Skip to content or view screen version

Success of Flotilla Protests signals a new era in anti-Sellafield Activism

Graham Caswell | 18.09.2002 16:03

The dramatic success of the Nuclear-Free Seas Flotilla offers hope of a new era of anti-Sellafield activism as intensive corporate media coverage penetrated even the British corporate press. Backed up by Greenpeace's skilled abilities in using corporate media, the drama of small boats searching the Irish sea to tell BNFL's ships to fuck off was irresistible even to the BBC (who's reporters expressed anger at the restrictions imposed on their reporting by headquarters).

Success of Flotilla Protests signals a new era in anti-Sellafield Activism
Success of Flotilla Protests signals a new era in anti-Sellafield Activism


The flotilla consisted of 20 boats included small sailing boats, luxury yachts, a rusty old trawler hired by the Pembroke Anti-nuclear Alliance and Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior - backed up by half a dozen 'Ribs' (small and dramatic 'rigid inflatable boats'). The boats assembled in Holyhead last Friday and, after a spectacular 'sail-by' display for the corporate media, set out at 4am on Sunday morning.

A Greenpeace spotter plane flying out of Cork airport has got a positive identification on the ships off Portugal on Thursday, but could not find them on Friday, or Saturday. Because of the uncertainty of the nuke ships location it was decided (through a democratic decision of the skippers of the boats involved) to split the flotilla into two with half going north to Barrow (where the nuke ships were heading) and half going south into the Irish Sea.

Continued at  http://www.indymedia.ie/cgi-bin/newswire.cgi?id=12335

Graham Caswell
- e-mail: caswell'indigo.ie

Comments

Display the following comment

  1. Subsidies illegal - but who cares? — Eurocrats don't