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Thursday July 21, 2005 20:40 by Andrew - Anarkismo
Details from Irish anarchists of the struggle that has seen 5 local activists jailed Residents of the Eris peninsula in North Mayo have for five years being fighting against a proposed high-pressure gas pipeline line. The pipeline will pass over land, approaching farms and houses as close as 20 metres in some cases. A consortium comprising Shell, Marathon and Statoil is building the pipeline For about a month now locals with some help from outside have been blockading the proposed refinery site, the Shell depot and the site where the pipeline is supposed to come ashore. This July five of them jailed for refusing to allow Shell from moving onto their own land which has sparked off an escalating round of nationwide protests including the blockading of Shell and Statoil filling stations and depots. Irish anarchists have been playing a role in these protests for some time including a few who have been working with the locals for months. A number of reports have already been carried on Anarkismo.net - here we bring these together with some more detailed explanations about what is going on. BackgroundWhy
is Shell jailing protesters in Ireland? Protest
camp against Shell pipeline in Ireland The
Environment & Animal Rights Local anarchist writingsWorkers Solidarity - People
Power Confronts Shell in Ireland Free
the Rossport 5 Action reportsUpdate on Shell campaign in Ireland and news of picket on Statoil Ushers Quay Thousands march against Shell in Dublin Succesful pickets in Dublin against Statoil in solidarity with Rossport 5 Protest
at Irish Consulate In Edinburgh during G8 in support of Rossport
5 Shell
Oil Depot Blockade In Cork in solidarity with Rossport 5 Second
successful blockade outside the Shell Oil Terminal in Cork |
The Guardian has some coverage of Shell including a substantial quote from Workers Solidarity
i mis-remembered that article and could have sworn that it detailed the WSM, however i see that was not the case.
Rossport campaign against Shell gas Pipeline shows way forward in community struggle
In a small corner of Mayo in Ireland over the Summer a mass campaign of non-violent direct action systematically, and in part spontaneously, shut down a major development being carried out by several multi-national corporations and the state. Since this article was written the five men in jail as a result of these protests have been released pending a court hearing.
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Comments (7 of 7)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7id really like to see, as much as possible, the diverse theoretical and agitational news of this sight become more fused.
to that end, what lessons is the WSM drawing from the shell struggle? what kind of strategic thinking and goals does the wsm have for the shell struggle?
The honest response to this is that beyond our general position paper on the environment and some pretty basic attempts to link it to wider issues we haven't yet had that sort of discussion at the level of the national organisation. Rossport is very rural and located on the west coast whereas all our branches are in east coast cities.
The scale of this struggle sprang on us before we really had a chance to discuss out the issues. Some of our members have been involved for quite a while but somewhat on an individual basis. The decision of the 5 Rossport men to refuse to obey the court injunction (which meant going to jail) meant that this struggle emerged from relative obscurity to a major issue very, very fast.
Currently each of our 3 branches is acting on this issue as each branch reckons falls within the logic of our position papers. There is of course some informal co-ordination and discussion via personal contact, email and inter branch meetings. But none of these are decision making structures.
Likewise the editorial group of Workers Solidarity have published articles in this issue of our paper and the previous one (which is unfortunately not yet online). One branch has published a leaflet and members have written individual pieces for web publication both here and on indymedia.ie.
As such this provides an interesting example of 'emergancy' anarchist communist decision making methods. An organisation that was simply centralised would have dealt this this by having the national officers decide what to do and then give instructions to the branches and members. Instead we have branches and members autonomously interpreting pre-existing policy - the federalism bit of the platform if you like. The is possible because over the last decade we have built up a substantial body of defined positions.
All this is of some interest to us because it involves putting theory into practise. Up to last year the WSM was just one branch in one city and a couple of members in another city which made decision making easy. But due to rapid growth we now have three branches between Dublin and Cork and have had to put the previously quite theoretical inter conference decision making structures in our constitution into operation. This is involving a lot of debate and discussion and our actions around the Rossport 5 are now giving us something to measure how well things are working against.
So not the answer you were looking for but hopefully one you will find useful. RBR10 due out in the Autumn will include a major theoretical look at environmental struggles based on the experience of one of our members over the last five or so years. It's promising to be quite interesting.
I'm a little confused - Chekov Feeney's analysis of NEFAC seems to imply that the WSM is a multi-city organization, when he critiques their looser structure (not having locals and so forth).
Is it possible to elaborate a little further on this?
I presume you mean this article An Irish Anarchist in the Northeast - Reflections on the North American Anarchist Movement?
I just scan read it and he doesn't actually seem to mention WSM structures in it at all. At the time we would have had one branch in Dublin and a couple of members in Cork. On that limited basis we did co-ordinate activity as the article might imply but otherwise I think he was making a critique based more on theory and discussions with NEFACers then anything else.
Our organisational method has always included trying to build theoretical preparation in advance of need so even then we had pretty much all of our current constitution in place.