Newspaper coverage of the Shell to Sea Prostest

It has emerged that protestors against Shell in Rossport, Co Mayo have been engaged in widespread baby-eating and child murder. One local, who admitted to being too terrified to use his name, spoke of his horrific ordeal when a known protestor (name withheld) turned up at his house and cannibalised his six infant children. He added: "It is known in the area that the IRA is controlling them."

In reality, the protestors have only been accused of intimidation and thuggery so far, but otherwise the paragraph above could serve as a fairly representative sample of much of the media coverage of the Shell to Sea campaign. It has been about as hostile and malicious as either the law or the public's credulity would allow.

As long ago as July 2005, the Sunday Independent ran a story, entitled "IRA-style death threats made to Shell contractors", entirely based upon anonymous "sources close to the oil-companies". Although Jerome Reilly's article claimed that "a formal complaint has been made to the gardaí", no charges have yet been brought against any protestors for this or any other act of intimidation.

The Sunday Times has also been particularly hostile. Despite the fact the campaign was named "Shell To Sea" long before the jailing of the Rossport Five, the paper has repeatedly claimed that the demand for an offshore refinery arose later, courtesy of subversive infiltrators. In July of this year, an editorial complained that the "original requests for safety assurances about the pipeline have given way to extravagant demands that Shell build a new terminal to carry out gas processing offshore". They put this down to "infiltration of the Mayo protests by Sinn Féin activists, self-styled eco warriors and professional protesters".

In recent days, after the state sent in a large force of gardaí to break the blockades and forcibly re-open Shell's refinery site, the media attacks have intensified. In consecutive issues of the Sunday World, Paul Williams presented dramatic splashes about intimidation, thuggery and IRA infiltration of the campaign. Both articles were entirely constructed from anonymous quotes or, at best, local business leaders and politicians making similarly unverifiable and unspecified claims. Where Williams' revelations were verifiable, they were often clearly wrong. For example, he claimed: "Sinn Féin have taken direct control of all protests against Shell outside Mayo." This is contradicted by a quick check of Indymedia*, where one can find photographic evidence of protests around the country organised by a half-dozen other groups.

Paul Palmer, writing in the Daily Mail, covered much of the same ground and the Sunday Times got in on the act too. Liam Fay talked of "intimidation" by an "angry mob", while Mark Tighe continued the paper's series of personal "exposures" targeting Shell To Sea campaigner Maura Harrington, by running a scurrilous article implying – without anything that could be considered meaningful evidence – that her teaching work is "suffering because of her extracurricular activities".

Most of the tales about thuggish mobs intimidating innocent citizens were accompanied by photographs of large groups of gardaí forcibly removing locals from blockades. It is a measure of the mentality pervading the media that the concrete reality of the state using obvious physical intimidation against the population is mostly ignored in favour of the fantasy land of anonymous sources and their reincarnated flying columns. p

*Disclosure: Chekov Feaney is a contributor on Indymedia