We get on very well,” says Pat, with the quiet assurance that comes with 30 years of married life and a clutch of kids. Pat is open about the demons which have challenged him in the past and about his struggle to overcome them; “I had a problem with drink in the early days, but after the first couple of kids was born, I ended up in hospital, thank God.” Pat is proud of his 20 years sober, (“coming up this October”) but the sinking of his ship brought him close to the edge; “That’s my main fear of all, that I’d go back to fucking drinking, Jesus Christ, that’s one place we don’t want to go. I certainly wouldn’t want that life.”
O’Donnell openly admits that most of his neighbours have accepted Shell’s presence in the area; “The fishing has gone down a bit, these last two or three years, fuel has gone up and most of them got a few pound.” Shell paid out €20,000 per licence last year for the disruption to fishermen and added a further €10,000 for this year’s interrupted work. “So a lot of them have accepted the money, they know the project is wrong, they’d tell you that privately, but when they’ve accepted the money they’ll have to go with what Shell says.”
This time last year Pat and Mary headed off to Shannon Airport after their children presented them with a surprise holiday to Italy. “We turned around at the airport”, says Pat, looking somewhat sheepish. News had reached them that the Solitaire had arrived in Broadhaven Bay. “There’ll be plenty of time for holidays when this is all over.”
ends.
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