NUI Galway Ecology Society 'End of Year Report'

Friday May 23, 2003 11:19

by Sylvia Pankhurst - Ecology Society

End of the academic year that is, obviously, and a wee report about the stuff we have been up to from September 02 to May 03: Including Shannon, Carrickmines, and making trouble in all corners of the island.

Shannon

A lot of Eco. Soc. time and energy was absorbed into opposition to military re-fuelling at Shannon airport. In the last academic year we first went to demonstrate in Shannon on October 12th, and over the year we went down there six times.

We helped organise demonstrations there in December and March, and we ran buses to several of these protests. Before the December the eight Shannon demo. we held a non-violent direct action training session. Before the one on March 1st we had a public meeting with speakers from both Faslane and Shannon peace camps and a speaker from the Cork Peace Alliance, as well as showing the film from October 12th.

3 of the companies bringing American troops through Shannon pulled out so we were not without success.

Members of the Ecology Society also helped to send four bus loads to the Dublin end of the international anti-war protests on Feb. 15th.
This was the largest demonstration in the Republic of Ireland in the lifetimes of most of the people in Eco. Soc. .

Also in February we helped with the pixies for peace St. Valentine’s Day street theatre where peeps dressed up as err… pixies.

We helped with agitating the S.U. to take a pro-peace stance, and barracked Bertie Ahern on his way into the Ardilaun Hotel.

When Bush and Blair came to Belfast Eco. Soc. folk were among the group which successfully penetrated the security cordon around Hillsborugh – the village where the summit took place.

The next day we were out blockading the street outside Belfast city hall, while those of us left behind in Galway took part in a simultaneous blockade in Eglinton Street.

On the day the war in Iraq “started”, (i.e. in media terms, it was preceded by 11, or is it 22 years, of war), we helped organise a walk out.

We did this conjunction with students from GMIT, and as we roamed the streets blocking traffic lots of the other folk joined in.
We marched into a Fianna Fail office and then went down to the copshop to make criminal complaints against members of the government.

One Ecology Society person did a lot of research on Top Oil, aka Tedcastles, who are the company which re-fuel the military planes in Shannon. This research helped inspire a number of pickets on the Amien Street, Dublin, Top Oil station, culminating in the full scale occupation of the forecourt during May’s Reclaim the Streets.

Finally (for this year!!!) and most importantly we worked at supporting people who were busted during all this activity, including raising money through bucketing and running a bus of supporters to a trial in Clare.

For more Shannon stuff see:

http://www.struggle.ws/wsm/shannon.html

http://www.shannonpeacecamp.org/

http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~slack/rp/

Miscellaneous

Parts of the Ecology Society were involved in a blockade of Kildare Street organised by the Campaign for Free Education, during the Feb. 5th anti-fees demo.
(See http://www.freeeducation.cjb.net )

Way back in November we organised a media awareness workshop for activists, which included a talk on how to work the Freedom of Information act.

In the fall we organised 4 film showings, including the independently made ‘Crowd Bites Wolf’ and ‘The Red Zone’; documentaries about the demonstrations against the World Bank summit in Prague and the G-8 summit in Genoa.

We had a whole week of public meetings and films showings in ‘The Hub’, including a talk given by a Swedish Autonomen and a spectacularly poorly attended talk given by a member of the Campaign For Free Education.
(See http://www.freeeducation.cjb.net )

In conjunction with Indymedia and Attac, Eco. Soc. hosted a talk in the Atlanta hotel by investigative journalist Greg Palast who exposed the Florida votes scandal.
(See http://www.gregpalast.com )

We also recently had another public meeting soon, featuring people from Assed, which are a Dutch based group that campaigns against the World Bank, and from INSAAF an Indian based anti-World Bank group.
(See http://www.aseed.org )

Carrickmines

Some of us have been camped in a barn in Dublin in the dead of winter successfully preventing tarmac from going through Carrickmines Castle. This is a major archaeological site threatened by the extension of the M50 motorway through south Dublin. Or to be more precise the extension of the motorway to the property of Jackson Way a Fianna Fail funding company which has featured in the Tribunals.

(See http://carrickminescastle.org/ )

Beyond Galway

The Ecology Society is also involved in wider networks of groups and individuals:

Gluaiseacht

Gluaiseacht is a non-hierarchical environmental and social justice movement. We bring together grassroots organisations, concerned individuals and student groups from all over Ireland to raise awareness and take non-violent direct action on the issues that affect our world and its peoples.
We are a diverse group with many different ideas but share the vision of a truly democratic and sustainable society.

The Ecology Society hosted one of Gluaiseacht’s bi-monthly meetings in September, and this year took on some of the administrative work for the network.

Grassroots Gathering

This is an all island network taking in environmentalists, anarchists, and other assorted troublemakers. It holds regular conferences with workshops on a wide variety of topics.
This year people from the Ecology society attended the Grassroots Gatherings in Belfast and in Limerick.

Even Further Afield

In his capacity as a member of Friends of the Earth one Eco. Soc.’er was a NGO delegate to annual conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change taking place last year in India.
A report on this went into the Winter issue of Earthwatch.
See Friends of the Earth at http://www.foei.org

Promoting Ethical Lifestyle Choices

We participated in Buy Nothing Day, which is an international festival of alternatives to consumerism. The Galway end of this had street theatre on Shop Street and a bring and barter fair in the One World Centre.
(See http://adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd )

And then of course world anti-McDonalds Day on October 16.
(See http://www.mcspotlight.org )

We’ve helped with Fair Trade Stalls selling goods where the profits go straight to the producers, allowing them to live on their land, rather than be thrown off it and starve. Fair Trade supports communities of producers in the developing world, by supporting co-ops where the producers get the profits of such imports as coffee and chocolate rather than those profits filling the coffers of multi-national corporations.
(See http://www.oxfam.org.uk/fair_trade.html )

We’ve also been developing the ‘Green Guide’, which is a booklet that gives the low down on where in Galway to acquire fair trade, organic, vegan/vegetarian and environmentally friendly alternatives to the plastic coated destructive crap produced by corporations such as Nestle et al. (see http://www.babymilkaction.org ).

The Ecology Society

In spite of the increased activity of the group Eco Soc remained committed to involving all its members in decision making and in raising new ideas. Our success has shown that a hierarchal structure is not needed to achieve social awareness, activism and change.
We have also always encompassed a diversity of views, and been a vehicle for people to come on board and set their own agenda.
The emphasis in this report is on “helped with”, “participated in”, “took part”, we don’t claim that our organisation is responsible for all of the above, but just that we played our part by co-operating with others as equals.