An Irishwoman's Diary

A man who has never been in trouble with the law before is experiencing his first taste of prison

A man who has never been in trouble with the law before is experiencing his first taste of prison. Several weeks before, he "kissed goodbye to the daylight" at the Bridewell in Dublin, as he and his companions were transported in a van with "dog boxes", or individual small steel cages, to Mountjoy jail, writes Lorna Siggins

Here, in a "dark, grey and rotten" atmosphere, watches and phones and money must be handed over, counted out and signed for. A phone rings: there is a change of plan, and the group is transferred west of the city to Cloverhill.

They are instructed to strip, are handed towels, and directed to walk through a screen before being given uniforms and allocated cells. It is "the most humiliating moment" of all.

As shock turns to depression, the man is offered a job in the kitchen at €3.25 a day. "I can't wait," he says. One day, he finds himself working alongside a Russian who is in jail for murder. "I was frightened at first being in the kitchen with him with all the knives," he recalls. "I said: 'how come they let you in here?'"

READ MORE

"It's okay my friend," the Russian quipped. "I killed him with my bare hands!"

Philip McGrath's story is one of several tragi-comic moments recorded in a book published five days before Christmas in Mayo. When he and his brother Vincent, and colleagues Willie Corduff, Brendan Philbin and Michael Ó Seighin, were sent to jail on June 29th, 2005, they were "almost entirely unknown outside a cluster of small villages and communities", Dr Mark Garavan writes in the introduction.

By the time they were discharged from prison by the High Court 94 days later, the small group of "quiet and private individuals" had become the Rossport Five, men who had "brought the €900 million Shell project in Mayo to a complete halt".

One of the first pieces of advice given to them by the prison authorities after committal was to "stick together in the yard" because "they mightn't like you because you're from the country". As it proved, however, the five's crime - contempt of court - aroused admiration among fellow inmates.

Ó Seighin, a retired schoolteacher whose health was not the best, believed all five would soon be forgotten about. Willie Corduff remembers how imprisonment felt like "catching a fox and putting him into a dog's cage, or catching young wild ducks". He worried about the safety of family travelling up for brief and difficult visits. There were nights, he says, when "we cried ourselves to sleep".

What sustained them was not just the public reaction conveyed in press reports, but also the letters - bags of mail from home and abroad, with one correspondent writing separately to each of the men every couple of days. Young sympathisers who set up a solidarity camp in Rossport helped out with work at home. The independent Mayo TD Dr Jerry Cowley visited them constantly, and was "a hero to us", they say.

It was during last summer that the families agreed to be interviewed about the events which led up to June 29th, 2005, at a time of continuing opposition to the method by which Corrib gas is to be processed in north Mayo. After the gas find off Mayo was declared, the bishop and local priest were flown out to the field by helicopter. Political support was also courted - to the extent that when An Bord Pleanála turned down the first planning application for an onshore gas terminal, citing it as the "wrong" location, politicians went into a frenzy of grief.

The families describe dealing with officials who didn't have immediate answers to technical questions on safety, and who, they claim, threatened them with court if they didn't sign up to compulsory acquisition orders. These were the first such orders issued to a private company by the State. They describe mounting 24-hour watches as Corrib developer representatives driving large jeeps with Garda escorts tried to enter their lands. One such foray was during a howling January gale.

Willie and Mary Corduff survived a devastating fire on their farm when their six children were small, but describe what they experienced over Corrib before the jailings as "silent torture". One morning, three days before Christmas school holidays, a company official entered the farm at 8.30am. Willie remembers how "the youngest girl cried all the way to school".

"You'd have to be here when this was happening to see for yourself," Vincent McGrath, says. "They had 'Work in Progress' and 'Sorry for the Inconvenience' signs up all over the place but they never said who was carrying out the works . . . All the signs were in English even though this is a Gaeltacht or Irish-speaking area. . . Nobody seemed to be in charge and taking responsibility for our safety along the pipeline . . . There was a legal limbo here in Rossport and I believe that this was done on purpose. It was done to try and confuse us and make us feel helpless."

The 208-page account was written before Garda deployment to the area as Shell contractors resumed work last October, and before the use of force against the community on behalf of the State. It gives a unique insight into why, some 27 months after their release from Cloverhill, the Rossport five and wider community are as worried as ever. "It's memories that are making us do what we are doing," Willie Corduff says. "To see someone coming in now and trying to destroy [ this area] kills you. Our footsteps are around the place since we were able to walk."

Our Story - the Rossport Five is published by Small World Media at €12.50.