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On Wednesday I saw The Pipe in the Lighthouse Cinema with Dar. It's a documentary about the people of Rossport, a poor coastal village in county Mayo, Ireland, and their opposition to Shell running a high-pressure gas pipe right through their land. Now, I'm from Mayo myself, and went to college in Galway where the group Shell to Sea often campaigned for support, so I was certainly aware of and against the gas project. I expected to agree with the film; I didn't realise I'd learn so much more about it. Or be so moved by it, either.
The history of the gas project is one of those very Irish stories - corrupt ministers (hello, Ray Burke), corporations with deep pockets, reliance on apathy and biddability to press through a selfish agenda. Unfortunately for Shell, the men and women of Rossport weren't so much with the biddability, and when Shell reps came to tell them their land, livelihoods and heritage had been bought, they said "hell no". In every possible way. They faced off against Shell, held out against tactics that put their minds, bodies, personal privacy and property in danger. Five of them (known nationally as the Rossport Five: James Brendan Philbin, Philip and Vincent McGrath, Willie Corduff and Micheál Ó Seighin) were jailed for over three months for blocking construction of the onshore gas refinery, and it's at this point that the film's timeline begins.
Over and over, the film shows events as they happened, without trickery or affectation. The director, Risteard O'Domhnaill, spent a good three years filming in Rossport, almost stumbling into making a documentary, and the good relationship between him and the locals make for entirely natural responses on camera - no one is acting, no one is putting on emotion: they're such normal Mayo people that it makes me homesick to watch and hear the sense and quiet humour of them all. I feared for them throughout, felt the force that was used against them, particularly by the Gardaí, the Irish police, who swarmed the area in numbers equalling the village's population and treated them like terrorists, felt the dis-ease of surveillance from the binoculared and scarfed watchers from Shell's security group/militia (I wish the latter was an exaggeration). And when the monstrous pipe-laying ship the Solitaire arrived in the bay, it blocked the sky like the Deathstar, looming mercilessly over "Chief" Pat O'Neill's aged fishing boat.
The Pipe is a powerful documentary, both in showing the normal lives of people living in a poor but close-knit rural community in a bleakly lovely landscape and in its portrayal of the pain Shell has brought. It disturbed me, scared me, disarranged my perception of the Irish guards. Through most of it, I thought there was no way the people in Rossport could win, bound as they were by morality and the desire to avoid harm. Yet the pipeline is still not laid through Rossport or elsewhere on land, and the film ended with victories at the end of 2008. But, also, with the ominous line "Shell is considering its options...".
If any of you reading this get the chance to see it, I hope you'll take it! And I hope you'll tell me about it.
Personally, it's also galvanised me into active opposition to the Corrib gas project, and I hope next to read Lorna Siggins's book "Once Upon a Time in the West". I'll also be following further events with great interest and if I'm able, participating in action.
(Dar also has a great writeup of the film, but he has to post locked these days because he lives with a nosy scumbag. If he can post it somewhere public, I'll link it here!)
The history of the gas project is one of those very Irish stories - corrupt ministers (hello, Ray Burke), corporations with deep pockets, reliance on apathy and biddability to press through a selfish agenda. Unfortunately for Shell, the men and women of Rossport weren't so much with the biddability, and when Shell reps came to tell them their land, livelihoods and heritage had been bought, they said "hell no". In every possible way. They faced off against Shell, held out against tactics that put their minds, bodies, personal privacy and property in danger. Five of them (known nationally as the Rossport Five: James Brendan Philbin, Philip and Vincent McGrath, Willie Corduff and Micheál Ó Seighin) were jailed for over three months for blocking construction of the onshore gas refinery, and it's at this point that the film's timeline begins.
Over and over, the film shows events as they happened, without trickery or affectation. The director, Risteard O'Domhnaill, spent a good three years filming in Rossport, almost stumbling into making a documentary, and the good relationship between him and the locals make for entirely natural responses on camera - no one is acting, no one is putting on emotion: they're such normal Mayo people that it makes me homesick to watch and hear the sense and quiet humour of them all. I feared for them throughout, felt the force that was used against them, particularly by the Gardaí, the Irish police, who swarmed the area in numbers equalling the village's population and treated them like terrorists, felt the dis-ease of surveillance from the binoculared and scarfed watchers from Shell's security group/militia (I wish the latter was an exaggeration). And when the monstrous pipe-laying ship the Solitaire arrived in the bay, it blocked the sky like the Deathstar, looming mercilessly over "Chief" Pat O'Neill's aged fishing boat.
The Pipe is a powerful documentary, both in showing the normal lives of people living in a poor but close-knit rural community in a bleakly lovely landscape and in its portrayal of the pain Shell has brought. It disturbed me, scared me, disarranged my perception of the Irish guards. Through most of it, I thought there was no way the people in Rossport could win, bound as they were by morality and the desire to avoid harm. Yet the pipeline is still not laid through Rossport or elsewhere on land, and the film ended with victories at the end of 2008. But, also, with the ominous line "Shell is considering its options...".
If any of you reading this get the chance to see it, I hope you'll take it! And I hope you'll tell me about it.
Personally, it's also galvanised me into active opposition to the Corrib gas project, and I hope next to read Lorna Siggins's book "Once Upon a Time in the West". I'll also be following further events with great interest and if I'm able, participating in action.
(Dar also has a great writeup of the film, but he has to post locked these days because he lives with a nosy scumbag. If he can post it somewhere public, I'll link it here!)
