Johnny’s fracking film Groundswell has been released
A FILM by Dromahair-based filmmaker Johnny Gogan telling the story of the campaign by people in Leitrim and Sligo against fracking (a technique used to extract shale oil and gas) has just gone on release in cinemas in Ireland and the UK. The film, called Groundswell, which was filmed by Strandhill man Niall Flynn, is described as the story of how “an isolated
Irish border community faces down the powerful fracking industry”.
“When I first heard about fracking”, says film-maker Johnny Gogan, “it was from my sister in Pennsylvania.
“I didn’t realise at the time I was living in one of the most promising gas fields in Europe”.
This is the opening line in the new wide-ranging David and Goliath documentary that features some 40 contributors on both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of the Irish border.
Groundswell was filmed in the North West over a decade and in the US just before the March 2020 lockdown.
Apart from many local people in Sligo and Leitrim, it also features Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo.
The film, which has an original soundtrack composed by
Sligo-based Steve Wickham, tells how after a company, Tamboran Resources, laid out plans for 3,000 wells in a gas field straddling the border between Leitrim and Fermanagh, using the controversial extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) a local camapign against it started.
The first community meetings in Leitrim and Fermanagh take place in the back of a mobile cinema after screenings of the Oscar nominated film Gasland organised by filmmaker Johnny Gogan. A decade-long campaign ensues involving hundreds of people.
Strong local voices emerge including Nuala McNulty, a local tourism provider, Fermanagh farmer Dianne Little, farmer and builder Eddie Mitchell whose story on its own is a remarkable journey of enlightenment and empowerment. Eddie, Dianne and Nuala are among over 40 voices heard in the film, the majority of them the voices of women.
A key milestone is reached in 2017 with the banning of “fracking” in Ireland and in this former Sligo TD Tony McLoughlin played a prominent role.
He tabled one of the most radical pieces of environmental legislation the State has ever witnessed – a Private Members’ Bill to ban fracking, which, in July 2017, President Michael D. Higgins signed into law.
Prior to that another local politician who was heavily involved and became known to his Dail colleagues as “Mr Fracking” was ex-Sligo-Leitrim Sinn Féin TD Michael Colreavy. The film also tells of an ongoing struggle on both sides of the Atlantic with prominent campaigners such as Mark Ruffalo, the scientist Sandra Steingraber, journalist Justin Nobel and people in affected communities in Pennsylvania such as Ray Kembel, whose ground water was poisoned, and Janice Blanock, whose son Luke died of Ewing’s Sarcoma in 2016. The film deals with the momentum necessary to achieve the Irish ban of 2017 which was followed up – after a further campaign – by the Irish Government agreeing in June 2020 to develop a policy to ban the importation of fracked gas. Johnny Gogan this year celebrates 30 years of filmmaking through his company Bandit Films which he founded in Dublin in 1990, moving it to Leitrim in 1997.
His 10 feature works include The Last Bus Home (1997), Mapmaker (2002), Black Ice (2013), The Bargain Shop (1992), the drama-documentary Prisoners of the Moon and the feature documentaries The Adventures of Flannery: a Portrait of Cathal Coughlan (2007), Hubert Butler Witness to the Future (2016), Home is a Sacrifice Zone (2020) and Na Coisithe/The Walkers (which was selected to premiere in the Galway Film Fleadh feature documentary section in 2009).
In addition, he has produced and directed many short films and TV documentaries.