"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act". George Orwell 

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On this page you can find articles and documents, old and new with historical or contemporary value for use in any way you see fit - either for your own continuing development or for use in classrooms if you are a teacher, for reference points for debates if you are a student, a trade union member or activist of some kind. At SPRING, however, we would like to stress that the works presented here should inform your own political practice and aid you in acting according to principles worked out by yourself. Please note that all submissions are subject to review by independent commentators and the editors of Tokyo Spring.

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Ireland: The Arrest of Pat O'Donnell & the Shell to Sea Campaign

By David Rovics Monday 15 February

In a country with the kind of tumultuous history that Ireland has it's not
surprising that a man being arrested and jailed for seven months would
escape the notice of the media, at least outside of Ireland. What should
hopefully pique some interest is that this is a man with a long history of
being bullied, intimidated, arrested and treated roughly by the authorities
for his nonviolent resistance against Shell Oil's construction of a gas
pipeline, and now the judge is calling him a bully and jailing him for
seven months on the extremely dubious charge of intimidating an officer.

To be sure, this is not Nigeria, where Shell regularly massacres those
opposed to the oil drilling which is destroying the environment and the
livelihoods of so much of the population. Shell doesn't run Ireland in the
way it controls Nigeria. But at the same time, much like my own country,
the Irish government has proven itself to be far from free of corruption.

When I arrived in Dublin last June, on the other side of the country from
where Pat O'Donnell's family has fished the bay for the past five
generations, the Shell to Sea campaign was a subject that came up regularly
in conversation. There was, and is, a buzz around it because, especially
for those of us the authorities like to denounce as “professional
activists,” the Shell to Sea campaign in County Mayo is inspiring as an
example of an effort that has brought together people from all walks of
life. To be sure, there are many scruffy young activists involved of all
sorts, from Dublin, Cork and Galway, with and without dreadlocks, along
with scruffy environmentalists from England, France and elsewhere. But the
backbone of the campaign are local school teachers and fishermen.

Despite my GPS it was difficult to find the tiny town of Rossport in Mayo
because, well, it didn't seem to exist. Occasionally there was a cell phone
signal and I was able to make contact with a very patient volunteer, but
between the two of us we couldn't figure out where I was or how to get to
Rossport from there. My traveling partner, fellow US musician Shawnee
Kilgore and I resorted to asking for directions, which we ended up doing
frequently. Once in a pub full of three generations of locals enjoying the
craic, then at a little grocery store. The woman in the grocery store was
the last little town we came to, then it was all narrow dead-end streets
that ended at someone's farm. At one such farm we were met by a very nice
but completely unintelligible elderly farmer whose border collie herded us
into submission when we got back in the car and wouldn't let us leave for a
good couple minutes.

Like everyone else we had met in Ireland, people seemed to have a positive
view of the campaign in Rossport. Until now our sample had been fairly
self-selecting, the types of folks who come to leftwing folk music shows,
but here in Mayo it was a decidedly random sample. The next person from
whom we asked for directions was a young man with a wheelbarrow full of
shit, a physique that suddenly made me question my heterosexuality, and the
humble, friendly manner that gives the Irish countryside its reputation.

Once we crossed into County Mayo, and increasingly as we neared our
destination, there were home-made signs of all sorts on the sides and roofs
of barns, perched in front of haystacks and all kinds of other places
making clear in no uncertain terms that Shell and its pipeline were not
welcome here. Finally, getting tantalizingly close to our destination, we
stopped in front of the house of a transplant from England, yet another
sympathizer, who was the last person from whom we required assistance that
day. (After that, finding our way around got a bit easier because I could
at least find our way back to the camp by saving our coordinates on my GPS.
The GPS had the road in there marked as “road,” which was better than
nothing...)

First we found the B&B where we were booked in for the next couple nights,
a couple miles down the road where the Shell to Sea camp was now set up.
The woman running the B&B was another strong supporter of the campaign. She
also had probably the only wifi signal to be found for a hundred miles. We
asked her where to find the camp, and she explained that now that we had
gotten this far it was easy – just drive down the road a bit further and
you'll see all the police vehicles.

The ranks of the police as well as of the campaigners were swelled that
weekend for the planned events, which were many-fold – an introduction to
the campaign for newcomers, a workshop on how to do civil disobedience, a
workshop on how to talk to the media and workshops on other subjects, a
mini-festival with an impressive roster of punk, hiphop and acoustic
performers from several different countries, and an attempt to scale the
formidable steel fence surrounding the nearby Shell base of operations for
this stage of the pipeline-building operation.

Within a couple hours of our arrival I found myself sitting around a fire
on a field that sloped down to the water fifty meters away. Sitting on logs
and chairs around the fire with people from County Mayo and others from
England, Lithuania and elsewhere in Ireland, a man sat down and introduced
himself to us one by one. This was Pat O'Donnell. He thanked us for coming
and joked that a few years ago people in the town would cross the road in
fear if they saw someone looking like some of these unwashed feral types,
but now they were all good friends. Around the fire there Pat gave us an
informal course on why this community had mobilized against Shell.

Although the circumstances are always different wherever you go, I was
reminded sitting around that fire of other small gatherings around a
firepit where I have heard other people say the same things. Sometimes the
phrases are identical. I heard elderly Dineh women around a firepit in
Arizona talking about the uranium mines and middle-aged farmers from the
Wendlandt area of Germany talking about the nuclear waste transports. I
imagined Pat O'Donnell had never been to Arizona, but he'd sure find the
discussions familiar there in Black Mesa.

Some people are cynical and just accept that “progress” is inevitable,
he said. Some make money from selling property to the corporation. Others
talk about the jobs the pipeline will bring in. But what about those whose
livelihoods will be lost when the fish becomes toxic? What about the
drinking water they're going to poison? They say their operations are safe
but we know that's not true, we know their safety record, it's disastrous.

It's when people like Pat start talking about “generations” that I feel
like I'm in a David and Goliath type movie – the Milagro Beanfield War or
Civil Action or something – my family has been fishing here for five
generations and I want to make sure we can fish here for the next five
generations.

Certainly the only people visible in Rossport who supported Shell were the
police, and there were a lot of them, from all over Ireland. Pat and others
from the community gave speeches to those police that would make a fascist
cry, one would think, but the police were studiously unmoved. Others
protesting were a bit more confrontational at least in their chants, if not
in their actions – “Whose cops? Shell's cops! Whose cops? Shell's
cops!”

Attempts to scale the fence were beaten back, literally. One young
Lithuanian man (a different Lithuanian than the one around the fire the day
before) suffered a badly sprained ankle from being shoved down the hill by
the police. It seemed like it might be broken. I drove him to the nearest
hospital an hour away. Except for the local folks I was one of the few at
the camp who knew I could find my way back. (Oddly enough it seemed that
half the other people there at that emergency room that day were there for
injuries below the knee.)

While some local people will profit from Shell's operations, the company
itself stands to make hundreds of billions of dollars from this vast
untapped resource off the west coast of Ireland, but these profits will
clearly come from the poisoning of the air, land and water of County Mayo
and the region. Moreover, the Irish people, ostensibly the owners of this
vast resource, are virtually giving it away. In 1987 and again in 1992 laws
were passed that decreased the share of profit from such operations
tremendously for the Irish public. One government minister was jailed for
corruption as a result of the 1987 law but it remains on the books.

Most of the people arrested on the day of the protest that I participated
in were released later that day. I found out later that a few days after I
visited the Shell to Sea camp Pat O'Donnell's fishing boat was boarded by
four masked men who held Pat and a colleague in a room while the four men
sank their fishing boat. Pat and his friend only survived because they were
quick with getting on an inflatable raft, from which they were eventually
rescued. And now, eight months after the sinking of his ship by these
mysterious masked men, Pat is in jail. Coinciding with Pat's imprisonment,
Shell is making plans to get a lot of work done in his enforced absence.

As Shawnee and I headed towards Belfast for the next gig we had after our
weekend in Rossport we were pulled over by the Gardai. They asked to see my
license and the ID of the other three people in the car (we were giving a
ride to a couple folks who had come down from Belfast for the festivities).
They took notes. They didn't say why we had been pulled over. They told me
my American driver's license wasn't valid in Ireland (untrue) and that they
could take my car from me. They said the car may be legal in Belfast (where
it was rented) but not in the Irish Republic (where I had rented cars on
many occasions with the same license). Then, out of the goodness of his
heart, he decided to let us go – this time.

No, Ireland isn't Nigeria. The outside agitators get harassed, not shot.
The community organizers have their boats sunk by thugs and are regularly
imprisoned, they're not hanged. But in Ireland as in Nigeria, Royal Dutch
Shell lies about their safety record, lies about their intentions, while
making obscene profits off of the poisoning of the environment while most
of the local people have less than nothing to show for any of it.


David Rovics is a singer-songwriter based in Portland, Oregon. For more
information about the Shell to Sea campaign go to www.shelltosea.com.

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Ford-Visteon worker factory occupation May 2009

Ssangyong Motors Dispute

As strikes continue across the globe and as the UK post workers continue to engage their government (see the Pilger article to the left) it might be worth reading James Connolly again and asking "What's changed?"

James Connolly

The Right to Strike

(1915)

The Workers’ Republic, 3 July 1915.

From P.J. Musgrove (ed.), James Connolly: A Socialist and War (1914-1916), London 1941, a collection of Connolly’s anti-war articles published on behalf of the Communist Party of Great Britain shortly before the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
The notes from this edition are included because of their historical interest.
Transcription & HTML Mark-up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

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We would advise all interested in the peaceful development of the Labour Movement to watch carefully the progress of events in connection with the activities of the Minister for Munitions. It will be noted that in his negotiations with the British Labour leaders this wily Welshman has already succeeded in inducing a very large section of these gentlemen to surrender the ‘right to strike’, on behalf of the workers they represent. This means that in the industries in which their members are interested the workers have surrendered the only weapon they possess of immediate effective value in compelling a hearing for their demands. We have not yet heard of any corresponding surrender on the part of the employers – have not heard of the capitalist class giving up any of the power they possess over the lives of their employees. It is only the workers who are asked to surrender civic rights – rights hard won by generations of fighters. It will of course be argued that this is for the war only. Even if that be so it cannot be cited as a justification for the surrender; it may be used as an argument against the war. For if the war can only be pursued by virtue of robbing from the civil population all the privileges hitherto enjoyed by them, then no friend of freedom and orderly progress can fail to be opposed to the war. But upon what guarantee is the statement based that this denial of the right to strike will not persist after the war? Do we not all know that the world after the war will be mightily changed, that many institutions are being introduced as war measures that will be carried over into times of peace? He would indeed be foolish who did not realise that each innovation which we see being introduced into the industrial world will, if it proves effective for its present progress, become an established fact too difficult to dislodge when war is over. 

Our friends who say that the denial of the right to strike is only a war measure would do well to study out the processes by which it can be justified on that ground. They will find that every argument that can be used to justify that denial now, can easily be stretched to justify similar restrictions in time of peace. For instance, what is the argument that made it necessary in war-time? The answer is that such restriction is necessary in the interests of national self-preservation. Well, what is to prevent the ruling class saying hereafter that any strike in a basic industry, such as the transport, the railway, the mines, the engineering, is a menace to the well-being of the nation, and that therefore it ought to be prohibited in the interests of national self-preservation? There is nothing to prevent them doing so, but much self-interest impelling them to such action.

And any tyro in politics knows that Great Britain above all countries in the world is governed by precedent. If it can be proven in a British Court of Law that any particular decision was once given before and accepted as Law, then the judge of that Court will give his decision exactly on similar lines, though it may involve the most manifest absurdity and heinous injustice. Hence this denial of the right to strike is full of dangers for the future, and the British Labour leaders in accepting it have grossly betrayed the class to which they belong, or did belong.

Thus another liberty is disappearing. Already we have seen trial by jury destroyed in Ireland, as in the cases of Sean Milroy and Sheehy Skeffington; we have seen the Crown arresting a man in one part of the country and arbitrarily fixing his trial to take place in another, as in the case of Sean Mac Diarmada, and we have seen newspapers suppressed, type stolen and machinery dismantled by the orders of the Government, which at the same time refused to specify any one article, paragraph, or sentence in these papers upon which the confiscation and suppression was based. 

Now we see that the right of the workers to withhold their labour is also taken away. Every worker under these regulations is bound to labour when and where he is told, and if he does not like the conditions he is graciously allowed to grumble, but grumble he as much as he chooses he must keep on working under the conditions against which he is grumbling. This is freedom as it is understood by the war party in England and Ireland.

So, whilst so many of our brothers are out fighting for freedom abroad the master class are, as usual, busy forging fresh fetters with which to bind the survivors when they reach home.

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