Shell Spin from the Irish Times

mayo | environment | other press Monday May 18, 2009 00:56 by IT reader

Murtagh missing Myers

Does Peter Murtagh have a relationship with the PR department of Shell? Do Conor Lally's "security cources" wear blue uniforms? Why has no one been charged with the break in on the Shell compound where someone supposedly started a digger and tore down a fence? Did anyone take a picture of this attack? Why did the security guards run away? How is that the security guard with the injured arm has never been named nor photographed?

It's all very interesting and will maybe some day be cleared up. But not by reading the reading the Irish Times sadly, which today published the following two articles by their "Crime" correspondent Conor Lally, and their mid life crisis correspondent, Peter Murtagh.

SOLITIARE MIGHT RETURN AFTER LOCAL AND EUROPEAN ELECTIONS

A SHIP that will lay the underwater pipeline for Shell EP Ireland’s controversial Corrib gas project in Co Mayo is due to recommence work there within a month.

Gardaí are planning a major security operation to ensure the ship’s work is not interrupted by protesters. Security sources have told The Irish Times that while the policing plans are still being formulated, the Garda is expected to seek assistance from the Naval Service in protecting the Solitaire pipe-laying vessel.

The Navy’s ships are expected to patrol Broadhaven Bay, near Belmullet, in an attempt to deter protesters from paddling up the Solitaire and disrupting its work, as they did last year.

The Solitaire was damaged last September as work began laying the pipeline from the Corrib gas fields to the landfall site at Glengad beach near Belmullet. A 100m section of the Solitaire’s pipe-laying apparatus, known as “the stinger”, became detached in high winds and heavy swell.

The work was abandoned for the winter in mid-September but not before protesters in kayaks repeatedly clashed with gardaí patrolling the bay in small vessels. Naval vessels were also drafted in to patrol the area.

Tensions between locals and the Garda and Shell’s private security staff were heightened when one local protester, Maura Harrington, went on hunger strike. The 55-year-old retired school teacher called off her action when the Solitaire was forced to leave Irish waters for repairs.

The 300-metre Solitaire, the largest pipe-laying vessel in the world, is due back in Co Mayo as early as the second week in June. However, that arrival date is provisional because the vessel will only be able to lay the underwater pipeline if weather conditions permit.

The vessel’s arrival is likely to result in further protests in the area. Gardaí believe that, like last year, the ship’s presence will attract protesters from the UK and mainland Europe.

Recent protests at the Glengad landfall site have become increasingly robust. Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy visited Belmullet Garda station last week to address gardaí there. Sources said he told those present that while people opposed to the project had a right to protest, local gardaí had his support and the support of the public in keeping those protests within the law. Mr Murphy was in Mayo to attend the funeral of Garda Terry Devers, who was killed in a road collision while travelling to work in Belmullet last Sunday morning. Local teenager Stephen Conway, who was driving the other vehicle, was also killed.

Three weeks ago trouble flared almost immediately Shell began works at the landfall site in Glengad after the winter break.

Gardaí said on April 22nd about 15 masked men carrying chains and iron bars gained access to the construction site. One of the men started a digger and used it to damage the site’s perimeter fence.

One security worker sustained an arm injury before he and has colleagues fled the site.

A number of hours later protester Willie Corduff was hospitalised after he was removed from the site, where he had climbed under the wheels of a lorry to prevent it from being used.

Mr Corduff said he had been held down and beaten by a group of men after he emerged from under the lorry to stretch his legs.

Last weekend seven protesters were arrested and charged after attempts were made to pull down fencing. Protesters believe the State has negotiated a poor deal that will benefit Shell with little benefit for the public coffers.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0518/1....html

SCRUTINISING CLAIMS OF VICIOUS ATTACK

A LETTER written to this newspaper posed an interesting question last week. “Are any of the nation’s newspapers curious about what actually happened in Rossport the night Willie Corduff was hospitalised?” asked the writer.

It’s an important question because in the past week what allegedly happened has been transmuted into bald fact without qualification by those leading the charge.

According to the Shell to Sea protest group, Corduff was subjected to a “vicious and brutal attack”, a “severe beating by masked men” who “beat him viciously about the head and knees” with the result that he had to be hospitalised.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said Corduff was “physically attacked, under cover of darkness, by the agents of a multinational corporation, resulting in his being hospitalised and left severely hurt and traumatised”.

The singer Christy Moore told listeners to RTÉ Radio 1 last week that Corduff was “very badly beaten up by security men”.

So what did happen?

Willie Corduff is a prominent member of Shell to Sea whose protest turned nasty one day last month. Shell erected fencing near the foreshore at Glengad in preparation for eventual pipe laying. (An oral planning hearing on this is due to begin this week.)

Mayo County Council says the fencing does not need planning permission, unlike the pipe. Protesters disagree and a group broke into the fenced-off area on April 22nd, commandeered digging machinery and smashed the fence.

At around the same time, Willie Corduff sought to stop a lorry delivering to the fenced-off area by getting under the wheels of the truck. A standoff ensued but in the early hours of April 23rd, Corduff was no longer under the lorry, an ambulance was called and he was taken to Mayo General Hospital in Castlebar. According to Shell to Sea, members of a “Shell security force . . . wearing balaclavas moved in to forcibly remove him”.

An unnamed resident was quoted saying Corduff was kicked and hit “with large batons” and “forcibly removed by the masked Shell security into an adjacent field where he was then knocked to the ground, kicked and beaten”. Corduff said: “I thought they were trying to kill me. They beat me until I stopped moving. I heard one of them say, ‘Stop now lads, he’s nearly finished’.”

A different version of events – from Shell sources – has it that, after some 18 hours under the truck, Corduff got out to stretch his legs and have a pee. At which point he was grabbed by security men, restrained and taken to hospital by an ambulance they called. There is support for some of this version from an unlikely source: the website indymedia.ie which supports the protesters. It asserts Corduff “had briefly gotten out from under the truck to stretch his legs”.

Peter Wilcock, a Sligo-based photographer who regards Corduff as a “man of intense integrity and honesty”, took a picture of him in his hospital bed. It was published by the Mayo News. Despite a vicious beating about his head and knees by men wielding “large batons” there are no signs of injury.

“His injuries were not visible,” Wilcock told me, “he says that of course they made sure they hit him where it would not show.”

I asked Shell to Sea last Wednesday whether Corduff would detail his injuries and publish his hospital records to confirm his medical condition on admission. The request was acknowledged but I have yet to obtain the information.

So. Was Willie Corduff “very badly beaten up” as Christy Moore and others claim?

Manuela Riedo was “very badly beaten up” before being raped and murdered. Women in abusive relationships are often “very badly beaten up”. Gay men the world over are not infrequently “very badly beaten up” by violent homophobes. Alleged social delinquents in Northern Ireland, or on sink estates in the Republic, are occasionally “very badly beaten up” by self-appointed republican enforcers. Brave journalists in places like Russia are sometimes “very badly beaten up” and worse by mafia thugs or friends of the politically powerful. Dissenters in dictatorships are often “very badly beaten up”.

But Willie Corduff “very badly beaten up” by Shell’s mercenary 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.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0518/1....html