Ballad of a Builder -Neil McEleny Vs Shell-Government

By Michael McCaughan, CorribGas.net

When the rebel ballads are written and recited in future centuries over the graves of the Mayo heroes, names like Pat O’Donnell, Maura Harrington, Willie Corduff and Eoin O’Leithin will undoubtedly enjoy pride of place. It is unlikely however that any bog bound bard will toast the bold deeds of Neil McEleny -a great shame. While campaigns are won and lost on the long term dedication and commitment of many people, sometimes an accidental or reluctant activist can expose the powers above in ways that are both subtle and profound. McEleny is the last person you could imagine blocking a road or climbing on a truck to protest an industrial project. Since the age of sixteen, McEleny has worked on building sites all over Ireland, blessing every new bypass, shopping centre and industrial project as proof of God’s unstoppable will. McEleny is built like a Rugby player and looks like he would be more at ease with Shell’s construction workers inside the Bellanaboy refinery site than around the fire at the Solidarity camp, cooking up another round of Direct Action.

On June 12th, this year, shortly after 9am, McEleny woke up, got out of bed and decided enough was enough. The time for direct action had come. He dressed and got into his car which he then parked on the road right outside his home, blocking a convoy of haulage lorries carrying stone for Shell to the nearby construction site at Glengad. There were no press cameras around, no dreadlocks and no trailers full of tea. The local builder and businessman politely advised Shell’s hauliers to turn around. When the first squad car arrived fifteen minutes later there were no angry comments directed at the gardai, even though they looked like they were gearing up to deliver the usual rough rewards that have become standard fare for activists who challenge the unpopular project. A second Garda car arrived, bearing an older officer, who knew McEleny and hustled the first officer away. It is one thing to assault ‘professional’ activists but quite another to go for a local man, uninvolved in the protest campaign and whose house has literally cracked open from the impact of Shell lorries. The Gardai were also aware that McEleny had already lodged eight complaints with them over Shell’s haulage operation which lacked even the most basic traffic management plan. McEleny went back to his own vehicle and waited to see what would happen next.
A resident of Pollathomas and Irish speaker, McEleny is a man born for the outdoors who looks positively uneasy sitting quietly indoors on a sofa. He is also a man who lives with consistent pain after a car accident which has left him with a morphine drip patched to the back of his neck. McEleny is every inch a builder, his broad 6’1 frame hinting at a secure place in the second row of any rugby scrum. I find myself staring at his neck and skin which has the leathery sunburn that marks the builder for life. McEleny plays down his intellectual abilities yet he articulates his ideas with confidence and measures his words carefully, often pausing to explain why he chooses one particular phrase over another.

When the gas pipeline project arrived into his neighbourhood McEleny was excited, like everyone else, imagining a prosperous future ahead. With his wife Kathleen he purchased their century-old home from Udaras Na Gaeltachta in 1997 and opened it as a diving centre with accommodation attached. The coastal strip in front of their home offers a breathtaking view of turquoise waters stretching lazily toward the horizon, while rocky outcrops dip through headlands and inlets. “This is a fantastic area for diving with beautiful, clear virgin waters”, explained McEleny, gesturing out his window, “half the dive sites are untouched.” The diving terrain sweeps away from Ballyglass to Broadhaven Bay and Portacloy.

The impact of the car accident (hardly an accident, more an act of crass stupidity as a careless driver rammed into his properly parked vehicle) left him unable to dive, so the house was reopened as a B&B but with little success. The problems really began for his family in 2008 when hundreds of lorries began passing in front of his home en route to the Shell compound at Glengad. McEleny has repeated this part of his story many times, to journalists and engineers alike, so his words carry the echo of repetition aimed at officialdom; “The house damage occurred mainly in the month of July 2008 where lorries in their hundreds passed by directly outside our home on a daily basis, some lorries carrying in excess of 32 tonnes and others in excess of 42 tonnes at high speed while in convoys of four, five and six and at times even seven trucks. This bombardment of haulage began at 5.30 a.m. and continued until 9.30 p.m. six days a week for the month of July and into the beginning of August. This was done in conjunction with Mayo County Council who were upgrading the road for Shell at a cost of €4.5m to €6m. As a result of the combined haulage, the front garden wall, which was structurally retaining the road, (as our house and garden are 2m below road level) collapsed and was structurally condemned and was now a health and safety concern to both me and my family and road users alike. As a result of the haulage, widespread cracking appeared internally and externally throughout the house due to the serious vibration from the lorries at the time. There has also been water ingress problems throughout.”

The impact of the heavy traffic can only be understood in the context of local geography as a shifting blanket bog brings the constant risk of landslide when heavy rains occur. In September 2003 there was a serious landslide parallel to the haulage route (L1202) in the Pollathomas/Glengad area. After a major clean up the area was categorised as ‘high risk’ and many local planning applications were turned down on those grounds. Despite the fencing off of some areas along the L1202 which allowed for ‘medium and low risk’ categorization, planning was still refused along the road. “And yet Mayo County Council have given Shell permission to use this highly sensitive area as a haulage route where hundreds of lorries traffic bombard these roads daily”, complains McEleny.
The day that Kathleen McEleny told her husband their house was cracking up, he refused to believe it. Once he saw the evidence, he immediately contacted Mayo County Council.. McEleny reacted the same way as Willie and Mary Corduff and many others when they first discovered the risks and dangers attached to the project.. They followed due procedure, anticipating swift redress. Over the past year McEleny has lodged eight complaints with the gardai, citing zero traffic management, excessive noise and the plaster peeling off their kitchen roof. This is where the runaround began. “This is a place that was kept in immaculate condition”, says McEleny, pointing at the front of the house, which resembles a bombed out excavation site. Inside the house, it looks like a powerful earthquake has struck as plasterboard peels off, ceilings are cracked and walls look on the verge of collapse. McEleny believed that Shell would take immediate action to rectify the situation; “We honestly thought, well, it’s a straightforward case, let’s sort this out, this damage was caused directly by a project, the developer is set to make lots of money.” McEleny hadn’t studied the track record of Shell which has a reputation for skimping on costs but lavishing endless cash on litigation to prevent any payouts or compensation awarded against the corporation.
The first letter from McEleny was acknowledged In February 2008 but there was no further response. McEleny wrote to engineers at Mayo County Council once more, visited the offices on four occasions, asked to speak to senior engineers, but no one was ever available. Finally an office manager told him there would be an engineer out that same afternoon to survey the situation. “That never happened”, explained McEleny, with growing frustration. “I went in the following day, he told me there’d be an engineer within two hours at my home”. Needless to say, that never happened either. The phone calls continued for four months. “I was trying to get someone’s attention.”

McEleny then turned to Shell. Surely, he thought, if Shell understood the damage done by their trucks, they would act. Sure enough, within 36 hours, a public representative called to his house, one of Shell’s public liaison officers reaching out the hand of friendship. McEleny was promised a speedy reply but nothing further happened. In July 2008 Shell promised to send an engineer to his home, but that he wouldn’t be available for three weeks. When the engineer arrived, he reassured McEleny that whatever survey was carried out, he would pass the report on to him the very next day. There have been seven surveys carried out since then. “We haven’t seen a copy of any one of the seven surveys”, said McEleny
In the light of this remarkable runaround McEleny’s direct action can only be viewed as a polite gesture in the face of overwhelming indifference and arrogance. At the time of writing, the County Council has sent a work team to build a structural retaining wall at McEleny’s home, but the builder remains skeptical; “It is obvious a year later that this is not being done out of health and safety concerns but to facilitate the upgrade of the L1202 Shell haulage route.”
In April 2009 Shell recommenced their haulage operation along L1202, provoking further structural damage in at least two more homes in the area. A number of property owners are planning to take legal action on Shell and Mayo County Council. At a resident’s meeting held on 21 May 2009, attended by Councillor Tim Quinn (Fianna Fail), locals presented a 30 point list that comprised health and safety concerns and other general points which were submitted to Mayo County Council the next day as a matter of urgency. Five weeks later, despite numerous requests, not one point had been acknowledged, let alone addressed.
McEleny’s perspective on the Corrib gas project has shifted dramatically since his brush with the company over a minor health and safety issue. “This is not about me”, he insists, “If they can do what they done to someone like me that’s never really got involved”, he says, his thought trailing away into silence. “I could have ended up being one of the lads over there”, he adds, gesturing toward the Glengad compound. “I’m an ordinary 5/8 man like yourself,” he said, before correcting himself, “no, like myself”. I had a feeling that the ordinary 5/8 man was a hardworking, no nonsense type of guy who would fit easily into a Bruce Springsteen anthem. Why wasn’t I one? I asked McEleny for further clarification on this mythical man; “When someone says that someone is an ordinary 5/8 type of guy” he explained, “it has many meanings ie working class, no airs and graces, no bull shit.”

I see.
The McEleny case is significant in that it offers a microcosm of the manner in which Shell-Government has handled every aspect of this project; “Things that could have been resolved have been aggravated instead,” observed McEleny. “Instead, people like ourselves, a family, that for whatever reason have never really been vocal on the project, have to go to these extremes in order to protect their home, protect the safety and health of road users.” It was early June when McEleny attended the An Bord Pleanala oral hearing into the project, at which local people made detailed submissions outlining the dangers of the project. “I was shocked by exaggeration after exaggeration, lie after lie coming from Shell engineers… I though to myself, enough is enough, I felt like I had to make a statement.” That statement was made on the road. “It showed people that residents can do something about it, that if they pull together collectively, it can work.” The residents have pulled together and are now prepared for further action should the haulage work restart. “It was agreed at the residents meeting that if I was to be arrested, then twenty to thirty residents were willing to take my place and also block the road in a peaceful and orderly manner…if one person can stop seven wagons, and twenty or thirty other residents were going to take his place then we’re talking about real people power.”

One of the difficulties with this community-based campaign, which seeks to bring the gas ashore in a safe manner which benefits the Irish people, rather than simply the developer, has been the piecemeal nature of the opposition. Is there a risk that once the haulage route is settled then McEleny’s concerns will also settle down? I asked McEleny if he was satisfied with the project, apart from the particular issue which disrupted his life; “If you’d asked me that question three years ago I suppose I’d have said Yes. It’s a direct question, I’ll answer it honestly. Yes, I wouldn’t have had a problem with the project. But now since I’ve been at home I can see exactly what it’s doing to the community, I can see what’s going on, how it’s full of inconsistencies, with me black is black, white is white, there’s no in between, I see a lot of in betweens, in their management, in the way they conduct themselves.. I’m more and more beginning to feel myself drawn in, I don’t use the word lightly, maybe that’s not the right word, drawn in, I can feel myself becoming more and more vocal.”
Years ago the Pollathomas/Glengad area was a children’s playground, an adventure zone where kids roamed free and parents could allow them out of sight without anxiety. That has all changed since Shell moved into the neighbourhood. ‘My son Conor comes home from school, itching to get out on his bicycle”, says McEleny. ‘He used to tear off down the road but now he’s not allowed out past the gate as heavy traffic moves at high speed.” At a meeting of the North West Mayo Forum, in which the two Eamons (Ryan and O’Cuiv) gathered project supporters in a pretend discussion on the merits of the development to date. Unsurprisingly the delegates (mostly local councillors, state-aid junkies and businesspeople based outside the project kill zone) declared their unconditional support for Shell, the Gardai and IRMS (the private security firm), in a monologue which would have made the old Soviet bosses smile with pleasure. This pride in project continued at the An Bord Pleanala oral hearing at which Shell praised the ‘improvement’ and widening of local roads as something ‘which will have a longer term positive impact’ for tourists and residents alike. The ‘improved’ road has inspired Boy Racers from Belmullet to take a late night spin down there, to perform tricks and keep residents awake at night. The scorch marks are still visible on the road.
Last November McEleny’s insurance company informed the family that they would no longer get home insurance, unless they agreed to declare their front garden a disaster zone, sealing off the path to the back of the house. This would eliminate all the play area used by the children, including swings and other objects.
McEleny recalled how Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Dermot Ahern made a statement advising anyone with a grievance in relation to the Corrib Gas project to use legal means to resolve them. “Here is one person who has endeavoured to do everything, from going to the police, to the law, writing to the powers that be, going directly to the source, Shell, Mayo County Council, yet here I am sitting in my house, it’s cracked front to back, the garden is sealed off, the walls are collapsing.. I’ve done everything within my power to resolve it, I can’t resolve it.”
McEleny has gained a better understanding of the pressures faced by Willie Corduff and Pat O’Donnell and is deeply skeptical of the official version of recent events; “He’s (Willie) been at it many a long a year, I couldn’t begin to compare myself with the stresses and strains, trials and tribulations that man’s had.”
McEleny is conscious of the impact his actions might have upon his family; “If I took Kathleen and the kids out of the equation, I’d give them a good run for their money now for the next while, I feel that strong about it.” Like the other local residents attempting to raise urgent health and safety issues, McEleny admits to his anxiety; “There are plenty of mornings when you think, ah not another day of this.”
On the balance however, it seems certain that while the walls of his home may crack up, Neil McEleny certainly won’t. And maybe, in years to come, he might even get a ballad in his name.