Photograph Author’s own (2025)

A Public Inquiry into one of the largest mining applications in Europe, in the Sperrin Mountains, North of Ireland, was suspended only three days after it started on the 15^th of January 2025. The project is proposed by Dalradian Gold and local communities have been resisting for over ten years, with Save our Sperrins established in 2014.

International and domestic laws and regulations that protect the right for transboundary participation in such proceedings were breached. The Department for Infrastructure, the body responsible for granting the mining application, failed to comply with their own (EIA) planning regulations, and the Aarhus and Espoo Conventions. These conventions, ratified by the UK government, enshrine the right to public participation in environmental issues.

Currently, the Department for Infrastructure has notified the Government in the South, and a public consultation process began on 26^th February that runs until the 23^rd of April. Anyone in Ireland can make a submission.

This is the second suspension of the public inquiry which has been full of issues surrounding public participation.

While the Island is sold as one country to the global mining industry and government departments on either side of the border work closely together to facilitate mining, it’s ironic that Northern Ireland’s government departments were found to be acting illegally for failing to consult with the Republic of Ireland, both their government and citizens.

Land and Water Protectors present at the inquiry from the Sperrins, and communities across the border in County Donegal and Country Leitrim, reminded the forum that we live on an Island, and that pollution will not stop at the border. While policies and regulatory systems might recognize borders, river systems, ecosystems and air do not.

Photograph Author’s own (2025)

The well-paid, suited and mainly male civil servants and legal teams supporting the company and the State, argued dry regulatory and legal technicality, devoid of emotion. Not only does this create an intimidatory atmosphere but reflects wider trends where extractive industries are presented as an emotionless and rational sector. The erasure of emotion from accounts of the social impact of extractivism on communities is part of a tactic to make invisible the everyday lived impacts of these projects.

The people of the Sperrins and wider afield who resist extractivism held their own, testament to the upskilling and self-education achieved during this struggle. For these ordinary people there is much at stake – their livelihoods, the very air they breathe, the water they drink and the land they raise their children on.

Mining Playbook: Isolate and Localise

Central to the ways extractive industries operate is the social engineering of communities to manufacture consent- this involves the divide and conquer of communities, buying a social licence to operate by sponsoring community groups or through greenwashing narratives. Such as Dalradian’s claims minerals extracted would be used for renewable energy, claims proven false by the Advertising Standards Agency in 2021.

Research shows that as part of the mining playbook companies aim to localise and isolate their plans. In the Sperrins, company and State work hard to keep this issue local and unconnected to wider communities, ecologies and systems of oppression. This is part of the logic of extractivism that tries to rupture relationships between communities and the more-than-human world.

Social engineering involves subtle manipulation and coercion, one tactic identified is managing the inclusion and exclusion of who is allowed to participate and who is considered a “stakeholder”. The exclusion of most of the Island of Ireland, or any human or non-human community outside the direct vicinity of the mine, is very much in the company’s favour. 

Transboundary resistance for environmental justice

In challenging these tactics and the extractive logics at play, the resistance movement has been building a strong all-island resistance movement. CAIM (communities against the injustice of mining) was set up in 2021 as a grassroots network of communities resisting mining.  Members of CAIM from Leitrim and Donegal were pivotal in highlighting the breaches during the public inquiry, leading to its suspension.

Strong international solidarity networks have also been fostered with hundreds of frontline communities around the world, including the Zapatistas, the Lakota Nation, and many more. Translocal solidarity building moves resistance struggles beyond ethnicity, state and species. This is the case in the Sperrins as the resistance connects with diverse people from around the world beyond the borders of nation-states, while also including the more-than-human world in our kinship.

The horizontal webs of solidarity are central to these experiences. Through CAIM and other all-island solidarity webs of peer-to-peer knowledge are developed. Communities have been building skils and forging collective relationships to resist extractivism. The relationships built through this resistance movement are building on past struggles against extractivism, from anti-fracking movements in Antrim, Fermanagh and Leitrim, and the struggle against Shell in the Shell to Sea movement, County Mayo.

This movement reminds us that not only will the impacts be felt across the Island of Ireland and further afield, but that this project is part of a global push to extract more for the infinitely growing economic system.

Similar solidarity building has been developing on the Iberian Peninsula, between Portugal and Spain, where transboundary anti-mining activism is working to challenge extractive logics and the rush for critical minerals.

What we know is solidarity cannot be contained by borders; this is an international struggle against an industry and system incompatible with well-being and a good life for all.

As green extractivism ramps up across Europe, building these relationships and transboundary solidarities could be key to defending land, communities and life.

Act today:

Sign this petition to ask for more transparency in the process.

Make a submission to the public consultation running until 23^rd April 2025

Follow Save our Sperrins online here and here.