‘No evidence’ that fracking is safe – Love Leitrim rally told

Damian McCarney

Armed with a report by New York health professionals, an American anti-frack activist visited Cavan last week to deliver the message that there is no safe way to frack, and that community campaigns can work.
Joan McKiernan, whose father was from Swanlinbar, attended the site in Belcoo where Tamboran intend to drill a borehole to obtain rock samples. She also addressed Thursday’s Love Leitrim meeting, discussing a 70-page report compiled by ‘Concerned Health Professionals NY’. The authors say the report summarises the “key studies” on hydraulic fracturing. Referring to the report titled (click link to view), ‘Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking’, she warns that the controversial process adversely impacts upon human health, livestock health, air pollution, water contamination and can even cause floods and earthquakes.
“One of the conclusions they have drawn is that there is absolutely no evidence that there is any way to carry out this process without endangering human beings,” says Ms McKiernan.
She adds: “What I’m explaining to people is that the United States for the past 10 years has been like a case study of what can happen. So we don’t need a trial run in Ireland, we’ve got the research.”
Tamboran Resources’ management have previously accepted that there have been problems in the past caused by fracking in the United States, but insist that they intend to achieve the highest standards required by the government’s watchdogs in Ireland, and vow to frack safely.

Opinion
Ms McKiernan, who lived in Belfast for about 30 years, moved to an area of New York State called Windsor in 2007, and it was there that she first learned of fracking. The energy industry has discovered a shale deposit, which, according to Ms McKiernan is “bigger and more productive than Pennsylvania’s”, which featured prominently in the controversial Gasland documentary.
“It’s near the Finger Lakes,” she says of her home, “which is one of the beautiful areas, like around here Lough Erne and Cavan and beautiful areas in Ireland.”
She believes that “high economic deprivation” and “unemployment” in the potential New York frack-zone is behind the community’s initial pro-fracking stance.
“We have a very divided community,” she laments. However, she refers to a poll carried out by Siena College in New York, which shows opinion has turned against fracking, despite the perceived economic boom.
“For the first time this area of New York, which is potentially to be fracked, has a majority of people agreeing that they do not want it.”
She credits community campaigning as the key factor in the battle for hearts and minds.
“It’s grassroots activists in every little town, putting out leaflets, like what I saw in Belcoo, like the Love Leitrim people - it’s not any big organisations, it’s local residents, local farmers, the doctors and nurses, ordinary people who are organising their communities and arguing with their politicians, putting forward motions at town meetings.”

Unfathomable
She recalls being told about the fracking plan for Ireland by a friend living in Sligo.
“It was with shock and horror that I realised this was serious.
“It is such a fantastically beautiful place dependent upon agriculture and tourism - and a small area. You figure they can do it in a place where there’s few people living - in Montana or Texas - that’s bad enough... picking areas of beauty? I found it unfathomable.
“If you’ve never seen any pictures, go online and see what a big drilling well looks like. They put them right near people’s homes. They are enormous gigantic things that shoot up into the sky and they go for 24 hours a day. The noise is incessant.
“They come in from outside, these machines which bring the equipment in, they are so big, they are so heavy they destroy the roads. I’m just trying to picture these things on the lanes around here - they would destroy them immediately. So all the money, like in Texas, the revenue that was made by the State is paying for cleaning up because the companies don’t clean up.”
The Anglo-Celt has repeatedly requested an interview with Tamboran Resources in recent weeks, but they have yet to make anyone available.