Pirates of the Corribean

“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 Gy 65 and Connor O’Reilly.”
– Sarah Clancy, extract from sworn statement made to the Garda Complaints Board (15/11/06) over injuries arising from a protest in Erris, Co. Mayo on November 10, 2006.

Fisherman Pat O’Donnell, the man with his face in the dirt, has little patience for the nuances of newspaper investigations.
“You ask more questions than the Gardai,” he says, after another interruption to ascertain times and dates, precise quotes and other details relating to the Corrib Gas project in County Mayo.
O’Donnell is vehemently opposed to the Shell-backed scheme, which involves laying a gas pipeline from the sea and across land in Mayo that, say protesters, takes it close to local residences. His brush with the dirt is one of many documented incidents involving the Gardai; he says 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 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 McDonnell were apparently attacked while working at sea and their boat the Iona Isle – registered to Pat’s son Jonathan – was sunk. This incident is the subject of an ongoing investigation, amidst claim and counter-claim as to precisely what happened that night.
Then, on Friday June 26, O’Donnell’s son Jonathan was arrested for having breached the so called 500 metre exclusion zone around Shell’s pipe-laying ship the Solitaire, as it arrived in Erris, and charged with wilful obstruction and loitering.
He was freed on bail on Saturday. The Department of Transport has since confirmed that in fact there is no official exclusion zone around the Solitaire. Members of the Erris Inshore Fishermen’s Association, meanwhile, have demanded that Gardai return O’Donnell’s boat and allow him back to work. Pat and Jonathan signed on the dole in Belmullet this week, insisting that their livelihoods had been destroyed.

Pat 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 and a direct manner that does justice to his title. On the day we meet however, his complexion is pale and he seems anxious about the weeks ahead. “I’m tired,” he admits.
Since the sinking of his boat O’Donnell has been sleeping fitfully, smoking excessively and he appears to have substituted cups of tea for formal meals. His spacious, beautiful home, perched on a hill overlooking the majestic Porturlin Bay, remains 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 Shell To Sea cause, opposing the controversial gas pipeline, while youngest daughter Aisling is in the middle of a profoundly pink phase, mercifully unaware of the tensions around her. At least that’s how it seems.
The Chief has not been back at sea since last month’s incident, but his son Jonathan is taking care of his pots. However, O’Donnell has vowed that he will take to the sea to block the Solitaire, no matter what the consequences.
Some people might regard Pat O’Donnell as a pillar of society. He got there the hard way. At 14 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 17 he purchased his first vessel which employed a crew of three, two of whom were old enough to be his father. “They had to take orders from a child,” recalls Pat, “but it was a friendly type of set up. There’s a kind of freedom out there, being away from it all.”
The rewards were uncertain. “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. He now owns several boats and has a small shellfish-processing factory, also in Porturlin. 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 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 pipelaying 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 which runs close to houses 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 licenses 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, employing 20 people, and although the current downturn has forced them to cut their workforce they are determined to maximise production. O’Donnell could have earned €90,000 for simply staying at home with his feet up as Shell paid fishermen €30,000 per license for the inconvenience caused by their work. Most fishermen – over 40 in all – took the money. Jonathan, Pat’s son, also turned down a further €30,000 from Shell.
It was in mid-June that Shell E&P sent out letters to homes located close to the project, unilaterally declaring a 500 metre exclusion zone around the vessel. O’Donnell responded with a letter to the Gardai, demanding a similar exclusion zone around his lobster pots. The fisherman feared 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 the Gardai, about grounds for his detention. With good reason, as it turns out, with Jonathan ending up in the slammer on this occasion.
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 Assessment) which talked about the impact it would have on the sea.”
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 interest at the time. As a fisherman, he 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 Corrib gas project involves the construction of a high-pressure gas pipeline passing through private land and hitherto pristine coastline, on the way to the refinery. In theory, 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 Pleanála, the only comprehensive inquiry into the project, concluded that it was ‘the wrong project in the wrong place’. When An Bord Pleanála announced a further oral 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 result is that the Solitaire arrived into Broadhaven Bay last week flanked, in an extraordinary show of force, by navy warships, Garda water units and private security vessels, while some 300 Gardai and 200 private security employees kept vigil on dry land.
Last year the arrival of the Solitaire turned the area into what looked like 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 Solitaire.
Maura Harrington, a retired local school principal, parked her car outside the Glengad landfall site and declared a hunger strike until the Solitaire left Irish waters. Police vans set up improvised roadblocks, searching all vehicles and requesting ID from visitors while surveillance cameras monitored movement in the area. 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 year, however, Shell seem determined that it will get the job done.

The stakes, it is clear, are high. Rossport Solidarity Camp, set up at the invitation of local people, has filled up with national and international volunteers preparing what it is hoped will be a highly disciplined campaign of direct action throughout the summer. The individual in charge of the kayak operation – who agreed to talk to Hot Press only on the basis that he would not be named – is a veteran Greenpeace skipper who has previously faced down the US Navy during environmental protests. Talking to some of the Solidarity Campers, the motivation behind their commitment harked back to George Orwell’s reflections on his 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 organisations are about to launch a UN-style monitoring and accompaniment programme, which will observe events as they unfold and offer independent witness testimony, should it be required.
The local community, meanwhile, is sharply divided over the project. The vast majority seems to support the pipeline – if you travel to Belmullet or Ballina, well outside the affected area, support for the project is high, boosted by the estimated 900 beds occupied by project workers, who fill local pubs and eateries. But the closer you get to the villages and townlands in the path of the project, the greater the opposition is.
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 makes 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.
While some of the opposition certainly comes from outside the area, 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 the locals involved in the campaign. Global Community Monitor, an independent human rights group, sent a delegation to Erris which reached this 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 allegation 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 during one of the protests but the case was thrown out on appeal. On another occasion O’Donnell faced similar charges but the crucial seven minutes of Garda footage mysteriously disappeared when it came to court. Now his son Jonathan is facing imprisonment.
There is no doubt that Gardai face a difficult challenge in policing protestors engaged in acts of civil disobedience. However, their response in this instance at least seems disproportionate: 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 constant 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 fascinating and tragic sub-plot, 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 became the leader of a militia group, which launched destabilisation operations against the left wing President of Bolivia, Evo Morales – with bloody consequences. Flores and Dwyer were shot dead in a hotel room in April by security forces responding to an alleged plot to overthrow the government.
Like Dwyer, at least two more suspects linked to the alleged Bolivian plot had previously worked at the Shell compound, giving rise to concerns over the track record of people hired for the ‘security’ operation.
For his part, Pat O’Donnell has been repeatedly singled out for exceptional attention by State authorities. Last year, just before the Solitaire arrived, two investigators were sent by the Marine Casualty Investigation Board (MCIB) to quiz him over an allegation of dangerous navigation, made by a survey boat working for Shell. This complaint, if substantiated, could have resulted in the loss of his license 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 tendentious and provocative.
“They treated him like a criminal suspect rather than an experienced fisherman,” John Monaghan, who hosted the meeting with the MCIB investigators in his house, recalls. Monaghan, an enthusiastic citizen journalist, had accompanied O’Donnell on the day in question and filmed the proceedings. He had footage from the precise time at which the navigational issue 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 says, with a smile. Hot Press 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 adds.
And his attitude to the arrival now that D-Day is here?
“I’ll have to try and protect my property again. That’s all I can do and if the guards decide to arrest me maybe that might be the best way, because at least I’ll be alive. But if they don’t, I might be dead. I fear for my life.”