Letter to the Taoiseach

I was walking past your office at 161 Lower Drumcondra Road on Saturday afternoon last.  There was a uniformed member of An Garda Síochána standing outside St Luke’s.  I was going to call in to see you personally but the word on the street was that you were in Kerry on your holidays.
I must say that I was also a wee bit put off by two additional factors.  One was that the ball was about to be thrown in over at Croke Park and the other was that I had watched a video the previous evening in Armagh about Garda mistreatment of the Shell to Sea campaigners in County Mayo.
I took part along with Tommy McKearney of the Independent Workers’ Union and Micheal Ó Seighin of Rossport Five fame in a Public Awareness evening as part of Féile Ard Macha Thíar, the West Armagh Community Festival.  Through the work of Damien White and Gareth Mackle and the team, it has been a great festival to date and another highlight this coming weekend will be the ‘Battle of the Yellow Ford’ guided tour and commemoration.
In case you do not know, the English Army suffered their biggest military defeat here in terms of Irish history in 1598.  O’Neill and O’Donnell sorted out the English Army near Connolly’s on the Blackwatertown Road.  Anyway, back to the Shell to Sea information evening at the West Armagh Festival last Friday evening.
Another contributor to the meeting was a blacksmith from Mayo who goes by the name of John Monaghan.  John told me that a local man called PJ (I think he was either Moran or Doran) secured a commitment from you on the last day of campaigning in the General Election.  You were in Ballina and you told PJ and other Shell to Sea campaigners that you would come back to see them after the election. Now, I am only reminding you, Bertie. If your diary is full for the foreseeable future, could you send Minister Eamonn Ryan or John Gormley instead?
Listening to John and Micheal, I was very impressed that there has been protest activity every working day since July 2005.  Tommy McKearney reminded us all of the Mayo origins of the first ever boycott campaign and the more the evening progressed, I thought I might support Mayo if they were still in the Championship.  
I was impressed, too, that all the protests at the proposed Shell refinery site have been peaceful.  Very disciplined.  What John and Micheal had to say brought me back to a visit which I made to Sellafield some years ago.  I was in the company of your own Ministerial colleague Conor Lenihan and Brian Hayes of Fine Gael was there as well.  On the way from the airport, our taxi driver was pointing out Sellafield to us in the distance.  He himself was employed by British Nuclear Fuels who would not have been pleased with him using the word ‘glow’.  But he did use the word ‘glow’ when I asked him to point it out to me.
One of British Nuclear Fuels’ spokespersons at the site also denied that plutonium was kept in ‘sheds’ there.  I had asked him if they had kept plutonium ‘in those sheds there’.  He disputed my description of these outhouses as sheds but they looked exactly like sheds to me and there was plutonium kept there.  
Another interesting observation which I made was a hand written poster on a wall inside Sellafield which read ‘41 days since last minor accident’.  I think that the point behind this was to encourage workers there to keep going and to reach a magic figure of 62 days without a minor accident.
Sixty two days is probably Sellafield’s record of achievement.  I wonder what constitutes a minor accident at Sellafield and I wonder what would constitute a minor accident at the Shell refinery site at Bellinaboy in North West Mayo?
On a final point, Taoiseach, with both Tyrone and Mayo out of the Championship, who should I support now?

Is mise le meas
Barry McElduff



NB: Bertie Ahern can be contacted on (00 353) 1 619 4020 or e-mail [email protected].  Address: Office of the Taoiseach, Government Buildings, Dublin 2.