Strange tale of Shell's pipeline battle, the Garda and £60,000 worth of booze

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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/10/shell-pipeline-protests-county-mayo


Anti-pipeline protesters Willie and Mary Corduff at the quay at Rossport. Willie spent some time in jail in 2005 for his protest activities. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer

For 10 years, the Shell oil and gas behemoth has endeavoured to bring ashore a pipeline from the Atlantic into the heart-stopping beauty of Ireland's County Mayo seaboard. And for 10 years, local people whose ancestors farmed the land and fished the ocean have been determined to stop it.

The struggle has become an epic clash between the Goliath that is Shell, backed by the Irish police, and a group assembled around the umbrella protest group Shell to Sea, whose founder, retired primary schoolteacher Maura Harrington, says that, "thanks in no small measure to the Shell to Sea campaign, the project is 10 years behind schedule and its budget has trebled".

An internationally award-winning film, The Pipe, by Risteard O'Domhnaill, has vividly charted the confrontation on the little rural strands; farmers and fishermen beaten and jailed; riot police and balaclava-clad guards mobilised across little lanes winding through bog to the brine.

But beyond these surreal scenes, a stranger battle rages, as Shell struggles for the "hearts and minds" of the community, using what the senior press officer for the company in Ireland, John Egan, calls "accommodation services" – sweeteners, or "donations", to the people of the region.