Now I don't know Nottingham very well, and to be truthful I have no real desire to go there, but I do apply that song to my life (and sing it to myself replacing town with Tom, and Nottingham with Tommy Sales). Well Rossport too, like any other factor or period In life has it's ups and downs.
The last few months had seen a gradual decrease not only in our core numbers, but also in the many drifters that help out on whatever travels they are on. The winter months, although strangely mild aren't as hospitable, and seeing that most of our visitors' favoured mode of transportation is hitching, the idea of standing, thumb out in winds that turn rain into needles on your skin for hours on end, isn't very appealing. This is why Kerouac wrote, 'on the road' about his journeys across middle America and not the British midlands. That and he was an American beatnik, in America, and had probably never heard of Wolverhampton, let along harboured any desire to spend it in Lorries next to Tattooed men called Frank wondering what a, 'yam yam' was and waiting to be dropped off at the M1 services. It may have made a more interesting and less narcissistic novel, but I doubt it would have carried the same cultural impact. Anyway, I digress.
What I'm meaning to say is, the camp was at a bit of a low. It was at many stages a bit of a sausage fest, to be painfully honest, at times it was the daddy of all sausage fests, it was the Glastonbury of salami. Five men, alone, in a very dreary house in rural Ireland eating meat, watching DVD's (very poor ones thanks to the combination of Aron's taste and Belmullets range), and dishing out huge barrages of playful abuse towards each other. To all the ladies out there, this is what happens when men are left in each others company, they develop a very strange way of discourse that mainly involves insulting every facet of each others being in order to get a laugh out of anyone, especially themselves. So after the Afri hedge school weekender, which saw another astonishing bedtime conquest by Dave (we have no idea how he does it, honest), we had the most exciting highlight of our time here approach, the 'Day of Action'.
(Bob, relaxing in the camps communal space)
Now a day of action is exactly what it sounds like. It's a day when people form all over the country and even the rest of Europe, pop over and show their solidarity to the cause by taking action. Now this could mean chanting, sit down protests, blocking lorries from entering, or even jumping the fence and stopping work. There's no real plan with this, lets face it, when your working with hundreds of people travelling from all over the place with political views ranging from Nationalism to Anarchism, it's bloody hard to organise. I'd rather take a leaf out of Sun Tzu's book, 'The Art of War' and say it was best to, 'Lure with Bait, Strike with chaos'. Unfortunately we'd run out of bait, so it was just Chaos mainly.
(the view near the office)
The lead up to a day of action is pretty exciting in itself. We had some people joining us for the lead up to it, Jess and Joel, friends of mine from Leeds were taking the good old 24hr trip over to stay for a couple of days. Katie Tee and Rocky, two old camp members had joined us that week armed with spoils from Dunnes stores' skips. An American student, Sarah had come along to study our non-violent action ways and look quizzically at our strange behaviour, Julie was back from Nine Ladies for a bit, and it was fun. Mcgraths was alive again with conversation, argument and playful abuse and the electric anticipation of the Friday was creeping into everyone.
We had a fair bit of preparation to do for the day, food had to be bought. The chiefs house, a shell of a place set next to a river in boggy land, had to be made hospitable, bedding and places for everyone needed to be secured and a vague meeting was held about what was going to happen. Like I've said before, it's a hard one to organise at the best of times. This time for example saw the majority of people coming down for between 12 and 4am, by then most people are knackered and want bed. Add to that the plan to block workers at 6am, and well, there's not much point in a full scale briefing with wall charts and maps.
(Eoin, carrying supplies to the Chief's house)
We basically got our shit together, packed a day bag, I charged the batteries, got the blank tapes together for the camera, and got an early night. Although to be honest I couldn't really sleep, I don't normally get this excited. But it shits on Christmas.
It's hard to explain to your friends how cold the mornings are when you haven't got central heating. It's not like when you wake up when the heating's off in your house. This house has never had central heating, any warm air that was in this place has flown the coup a long time before I turned up, it's colder than the ice queen's naughty bits. I can normally cope with it, my dad in his very own strange way of bloody mindedness and inability to understand that the universe goes on when he's not in the room never let me put the central heating on when he wasn't home. Now i can deal with cold temperatures, it's not weird to be chatting away and then notice that everyone in the room can see their breath, it's just a way of re-setting yourself.
However, it's hard to explain that to your poor friend who came out to visit and is going into shock becuase the plans for the action changed when you weren't in the room has got him up at 5am to block workers from getting into the refinery. No, quite expectantly if this happens you get a very grumpy Joel who is shivering so hard that he may vibrate into another plane of existence.
After we load up with layers, and camera's, tapes, flashlights, hats and our very dulled wits, we head off to our objective.
There are two major and one minor entrance's to the gas refinery. The main entrance is reinforced for lorries and cargo, the third gate is for workers to enter. The workers normally start getting in around 6am, the rest start coming in from 8. On a normal day there's a steady flow of lorries taking in all manor of raw materials, normally there's about three cop cars full of guarda that patrol the area. On a good day, when you catch them offguard, you can stop the traffic for 30 mins, maybe an hour. Then they drag you off.
On this day there were a couple of hundred protestors, and about three hundred guardai. It was this wall of cops that greeted us at 6am. Linked arm in arm they blocked the road, seperating us from the other groups. It was just us and some people from cork. We moved forward and stood face to face, banners flew, and from the depths of our group came, the war of the worlds anthem, 'da da daaa, da da daaa'. I nearly pissed my pants with laughter. Trying to get through a thick wall of coppers is, well like talking to a brick wall, or coppers. Bloody useless. One or two of us broke through, only to be carried back and neatly dropped off (dave for one).A few people get the boot stuck into them by the cops. One very irritating one tries to throw me into a very nasty ditch but instead falls arse over tit. I point out that slippery smart shoes may not be the wisest of footwear and her takes a swing at me. I also point out that he's not very good at taking swings at people, this seems to irk him. As our pals in arms blocked the other road they were picked off one by one by the masses of pigs and thrown into our enclosure. We were stuck, and bored to boot, so we headed back towards the workers gate.
The worksite has two main fences. The main perimeter is a 6 foot high sheer metal sucker that is easily scaled, the inner fence is a little taller with sharp spikes all along it, it's nothing that any self respecting kid wouldn't climb to get at their football, but when you've got five very stupid and angry security guards on the other side, pulling, pushing and genrally beign arseholes it's a different story.
We get to the gate and after a little game of cat and mouse scale it. On the other side a group of about ten guards are waiting for us. There's a small scuffle, they form a very amusing line and we break through. At the start i'd say there was about 20 of us over the outer fence, now there's about 13 of us. We're a ragtag bunch of stragglers from other groups. Me and Dave are from the camp, Auntie G and a few others from Dublin, some from Cork and a tall frenchman with a camera who no-one knows. We head for the fence, but are greeted by a couple of lads from belfast and the woodsman that is Finbar.
Finbar has the most amazing ability of popping up out of nowhere. One minute you think that you're all alone, scrabbling around in bog and scrub and all manner of shit and this weapon x looking irishman in a neatly tucked in lumberjack shirt and strangely tight ripped jeans will come striding out of the bushes, normally with about 8 security guards bumbling behind him. At every action i've always marvelled at his ability to outrun every guard, i know they're not the fittest of people, after hours of tussling being dragged and the big fuck off coats i insist on wearing i'm a regular melting man by noon. Finbar is just this bouncing gazelle dipping and ducking out of reach. Needless to say it really pisses them off.
So we're stuck between the fences, wandering around on spongey bog and with not a clue what we're doing. Then the discussions begin. Groups of protestors aren't very good at organisation. When sun tzu wrote, 'the art of war', he laid pen to paper and stated, 'lure with bait, strike with chaos', well there's only so much chaos an attack can have before it just ends up as a bunch of dim lefties wandering around debating very slowly about what the agenda is whilst the cops slowly surround them. And that's precisely what happened.
It takes a while for the gardai to totally remove you from a refinary, or anywhere. The disorganised mess can be your greatest ally. The local law enforcement are trained to a rigid decree of procedures, that were devised before direct action came to these shores. Add the fact that there's camera's floating about, alot of the time they seem more comfused than we do.
Finbar kept a great deal of them busy in the fields, prancing and galloping around the security guardsducking in and out of bushes, appearing and dissapearing in the undergrowth to everyones amusement. Some of us were singled out and dragged off into vans, arrested or held without charge and released. Mostly they formed lines and slowly pushed you out of the gates whilst whispering obscenities into your ear, kicking the back of your knees all the way to the gate.
Outside we saw the other side to the action. The side that was seen by the media. dozens of protester were lined up against a ditch by a strong line of Gardai. All morining they'd been blocking trucks, rotating in sitting blockades in the centre of the road, kicked, punched, and manhandled. One had his glasses smashed, many were winded and had been stamped on, they had blocked the lorries for a while until finally the superior numbers and violence had won them over. Everyone was exhuasted and elated, slightly delirious from the events, joking, drinking tea and eating sandwiches. The Guardai still japed and insulted us, but it was all too amusing, we had done something, that was all that was needed. To do something, to show solidarity against adversity, that was all that truly matters. Ignorance and apathy is the biggest weapon they have, and without it things happen, change occurs and this world needs change.
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