Hot Press meets Donal O'Kelly

Irish actor and writer Donal O’Kelly has scored a notable success with his one-man show, Fionnuala – a play based around the Corrib gasline controversy – winning a prestigious Fringe First award at Edinburgh. The Fringe First awards were established by The Scotsman newspaper in 1973 and are highly coveted.

Speaking to Hot Press shortly after receiving the gong, O’Kelly described the recognition as ‘very validating’. “It makes it much easier to get people to come and see the show,” he said, “and it opens up new publicity angles about the issue itself. That’s why I brought the play here, to try and bring international attention to the Shell Corrib gas project.” The play was strongly supported by Hot Press during its opening Irish run.
O’Kelly first visited the Shell project in 2007 to get a better understanding of the issue, and eventually wrote Fionnuala. Based around an incident last year in which a Shell tunnel boring machine, called Fionnuala, sank into a Mayo bog, the play tells the story of a Shell PR executive, called Ambrose Keogh, who is summoned to a midnight court in a fairy fort by Fionnuala of the Children of Lir. Fionnuala puts on a spell on Keogh, who has to tell the truth about Shell’s activities, or else he’ll be turned into a frog (for which ‘Keogh’ is the Irish language word).
“It was an extremely brass neck act for Shell to name a machine for their project after a mythical figure from local folklore,” says O’Kelly. “During the play, in the course of telling the truth, Ambrose Keogh tells about an attack that took place on Willie Corduff in the Shell site in Glengad, County Mayo. So, if you like, the reason I’m doing this play is to ask the question, who assaulted Willie Corduff in April 2009?”
O’Kelly has a second show at the Fringe, Skeffy (about murdered Irish pacifist Francis Sheehy Skeffington), and he performs the plays on alternate nights at the Hill Street Solo Theatre.
“I’ll be doing Fionnuala at the Imagine Festival in Waterford at the end of October,” says O’Kelly. “I actually did it a few weeks ago for the Shell security cameras outside the site in Rossport – I asked for them to be turned on so that Shell and their security firm know the content. They haven’t given a response that I know of yet. So I’ll keep doing it.”
As for the current state of play with the Corrib pipeline, O’Kelly says that, “There’s about seven miles to go to the refinery that’s already been built in Bellinaboy, on very dodgy planning permission grounds. The local community are still very worried about the health and safety issues that haven’t been addressed. It was only at the An Bord Pleanala hearing a couple of years ago, that Shell finally admitted that what they’re doing up there is experimental.
“Bringing raw gas in at high pressure and then running a pipe a through a populated area, to a refinery at land, hasn’t been done anywhere. That was what gave Shell to Sea its name – the local population were asking for the refinery to be placed at sea, and processed well away from people, so that if there was an accident, there’d be no danger to human life. But it’s more expensive to do that – so people’s health and safety are endangered for profits for a global corporation.”