Oisin's photos from Barton Moss fracking site near Manchester

Earlier this year I was in Barton Moss, near Salford in Greater Manchester, where the local community is bravely opposing the imposition of fracking.

I went there with the four directors of Friends of the Earth England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to lend solidarity to local campaigners. And what I saw there convinced me that we must stop fracking.

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The Barton Moss fracking site looks like an industrial fortress that landed in the middle of a field. A rural lane that passes right beside houses has become a highway for convoys of trucks supplying the chemicals and 200,000 litres of water that have been used in the test drilling.

And because the local community and their supporters were mounting a peaceful protest the police were out in force to ‘protect’ the daily convoys. While we were there four van loads of police arrived to escort one such convoy.

First the police lined up in front of the gates to the compound and then formed a moving wedge to shepherd the emerging trucks down the lane past the protesters. It was a substantial deployment of public resources to make sure a private profit-making company was shielded from the legitimate concerns of local residents.

We’ve seen it here in Mayo in the case of Shell in Erris and it is not a sight I want to see repeated across Fermanagh and Leitrim and down the Shannon all the way to Clare

 
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