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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
26 — village july 2009
“ criticise a multinational, because
generally speaking I am a great fan of multi-
nationals (they being the basis of our present
prosperity) but I have to say that Shell has
been scandalously remiss in not employing
someone to bump off a few of these fellows.”
Kevin Myers, Irish Independent, Friday rd
August .
In April , life-long native of Erris, Co
Mayo, Willie Corduff was honoured to go to
California to accept the coveted Goldman En-
vironmental Prize – awarded to him for his
efforts to protect his community from en-
vironmental and other threats it faces from
the proposed Shell/ Statoil/ Marathon Con-
sortium’s Corrib Gas project. The Goldman
is awarded annually to just six people from
around the world. Here was a big story, a
source of national pride, with international
significance and full of human and social in-
terest. Yet there was only a relatively low-key
murmur about it in the Irish national media.
Three years later almost to the day Corduff
found himself attacked and viciously beaten
by a number of men in balaclavas.
By the early hours of April rd, , Cor-
duff had spent much of the previous day trying
to prevent the erection (with dubious permis-
sion) of fencing for a Shell compound above
Glengad Beach in Broadhaven Bay, by sitting
under a Shell works truck thus rendering it in-
operative. The sandy beach cliff at Glengad is
home to a much-loved population of sand mar-
tins but it is also the proposed landfall site for
the km, globally unprecedented, pipeline of
highly volatile raw gas - from seven well heads
out in the Corrib field. Having hit the landfall
at Glengad, Shell say the pressure will, if the
project goes ahead, be reduced from the ex-
tremely high bar pressure to bar via
a “reduction valve” and then travel a further
kilometres inland, criss-crossing the exqui-
sitely beautiful Broadhaven Bay, to a proposed
refinery at Ballinaboy.
Following the alleged assault on Corduff,
again, the national media has been strange-
ly reticent in key respects. Most reports, at
first, relied on Garda statements which fo-
cused on a separate allegation that earlier the
same night “an armed gang” had frightened
off two Shell security men and taken down the
fencing – “with paramilitary precision”– but
omitting mention of any attack on Corduff or
of the beating sustained by his brother-in-law,
Pete Lavelle, who says he had tried to help Cor-
duff when he was attacked. As other accounts
of the incident began to surface from alterna-
tive sources, further Garda statements men-
tioned that an ambulance had been called for
Corduff to take him to Mayo General Hospital
because he had been “feeling unwell”.
An RTE report on April rd is typical of
the media attitude. Brian Dobson in Dublin
and Teresa Mannion in Mayo emphasised at
every turn the removal of the fencing while
noticeably understating what Corduff be-
lieves was a serious attempt on his life. His
wife, Mary Corduff, has expressed her dismay
at how her interview with Mannion was pre-
sented – most of her testimony edited out to
imply that her husband had been happily sit-
ting under the truck until, as then qualified
by Dobson, he was “led by gardaí” to an am-
bulance.
According to Corduff, unable to stand
or walk, he was carried by paramedics on a
stretcher. Corduff says of his attackers “they
knelt on the side of my head and neck and on
the side of my chest, my airways were con-
stricted and I couldn’t breathe. One of them
jumped repeatedly on the inside of one leg.
Eventually, my tongue fell out of my mouth
and when they saw that, they stopped. I think
they thought I was gone.” Corduff says he
heard one of them say “Stop now lads, he’s
nearly finished”. I could see two gardaí min-
gling with the people who attacked me who
were still wearing the balaclavas but none
were arrested.’”
For the first five or six years of the ten-
year-old dispute in north-west Mayo the me-
dia reaction was mainly one of indifference.
That all changed when, in , four farmers
and a retired school principal – ‘The Rossport
Five’ - including Willie Corduff, were jailed for
refusing to comply with an injunction by Shell
requiring them to allow access to their land
for works on the project. The story was icon-
ic: five Davids were taking on three colossal
Goliaths on points of safety, environmental,
social and national economic principle. Sup-
port for the men poured in from all over the
country. After toughing out the negative me-
dia onslaught for days, Shell, the major-
ity shareholder in the project, was effectively
forced to concede the public relations disas-
ter their injunction had generated - though a
face-saving explanation was found for lifting
it - a course of action they had been adamant
they could not and would not take.
Shell is to go on trial in the US on May th
for its activities in the Niger Delta where Ken
Saro Wiwa was hanged with eight other men
by the Nigerian government following his de-
termined opposition to Shell activities there.
In his book about Corrib “The Price of our
Souls: Gas, Shell and Ireland”, Michael Mc-
Caughan, who often writes for the Irish Times,
though not about Rossport, quotes the obser-
vations of Kevin O’ Hara, the founder of the
Centre for Social and Corporate Responsibil-
ity in Port Harcourt, Nigeria about what he
saw in Mayo:
“I pulled up in my car and people jumped
out at me and were taking photographs of me
and my car and my number plate…I realized,
oh boy, here we go again. Shell in Ireland… I
was very saddened to see all of the same mis-
takes, a repeat of what I saw in Nigeria and it
was happening in County Mayo, Ireland”.
Rossport
27
Was there a planned, behind the scenes
campaign to smear the reputation of the com-
munity in response to the popularity of The
Rossport Five? In October , almost ex-
actly a year after their release, a large force
of Gardaí was sent to Ballinaboy where they
began to physically engage with local people
participating in the ongoing, non violent di-
rect action to prevent the construction of an
onshore gas refinery. A baton charge ensued
and many people were injured. Since then, the
victims have, in the media narrative, become
the aggressors. Community campaigners,
outraged by the perceived inversion of truth
which the national media mostly repeat with-
out question, can scarcely get their experienc-
es heard, let alone reported. The media now
frequently send crime correspondents to cov-
er the story and the Irish Times and Sunday
Independent now deploy their “Security Cor-
respondents”. These reporters are invariably
obliged to work closely with the Garda as the
primary source of their information.
The community’s protest campaign is
said by some to be functioning as a ‘recruit-
ing ground’ for dissident IRA terrorists. The
protest in Erris includes people with politi-
cal views from left to right. Willie Corduff
says “this would have been a Fianna Fáil area
mostly”. The presence of Sinn Fein support-
ers among the campaigners is nevertheless
frequently used to imply unspecified ‘sinister’
motives. Not to be outdone for invective by
Kevin Myers at the Independent, Peter Mur-
tagh – the opinion-column editor of the Irish
Times – has made a habit of weighing in with
tendentious views on this subject. Here is his
attempt to link the Erris protest to the murder
of Constable Stephen Carroll.
“Asked if the campaign against Shell wel-
comed the support it gets from Republican
Sinn Féin, thought by the PSNI and Garda to be
the political wing of the Continuity IRA which
murdered Const Stephen Carroll, Ó Mongáin
[a protestor] said: “We welcome support from
everyone and every quarter, we won’t deny
support from anyone.” (Irish Times th
March ).
Peter Murtagh has now written two opin-
ion pieces of Myersesque vituperation about
Rossport, the second of which finishes, “Willie
Corduff ‘very badly beaten up’ by Shell’s mer-
cenary thugs? I don’t know because I wasn’t
there and I’ve yet to see supporting evidence.
But that won’t deter some people pronouncing
it as fact”. It is an extraordinary journalistic
vice that he combines such venom with such
factual unawareness. The fact is Mr Corduff
says he was beaten up. Photos obtained by Vil-
lage, taken while he was in hospital and in the
days after his release, clearly show the bruis-
ing sustained by Willie Corduff all over his
head, face and body. Murtagh says, “ I asked
Shell to Sea last Wednesday whether Corduff
would detail his injuries and publish his hos-
pital records to confirm his medical condition
on admission. The request was acknowledged
but I have yet to obtain the information”. The
information has been sought from the hospi-
tal by Mary Corduff, who was asked to submit
her request in writing. Maybe Murtagh’s ven-
om was premature in the absence of the facts
and in the absence of an attempt to talk to Mr
Corduff himself or his family or the hospital.
Why does such a reputable journalist, one who
enjoyed a stellar career in the Guardian and
was editor of the Sunday Tribune before tak-
ing his position in the Irish Times, take such
an extraordinarily partisan approach for Go-
liath on this issue?
The irony is that when it comes to violence
and sinister behaviour, it is the government
and Shell who have a case to answer accord-
ing to many Erris people who say they have
suffered at the hands of both the Gardaí and
IRMS the security firm employed by Shell.
There is a lot of publicly available video evi-
dence which appears to support that conten-
tion. A former employee of IRMS in Co Mayo,
Limerick man Michael Dwyer, was recently
shot dead in Bolivia suspected by the Bolivian
government of being involved in a mercenary
plot to assassinate the country’s president,
Evo Morales. Though there does not seem to
be a link, it is notable that Bolivia is yet an-
other sovereign, democratic country where
private oil and gas interests are doing their
utmost to prise ownership of energy resources
out of public hands.
It is scarcely reported in the mainstream
media that two of the four local groups oppos-
ing the present configuration of the project,
Pobal Chill Chomain and Pobal Le Cheile (Shell
to Sea and The Rossport Solidarity Camp be-
ing the other two), have put forward a con-
sidered, practical and viable alternative that
would permit Shell to bring the gas ashore at
Glinsk - away from homes and from the seri-
ously endangered drinking water supply at
Carrowmore Lake and from the special are-
as of conservation threatened with destruc-
tion by the current plan. Shell has rejected
this compromise claiming that cliff faces at
the alternative site are an insuperable obsta-
cle. This is an industry that can extract oil
from K feet below the sea bed in the Shen-
zi field off the coast of Louisiana. Neverthe-
less, it is still the community who are depicted
by Shell and their many media supporters of
being difficult and uncompromising because
they decline ‘discussions’ which require them
to accept much of the Consortium’s plan as a
foregone conclusion before those so called dis-
cussions can even begin.
On hearing of the attack on Corduff, offic-
ers of the Goldman Environmental Prize in
California were seriously alarmed. Recipi-
ents of the prize from all over the world have
in recent days written to President Mary Ma-
cAleese and Taoiseach Brian Cowen protest-
ing the treatment of Corduff and urging the
Irish government to reconsider the foreign
owned consortium’s plans for Corrib Gas.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa
has also issued a statement in support of Cor-
duff and called for an independent interna-
“The protest in Erris includes people
with political views from left to right.
Willie Corduff says “this would have been a
Fianna Fáil area mostly.”
