From a farmer’s shed in east Cork to the picket line at Rossport

THEY were called ‘the Mayos’ on the farms around Youghal, Co Cork, in the 1950s.

With brawny or wiry frames and weather-beaten faces, they rose from outhouse and shed before 6am and spent many the long, hot day until dusk bent over the drills, moving with metronomic precision, the spuds flying into all sorts of tin containers.

They would break for the ‘tae’ and grub. Some names seemed so exotic to us then — Concannon, Kilbride, Lavelle. There were Jarlaths and Endas, too.

Mayo football was on a high back then and the Mayos fired their salvoes across the barony’s fields.

Locals lived in the haze of the great Cork-Wexford hurling matches, and a Mayo would be challenged to grasp a hurley and swing it. Ribald laughter always followed.

They would be told how John Joe O’Reilly of Cavan — truly a great among greats, I believe — had destroyed multiple Mayo midfielders in a final and, when resistance was offered, Mike Fitzgerald would always fire the coup de grâce — “Ah, ye can have your flying doctors (Padraig Kearney commuted from New York for the big ones), but ye’ll never have a Christy Ring”.

On the Mayos would move through the counties of the south, migrant labourers, like Mexicans in the US.

I can’t imagine how they fared on the long, drenching, no-work-no pay days. Habitation and hospitality would often have been lacking, and a pack of cards would have been a small source of comfort.

Later we learned of the ‘tatie hokers’ — Irish migrants to Ayrshire and the lowlands of Scotland where working conditions were often dreadful.

On a radio documentary recently I could hear the same stoic, wry tones. They seemed a mild, dignified people not too serious about themselves, never expecting too much from life.

Young children from the Mullet and Erris went to the hiring fairs of Omagh and Strabane and Enniskillen and into indentured labour, into virtual slavery. All sorts of privation and loneliness, and sometimes worse, followed: well-documented physical and sexual abuse.

North Mayo is an area that has always been ravaged by high unemployment with few, if any, major employers .

While I have at times admired the sheer spirit and tenacity of the Rossport pipeline objectors in the face of Shell’s transnational might and statutory power here, they must be certain they are right before they hector, hassle and abuse people who simply want to work and need to work. Or is their absolute sense of certainty the central problem?

The man who spoke on radio about local employment rather a 150-mile round trip for work elsewhere was surely a 2006 version of the Mayos of yesteryear.

Some interviewed clearly felt the protesters were very much in a minority and dominant only in the immediate environs of the pipeline. If so, the protesters are in danger of falling into the Nimby (Not In My Backyard) category.

A banner should not be flown too readily for Shell either. We will never forget the execution of Ken Saro Wiwa and eight others protesting against Shell’s spoiling of an immense and rich Nigerian delta after a rigged trial by a vile military dictatorship.

Apologists for Shell are claiming now that the company was ‘horrified’ at the 1995 executions. Personally, I don’t remember a peep of real protest from Shell until a very late, bland PR statement on the virtual eve of the executions.

I heard Dr Jerry Cowley TD say, in clearly disparaging tones, that Shell made £3million profit every 10 minutes. I think the good doctor — and this is surely a populist who has done much good to date for his people — is only weakening the protesters’ side of the argument here. Shell has been hugely successful when it comes to oil and gas and the company cleary feels it’s on to something really big here. Ireland needs the gas badly and north Mayo needs the jobs badly.

There are endless miles of gas pipeline across the US alone, without a serious accident to report. Shell has improved its pipe specifications for Mayo.

The protesters’ mantra about an offshore terminal, according to expert opinion, is a non-starter in the Corrib on economic and technical grounds.

Whether we like Shell or not, the company has serious expertise and it will surely behave itself in a modern, affluent western democracy. I think populism fuelled by passion has morphed into demagoguery here.

I distrust the protesters when it comes to putting north Mayo and parts of Sligo, Leitrim and Roscommon before perceived (imagined, I feel) threats to their own health and property.

Risteard Pardi

56 Beechwood Park

Ballinlough

Cork