A postcolonial ecological regime

We are driving on the coast, among the blanket peatlands of North Mayo. These peatlands have been accumulating carbon in their anaerobic muck for millennia, quietly depositing the environmental and cultural memory of these places in semi- aqueous soil. An eeriness saturates the landscape. It may seem cliché, but we are going back in time – at least, becoming acutely aware of the history of this place, transported to different moments and sites of conflict that awaken our senses to the entangled pasts and futures of land, energy, and technology.

We start in Rossport, where 83 km offshore, the Corrib gas field was ‘discovered’ in 1996. After having already granted exploration licences in the early 1990s, the British multinational oil and gas company Shell was granted permission to exploit the field and build an onshore refinery by the early 2000s. The Shell to Sea campaign formed in direct opposition to the project, which mobilised local protestors and wider national and international solidarity groups (Figure 3.1). The campaign connected with those who had been affected by Shell's developments in the Niger Delta, and a solidarity mural of the martyred Ken Saro- Wiwa was painted. The message was clear: this pipeline will harm this community, and is connected to wider extractive practices by multinationals, supported by the Irish state and its foreign direct investment (FDI) policies. Most in the area considered this an untenable and unjust project, and we can still see the famous Shell- to- Sea mural on a cottage in the middle of a field.