How the West was divided
The choice of image will resonate with anyone who has visited the isolated corner of northwest Mayo where this remarkable drama has played out. A landscape of desolate beauty that would normally instil calm has been suffused with menace and angst in the decade since Enterprise Oil — since bought by Royal Dutch Shell — proposed building an inland gas refinery and high-pressure, raw gas pipeline in a shifting blanket bog with a history of landslides.
Journalist Lorna Siggins tells the long and extraordinary story of families in the remote farming and fishing communities around Rossport and Pollathomas, whose resistance to the development propels them from lives of quiet obscurity into years of legal actions, scientific research, civil disobedience and even imprisonment. In scenes resembling a Hollywood movie, some of these people first learn that their land is on the pipeline route when they look out their windows to see men in dark glasses in their fields with surveying equipment.
