On the grey morning of Friday September 15th, we volunteers decided to join the Fridays for Future manifestation in Dublin to represent GEAI. Despite the dreadful weather, we marched through the city streets to make our voices heard, demanding immediate climate justice and the end fossil fuels consumption. After the march we had the chance to attend a few speeches by the young activists of the movement, together with musical and poetry performances.

The highlight of the day, however, was the celebration of the government’s refusal to build the liquefied natural gas terminal (LNG) by the Shannon Estuary. The decision of having the terminal built would have had enormous impact on the local environment and the involved communities. In fact, even though on-shore fracking was banned in Ireland in 2017 thanks to our and other organisations’ collective efforts, the Shannon LNG project would have meant the import of fracked gas from the US.

This is a prospect that activists from both Ireland and the United States have always fiercely opposed, and on Friday we had the chance to hear the dreadful effects of fracking in North America directly from Julia Walsh, director of Frack Action, who joined our march in Dublin.

This is a huge win on the environmental point of view, that repays us for all the work we have done in the past few years, and gives us hope for a future evermore reliant on green and sustainable energy for everybody.

To know more about our work on fracking and the Shannon LNG:

https://www.goodenergiesalliance.ie/campaigns/shannon-lng/

https://www.independent.ie/regionals/kerry/news/lng-refusal-it-dashed-north-kerry-hopes-with-the-stroke-of-a-pen/a311124448.html