Images of death and suffering drift in and out of our minds, shocking us to the core for a few hours and then disappearing into oblivion, writes Fintan O'Toole
But I've never managed to shake off the TV images of the charred bodies of people in the Niger Delta town of Jesse in 1998.
They had been gathering oil in buckets and bottles from a crack in a pipeline, when a spark created a fireball. Around a thousand people were burned to death.
Some of the corpses, including those of children, were found clutching plastic cups, funnels and cans to collect the fuel.
These desperately poor people risked their lives to gather a few drops of the oil that came from their land, but to which they had no claim. The resource that should have made their lives better actually made them worse.
They got the danger and the environmental degradation. The Nigerian elites and the transnational corporations got the benefits.
It would be obscene to compare the desperation and misery of the African poor to the situation in Mayo that has led to the indefinite jailing of five farmers at the behest of Shell Ireland. The scale and the consequences of the injustices involved are of an entirely different order. There is, however, an underlying connection.
The people of north Mayo will gain very little from the exploitation of the Corrib natural gas field, thanks to the staggering deal done with the exploration companies by Ray Burke. But they will have to bear all the costs of personal danger and environmental degradation. Like the horror in Nigeria, their predicament exposes the bones of a stark reality: that this place is run in the interests of local and international elites.
It is easy to dismiss the "Rossport Five" as just another bunch of NIMBYs, standing in the way of necessary development. But in this case the development is utterly unnecessary.
Shell could easily process the gas at an offshore terminal, as it has often done elsewhere, and as the original inspection report by An Bord Pleanála suggested. It has chosen instead to run a very high-pressure gas pipeline through a landscape whose instability was amply demonstrated by the Dooncarton landslide at nearby Pollathomas.
This choice is determined simply by the desire to make the already lucrative deal that Shell got from the State even more profitable.
Having made a mere $17.5 billion in after-tax profit last year, Shell's shareholders obviously need every cent they can get, and a few Mayo farmers can't be allowed to stand in the way.
The fears of those farmers are not hysterical. The experience in the United States, which has vast experience of operating gas pipelines and a relatively well-developed regulatory system, is salutary. In August 2000, for example, a gas pipeline exploded at Carlsbad, New Mexico, and killed 12 people, five of them children.
The US Office of Pipeline Safety records that between 1986 and this year, there have been 4,280 accidents with natural gas pipelines, causing 382 deaths and 3,061 injuries and creating $780 million worth of damage to property. Last year, an explosion in a natural gas pipeline in Belgium killed 15 people and injured 120. Is it unreasonable to worry about gas piped at far higher pressures in a shifting landscape and in a country whose flagship swimming pool leaks vast amounts of water?
Would you believe a Government that builds leaky swimming pools when it reassures you that high-pressure gas will be safely contained?
In the late 19th century, when the small farmers of Mayo founded the Land League, they were acting in their own interests, but also asserting the dignity of ordinary Irish people.
Micheál Ó Seighin, Willie Corduff, Brendan Philbin, and the brothers Vincent and Philip McGrath are making a similar statement with their calmly courageous refusal to be bullied by Shell.
Their imprisonment exposes the hypocrisy of the law, which holds that property rights are sacred except when vast public resources are being given away to powerful corporations, and unimportant people object to having explosive materials pumped through their lands.
Gougers who have run huge tax frauds here have never seen the inside of a prison cell, but Micheál Ó Seighin, a 65-year-old man who has undergone triple heart bypass surgery, is treated like a criminal because he refuses to be a good little peasant and get out of Shell's way.
If Michael Davitt were to be resurrected, he would find it all too eerily familiar.
Ultimately, this is a political issue. Shell is behaving like a greedy transnational corporation, which is what greedy transnational corporations do. But it is the Government that has given Shell the right to gain access to the Mayo farmers' lands. It can tell Shell to call off its hounds and let the Rossport Five out of jail.
It can recognise, however belatedly, that the pipeline is unnecessary and unworkable and remind Shell that the fabulous deal it is getting imposes some moral obligations.
It can pretend that a sovereign, supposedly republican, State has half the backbone of a few Mayo families. And while our leaders slowly try to assume a position that is not supine, the rest of us can enjoy the novelty of being able to assert some collective dignity, just by filling up at Esso or Maxol or Statoil.