Festival to celebrate Carnsore Point victory

I see a dark cloud rising outside Wexford town, I see a hard rain on Ireland pouring down. There'll be no time to shelter. Let's all make a stand. O'Malley's plan we'll have to ban . . .

The year was 1978. The singer was Christy Moore and the location Carnsore Point, where 5,000 people gathered on an August weekend to oppose the Government's plan to build a nuclear power station on the Co Wexford headland.

After subsequent rallies the following two years, the project was quietly abandoned. For nine days from this weekend musicians, writers, poets, artists, environmentalists and others will gather in Wexford again for a festival celebrating the success of those protests and promoting the benefits of a nuclear-free future.

Mary Coughlan, Pol O Braonain, Hothouse Flowers, Eleanor McEvoy, the Dubliners and Brian Keenan are among those taking part, and while most of the events will be held in Wexford town there will also be ceremonies at Carnsore Point itself.

Liam O Maonlai, the Hothouse Flowers singer and one of the organisers of the festival, Carnvaha, says the story of Carnsore Point "is a story with an incredibly positive resonance that needs to be told". It is hoped that many of those who took part in the original anti-nuclear rallies will attend.

"The word carnvaha is derived from the Irish carn bheatha, or mound of life," he said. "This festival is a celebration of the Earth and the importance of respecting its beauty and fragility. The celebration is also sharply focused on the need to ensure that we see an end to the use of nuclear power."

The idea for the festival arose two years ago at a Nuclear-Free Future awards ceremony in Berlin, which Mr O Maonlai attended. Mr Claus Biegert, the founder of that event, asked the singer if the awards could be hosted in Ireland.

"I said Yes and thought Carnsore Point would be the obvious location, not only on account of the protests that took place, but because it's a wildlife reserve and a beautiful place," Mr O Maonlai said.

He was still at school when Christy Moore and Clannad were entertaining the protesters in the 1970s, but was acutely aware of what was going on. For those who were there, the festival will revive memories of an exciting time. Dr Barra O'Meara, a general practitioner in Bree, near Enniscorthy, attended two of the three rallies held between 1978 and 1980 and was one of six doctors who signed a statement condemning the ESB's proposal to build the nuclear plant.

He also succeeded in getting a motion calling for a public inquiry into the proposal passed at the annual conference in Tralee in 1979 of the Irish Medical Union, as it was then. The call was immediately rejected by the minister for industry, commerce and energy at the time, Mr Desmond O'Malley.

"My aim was to try to get doctors excited about the issue," he said. He had begun compiling information after attending a public meeting and had concluded that the plant would be a threat to people's health. But not everybody was easily convinced.

"The farmers and all the big businesses were in favour of it. There was a feeling that anything that was modern and created jobs had to be good." Events such as the Chernobyl disaster had "unfortunately proved me right. I felt it was a good struggle".

The Carnsore Point rallies had a "terrific" atmosphere, he said, and kick-started the green movement in Ireland. "They got people thinking about environmental policies."

A flavour of the good-natured, if slightly chaotic, character of the 1978 protest, organised by an ad-hoc committee of young people, was captured by Dick Grogan in his report in this newspaper: "Somebody stole the anarchists' tent, and the Socialist Labour Party also lost its flag mysteriously. But the major part of the proceedings went smoothly and, even if many of those present attended only for the music, they could not have gone away without some impression of the seriousness with which others regard the nuclear proposal."

Carnvaha opens on Saturday with performances by the Dubliners and Tony McMahon at the Talbot Hotel, Wexford. Exhibitions, workshops, pageants and performances by the acclaimed native Australian group White Cockatoo, will also form part of the festival, which has a website at www.carnvaha.com