Just Forests FREE Donziger Campaign hits the ground running.

The first in a series of nationwide events in support of the FREE Donziger Race Is On Campaign took place at the GIANTS OF MEN Memorial at Barrington’s Pier, Limerick City, on Friday 7 February 2025.

I held my first Vigil at the GIANTS OF MEN Memorial in Limerick last Friday 7^th February.

Future vigils, which will take place on the seventh day of each month during 2025, will act as a reminder to all Irish NGOs, academic institutions, teachers, social enterprises and the Dochas Network of International Development Agencies, who have turned a ‘blind eye’ to fossil fuel sponsorship of sports and children’s art in Ireland, that you have failed to protect Ireland’s children from the corporate abuse by the fossil fuel industry.

As many of you know, through my development education (DE), advocacy and campaigning work with Just Forests, I have had the great pleasure of engaging with the work of your respective institutions namely: the Irish Development Education Association @IDEA, the Irish Environmental Network @IEN, the UBUNTU Network @UL, Mary Immaculate College, MIC@UL and the Regional Centre of Expertise in Education for Sustainable Development, RCE@DCU, for a good many years.

At all times, I have endeavoured to bring a practical, experiential, hands-on perspective, and true understanding of the relative importance of forests and the goods and services they provide to society – both locally and globally, to the table.

To this end, as a non-academic, I employed several methods more closely associated with my livelihood as a furniture-maker and includes workshops to student teachers and woodwork teachers based on the Wood of Life ‘hands-on’ exhibition for schools. Then there was Thinking TREES – a resource for primary school teachers, designed to help them embed a message of sustainability in the curriculum. The hugely popular Sound of Wood Concert(s) with The Chieftains, highlighting our dependence on ‘tonewoods’ for our beautiful musical instruments and a week-long series of events and activities in association with Killarney Chamber of Commerce & Tourism, which included a national Tree Hug in Killarney House & Gardens that attracted 1,900 PLUS participants on the day.

All of my endeavours emphasised the significance, the need, and the urgency of dealing with some of the most challenging issues of the day –  climate change/global warming, ecocide, deforestation, illegal logging, biodiversity decline, zoonotic disease, resource extraction, land grabbing and associated migration and movement of people to other countries to find better living conditions, industrial scale farming and of course, the human rights abuses and conflicts associated with all the above and Ireland’s role therein.

Also of major concern to me is the murder of ‘land defenders’ and the unacceptable treatment dished out to opponents of Texaco/Chevron’s corporate prosecution of human rights defender Steven Donziger.

President Biden left office without acting on a request that was backed by 34 members of the US Congress, more than 100 civil society organisations, and tens of thousands of supporters from around the world, demanding a pardon for Steven Donziger.

It’s now up to us to help FREE Donziger and we start by getting Texaco-Chevron out of Irish sport and children’s art.