The Frayed Atlantic Edge, page 24
Many villages here attest to an age when crossing wild seas was an ordinary fact of life. South of the Stags, we passed the small sea-facing settlement of Kilgalligan. Twenty miles of twisting road from the nearest town (Belmullet) the Kilgalligan road sees little passing footfall despite its staggering views across a hundred miles of coastline. Until 1942 steamers ran between Belmullet and Sligo, while currachs and sailboats ferried labourers around these smaller settlements. Making little sense as a roadside township, Kilgalligan is an artefact of Erris’s risky histories: it’s no surprise that nineteenth-century visitors described the local people as courageous seafarers whose natural element was winds ‘which a landsman would consider a storm’.5 They also note coast-dwellers with thick and muscular necks built over lifetimes of twisting right and left while turning small boats into the waves.
Our landfall on the day of the Stags was a tiny, isolated pier, scattered with old currachs and fishing boats. Here we met a local man walking his Labrador by the shore. He drove us two miles uphill to Connolly’s pub at Carrowteige and we were soon surrounded by retired fishers and farmers, pressed into a corner of the snug by a rollicking eighteenth birthday party, complete with DJ, elaborate lighting rig, and three generations of Erris families. For an hour or so, Llinos and the Erris men swapped notes on language, discussing the survival of industries such as slate that gave resilience to Welsh, where the collapse of maritime trades had made the Irish-language cause far harder. Eventually, a weather-worn retired fisherman broke from the discussion and asked me if I knew David Thomson’s classic The People of the Sea. I’d find, he said, that another pub nearby had been Thomson’s source for folklore of Atlantic seals. He told me, as a fisherman had told Thomson nearly a century earlier, about renowned local seafarers, the Cregan family, who never drowned despite going out in the fiercest seas. A boat of Cregans once found themselves adrift after a storm and, legend has it, were only saved from shipwreck by a seal that pointed their landward route, then swam to shore and behaved so strangely that the coastguard scanned the sea and spotted a speck stranded on the skyline. Out of respect, it’s said, the people of this part of Mayo became the first to stop making waistcoats and hats from sealskin. In this place, Thomson’s informants told him, the worlds of land and sea became intertwined: a seal, for instance, is remembered drinking rum at a November fair, and many stories tell of evils that quickly befell any human who broke the pact with the people of the sea.
But conversation soon turned to far more recent stories of the coastline. While we were at sea, a coastguard helicopter had been tragically lost nearby, and local fishermen were engaged in the quest for wreckage, frequenting pubs to exchange information on the search: we’d arrived at a time when communities were focused on the ocean and full of concern for coastal dangers. Unlike in some parts of Scotland, though, they showed no worry about the risks we were taking: this was the first place I’d been since Shetland where small boats at sea seemed to feel as natural and familiar as the act of breathing.
We learned from our evening in Carrowteige that this is a region both ur-Irish and un-Irish: a stronghold of language and traditions, but a place where many are now fiercely ill-disposed to the Irish state. Because the land intrudes so far into ocean, there are few more contested waters than these. Oil fields and gas deposits lie close to the coast, bringing local communities and multinational corporations into unusual proximity and revealing the priorities of the state in its mediation between the two. We soon heard of locals imprisoned for protest against corporate action, and naval deployment against small coastal communities. These sound like typical tales of heavy-handed Victorian officialdom. Shockingly, they happened in the twenty-first century. Hearing them over whiskey in a packed pub I wondered whether indignation was fuelling exaggeration. Only in Galway, following up leads from Mayo fishermen, did I learn every word they’d spoken to be true and unembellished.
The context of these tensions is the selling off of Ireland’s Atlantic resources. Corporations registered in Norway, Russia, Canada, the Netherlands and Spain draw greater profit from the waters west of Ireland than do Irish interests. Ireland has a quarter of the fishing grounds of EU states but just a 4 per cent stake in the fish from its own seas. Oil, gas, offshore fishing, salmon farming and even (if current lawsuits fail) the seaweed harvest are all controlled by distant interests. In a global system skewed towards scale – with huge margins for multinationals and non-existent profits for the small boat or community co-op – coastal communities can only flourish if their interests are understood and nurtured by the state. But Ireland has so long been conceptualised as an agrarian economy, in which farming interests are protected with great care, that coastal needs have been consistently bargained away.
Erris has a long history of activism against its marginalisation. In the 1950s some residents refused to pay road tax because local routes were so neglected: their taxes repaired roads in Dublin or Limerick where spending per head was many times what it was in Erris. ‘They have the jet age in Shannon now,’ said the neighbour of a man imprisoned for non-payment, ‘but we are still in the Stone Age here.’ Fifty years later, protests were far larger. Their arena was oceanic in scale, because the Atlantic multinational, Royal Dutch Shell, had arrived in Mayo seas.6 In 1996, a substantial resource, the Corrib gas field, had been discovered offshore from the Stags of Broadhaven. The 1980s had seen Irish politicians such as Dick Spring work to establish conditions for oil exploration that would benefit the Irish people, but when few finds were forthcoming, these collapsed in 1987 into a situation that left Ireland gaining little from the vast profits of the multinationals. These companies were able to sell Irish gas back to the state at full market price. Dick Spring labelled these concessions to the industry ‘an act of economic treason’ and, indeed, the justice minister who oversaw the change was later jailed for corruption. But still these unjust conditions persisted. The company that had found the Corrib gas was Enterprise Energy who exploited their unusual freedoms to the full: they treated Erris like their own private property, conducting far less research and consultation than was required for the complex task of bringing gas ashore in a populated area of outstanding environmental significance. Locals fought back and were angered but not shocked to find council and government officials on the side of the industry.
When, in 2002, Enterprise was bought by Shell, locals rightly feared the situation was about to escalate. The reputation of Shell when the company came to Erris was disastrously bad. The corporation’s desire to dump a defunct rig, the Brent Spar, in deep Atlantic waters had been turned by Greenpeace into a flashpoint of eco-protest. The rig was occupied by activists and, across Europe, Shell service stations were boycotted. In Russia, Shell’s actions were still more contentious: the indigenous communities of Sakhalin Island had protested Shell’s despoliation of their coast, which damaged livestock grazing and the bays they relied on for fish. The regional assembly, Sakhalin Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North, decided that direct action was the only response to an unaccountable multinational that refused even to fulfil basic requirements such as conducting cultural-impact assessments. Blockades and pickets, with banners such as ‘Fish are our wealth’, followed. After protests directed international scrutiny towards the Sakhalin scheme, Shell’s environmental approvals were revoked with over a hundred breaches of Russian law identified. Among the many shocking discoveries was that pipelines were being laid through an active seismic fault.
Shell’s activities, like those of other energy corporations, were shaped not by national geographies but by the geophysics of oceans, both ancient (relict seabeds where oil and gas pipes were laid) and modern (offshore fuels and routes for vast tankers). The remarkable counterpoint to this was that their actions inspired a transnational community of protest: they consolidated connections between distant Atlantic societies, reviving an interlinked littoral that had slumbered since the age of sail. One striking instance was new intimacy between Erris and Ogoniland, a region of Nigeria 5,000 nautical miles away.
Shell’s activities in Ogoniland are the most venal entries in its catalogue of horrors; events there have been described as ‘the most graphic example of the “oil curse” [that linked] oil and corruption, conflict and poverty in developing countries’. Environmental destruction involved almost 3,000 oil spills as well as waste discharge that rendered vast swathes of the Niger Delta infertile. In 1989 an oil platform off the Nigerian coast exploded, adding to the deaths and despoliation. Four years later, peaceful marches of 300,000 people (almost half the Ogoni population) took place to protest Shell’s plans to lay a new pipeline through Ogoniland. The Nigerian government despatched riot police to twenty-seven villages, leaving 2,000 dead and 80,000 homeless. The government then claimed that the murders of four Ogoni chiefs had been caused by the protests, so arrested nine campaigners and condemned them to death for ‘incitement’. One of the ‘Ogoni Nine’ was Ken Saro-Wiwa, internationally renowned author and campaigner, vice chair of the international Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation. Witnesses in Saro-Wiwa’s trial later revealed they’d been offered jobs with Shell in exchange for false statements. Shockingly, the ‘Ogoni Nine’ were found guilty of these fabricated crimes and executed. The result was international outrage and Nigeria’s expulsion from the Commonwealth of Nations.
All this was witnessed by an Irish nun, Sister Majella McCarron, a friend of Saro-Wiwa who had worked in Nigeria for three decades and now made certain that the campaigning cry of ‘Remember Saro-Wiwa’ spread throughout Ireland. McCarron’s role as teacher and lecturer in Lagos and Ogoniland was the product of long-term Atlantic relations. The Nigerian Irish presence dates back two centuries, to an era when missionaries arrived by sail. Soon, Patrick was adopted as the Nigerian patron saint, ‘Irish’ potatoes were being grown throughout the country, and Nigerian public figures, such as the nation’s first foreign minister, were being trained at Irish universities. By the 1960s, in what has been called a ‘religious empire’, Irish personnel occupied positions in every stratum of the Nigerian church and every division of its provision, running 2,419 primary schools and forty-seven hospitals. Today, there are Nigerian expats in Atlantic cities such as Cork and Limerick and Irish communities in coastal cities such as Lagos. The arts of the two nations have intertwined. Yeats echoes through Nigerian literature, from dedications in poetry such as that of Christopher Okigbo, to the title of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. But the reverse influence is perhaps more significant. Issues raised by Nigerian writers, such as Achebe’s question ‘What must a people do to appease an embittered history?’, inflect Irish efforts to understand the colonial legacy. Irish authors wrote regularly to Achebe, sometimes expressing their wish that someone might illuminate the famine or the troubles with the power with which Achebe expressed the condition of colonial and postcolonial Nigeria.
This all meant that when Shell arrived in Erris many locals saw the company’s name as synonymous with the plight of Ogoniland. They’d read dozens of national newspaper articles and donated money in church fundraising campaigns. Sister Majella had founded Ogoni Solidarity Ireland who began, in 1996, an annual Saro-Wiwa Seminar. In the year that Shell bought the Corrib gas field, this event saw Komene Famaa from Ogoniland draw parallels between the recent past of his people and the immediate future of Erris. Soon, the Ken Saro-Wiwa Archive was established at Maynooth University. As press reports put it, ‘there is a little corner of Ireland that is forever Ogoniland’.
Over subsequent years, Irish activists undertook many forms of peaceful protest including changing the street names round Shell’s Dublin offices to Ken Saro-Wiwa Street. A Dublin MEP, Mary Lou McDonald, congratulated these campaigners: despite the prominence of Saro-Wiwa’s name,
still the Irish government continues to collude with Shell in the destruction of the sensitive environment of the north-west coast of Mayo, while doing deals which effectively hand over the country’s oil and gas resources to Shell and other multinational energy companies. To give away such valuable natural resources in a time of economic uncertainty is inexplicable. Ireland should be harnessing its own natural energy reserves not handing it over to multinationals virtually free of charge.
In Mayo, locals set out to scrutinise Shell’s activities in the ways a responsible government, less dazzled by multinational wealth, might have done. They drew attention to the high-pressure pipelines that would be built three times closer to residential homes than safety guidance suggested. They pointed out the weakness of peat bogs through which such pipes would be laid. Indeed, in 2004 a graveyard and road were lost from the pipes’ proposed route as peat and turf slid downhill. Some locals even began to name themselves ‘Bogoni’.
From the start of the project, residents had witnessed developers begin clearance and construction before permissions were granted. Local houses and land were given to the oil companies under an unprecedented scheme of compulsory purchase, but locals refused to watch their homes destroyed until they’d seen permissions in full and confirmed their legality. Five residents of the Erris village of Rossport were jailed for non-compliance and ‘the Rossport Five’ became local heroes in life as the Ogoni Nine had in death: crowds of protestors guarded their land through all the time they were locked away. Activists set up Rossport solidarity camps, while Shell multiplied its security and the state committed 3,000 Gardai (a hundred times the usual local compliment) to protecting Shell’s interests. At the same time, locals collated the many dimensions of potential impact on the coastline. New attention was paid to the animal species using the bay and to the potential impact of seismic interference. Analysis was devoted to the place of fishing in the local economy and to the damage to fish stocks that would be caused by release of waste products. Local contacts with Ogoniland and Sakhalin Island allowed conclusions to be based on evidence of Shell’s past actions.
The historic coastline played a contested role in these campaigns. Pipelines would rip through beaches, field systems and famine-era structures that were mapped in greater detail by local tradition than by official cartography. One flashpoint came in 2002 when, while still waiting for permissions, developers began to excavate the beach where proposed pipelines would make landfall. An eighty-four-year-old local, Mary Philbin, brought an injunction against them because their digging destroyed a cillín (a burial ground for unbaptised children). No cillín was marked on Ordnance Survey maps, so developers and Dublin authorities could wield the official record of the Irish landscape when they insisted this stretch of coast had no cultural significance. Such claims escalated the tension, because they showed that it was not just a single site that was ‘violated by the most arrogant and uncaring forces’, as Philbin put it, but the whole edifice of local tradition. Maps made by the occupying force of the British army were being used to undermine a place, associated by locals with great psychological trauma, whose very existence had been predicated on secrecy. The question that was now at stake was how, if at all, coastal oral traditions could constitute evidence in a court system built on the recorded facts and written words of historic imperialism.
This question would never be fully answered: no satisfactory solution was found to the implicit dismissal of local knowledge contained within the legal system. But these debates did destabilise Shell’s approach. Shell tried constantly to return the debate to specialised scientific language in which locals could have little stake; they even labelled the protests ‘a sustained assault on scientific reality’. Yet the complex array of voices that confronted them meant Shell were unable to dictate terms and in the words of one local, their ‘aura of power [was] undermined’. It was in the year I travelled here that Shell’s incursions were rebuffed and the corporation finally gave up.
Every mile of coast south of Erris is evocative of a famed aspect of Ireland. Alone again, I soon rounded a row of vast cliffs at the largest of the islands, Achill, once the hub of the basking-shark hunts that provided oils which, before the era of Shell, powered Ireland. Here, days after I passed, a storm restored a beach that had been missing for thirty years: tons of sand appeared overnight on bare rock, as much like a fairy tale as the sudden theft of the beach in the 1980s. From Achill I moved into the stretch of coast versified by one of Ireland’s greatest nature poets. Just as Norman MacCaig spent summers in Assynt and winters in Edinburgh, Michael Longley escapes the cities for warm, wet weeks among the Mayo waterbirds. Like MacCaig, he praises moor and ragged coastline, locating transient tracks of dunlin and sanderling and peering through the heather to find delicate delights like the lesser twayblade. The distances evoked by the fauna near Longley’s chosen village, Carrigskeewaun, add to its legend: it is ‘a townland whooper swans / From the tundra remember, and the Saharan / Wheatear’.7 He marks the shifting boundaries of this tide-digested place whose gestures to eternity – forts and burial mounds – are easily ‘erased by wind and sea’. Longley dreams of being buried high on the relict shoreline: entombed in a plateau that had once, when ‘the old stone-age sea’ came far inland, been an Atlantic isle.
Leaving the land facing Corrib didn’t mean escaping the tensions between conflicting systems of power and knowledge. Indeed, crossing from Mayo into the most historic coastal corner of County Galway – Connemara – meant moving into a region famed for its tensions of old ways with new. This is a place now mapped with greater inventiveness and attentiveness than anywhere else in the Irish and British archipelago; yet all its recent mappings have been countercultural acts of subversion aimed at the blind spots and falsehoods of the official record. This was where the experience of kayaking was made unique by the cartographic projects that record lives lived across the strand-line, rejecting the familiar breach between land and water and showing how, in the words of Tim Robinson, ‘the dense record of life is scribbled in the margin of the sea’.
