The week before last Erris fisherman Pat O’Donnell was jailed for seven months for his part in the communities ongoing resistance to Shell’s attempt to impose an experimental gas pipeline on them. Across the country local Shell to Sea groups have been holding solidarity protests and other events for Pat. In Dublin this has included two protests and a public meeting in UCD (an audio recording of the meeting is at the bottom of this article). Meanwhile Shell have been forced to admit a temporary defeat in the face of local opposition and call off the construction they have planned for Glengad this year.
Over 50 Shell to Sea campaigners gathered at the Shell head quarters in Leeson street Dublin Tuesday evening to protest at the jailing of 52 year old Erris fisherman Pat O’Donnell for resisting Shell’s experimental gas pipeline. Pat received a seven month sentence which has the added benefit for Shell of taking his boat off of Broadhaven Bay for the period they need to carry out major underwater construction work and repairs. Pat has twice previously been arrested and held without charge when Shell has needed to carry out work in the bay.
Over the weekend of February 5th the Workers Solidarity Movement sent delegates to Paris to take place in a European conference of the groups involved in Anarkismo.net. Anarkismo.net is a multi-lingual news and analysis site made up of 31 organisations around the world who agree with the Anarkismo.net editorial statement*. WSM members were involved in founding this project almost five years ago, this was the first formal meeting of some of the groups involved.
Since the start of the great anti-slavery republican insurrection nearly 220 years ago, Haiti has been presented as a dangerous place incapable of running its own affairs and requiring foreign intervention. Yet the reality is its people were the first enslaved population to deliver themselves from slavery and also carried out what was only the third successful republican insurrection on the planet. The threat of this good example was rewarded with centuries of invasion, blackmail, the robbery of Haiti’s natural resources and the impoverishment of its people. This articles summarizes that history of intervention and the resistance to it in order to put into context what is happening in Haiti after the quake. It was written s predictions for the death toll from the Haitian earthquakes rise over 200,000, ABC News have reported that planes carrying medical equipment and relief supplies are having to compete with soldiers for the valuable slots at Port-au-Prince airport which was taken over by the US military after the quake. 
Outside of a few events including the Long March and the Shanghai commune the development of the Chinese revolution is relatively unknown on the western left in comparison with the revolutions in Russia in 1917, Spain in 1936 or even the Paris spring of 1968. Those sections of that left influenced by or proclaiming themselves to be Maoist haven’t helped that situation much. Their histories have tended towards simple tales focusing on the role of one man and collapsed a 100-year history of revolution into the events important to him. [
On the cancellation of the Dec 3rd strike and the disasterous ICTU negotiating position
A leader of the Bolivian Confederation of Peasant Workers (CSUTCB) is in Ireland this weekend to visit the local people who continue to resist Shell’s experimental gas pipeline in Rossport and to demand that the Irish government investigate the role of Shell’s security company IRMS in the attempt to start a civil war in Bolivia. Meanwhile in the wake of the An Bord Planala decision Shell’s dangerous experimental pipe has been exposed as just that and many people are starting to question the wisdom of giving the energy corporations 420 billion of oil and gas for next to nothing.
The campaign against Shell’s inland refinery and high-pressure pipeline near Rossport in Co Mayo has been long and extraordinary, inspiring communities everywhere. Local residents began their campaign in 2000, adopting the name Shell to Sea in early 2005. Tactics have ranged from High Court actions, planning objections and lobbying politicians to grassroots campaigning and civil disobedience.