Rossport Five vindicated by High Court ruling

mayo | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday April 18, 2007 19:45 by Bill Poster - Dublin Shell to Sea

Pipeline route now defunct, Shell to pay legal costs

Very good news for Shell to Sea from the High Court today.

* The stance of the Rossport Five and Brid McGarry has been legally vindicated.
* The original pipeline route through Rossport is now defunct.
* Shell will have to pay the €1 million costs, including those of the Rossport landowners.

Broadhaven Bay

In a nutshell, Shell was applying to drop the permanent injunction against several local landowners. They had dropped the interlocutory (temporary) injunction in September 2005 - they dropped that in order to get the five men out of jail, as having the men in jail was doing Shell so much harm. Since then they have been trying to drop the permanent injunction.

But the local landowners said, you can't just drop the injunction as though it never meant anything - some of us went to jail as a result of that injunction. Justice Mary Laffoy's ruling today agrees with that standpoint and imposes conditions on the dropping of the injunction, including:

* CAOs (Compulsory Acquisition Orders) be dropped against landowners along the pipeline route. This means that the original pipeline route is now formally and legally defunct. The only way it could go ahead is with the consent of the landowners.

* Shell pick up the legal costs associated with the injunction. The Rossport Five are still liable for the costs associated with their contempt of court, but these are marginal. And for Shell to pursue these would be highly vindictive and an extremely bad PR move.

The ruling also means that the stance taken by the Rossport Five and Brid McGarry is now legally vindicated. To say they are vindicated is no longer an ideological position. It is now a legal position.

A further blow for Shell is that the company hoped that other legal matters which were raised during all the proceedings (arising from counterclaims made against Shell by the landowners) would be dispensed with. This has NOT happened. Justice Laffoy ruled that there are issues of "public law" still to be considered.

It can said that Shell abused the injunction process. They took out an injunction against five people, had them jailed on the foot of that injunction, and then tried to drop the injunction.

This is good news in lots of ways. Bu one potential negative outcome to be aware of might be that this will add to the notion, spun by Shell and government, that the honest decent folks who went to jail over a pipeline was one issue, which has now been resolved, and that there are then separate issues being dragged out by people who just won't let the past be the past and who are determined to oppose everything about the project (e.g. small things like a refinery and a gas giveaway) because they are extremists...