The problem with alliances for the anti-fracking movement on the island of Ireland

This research looks at the role of alliances in the context of one of the largest collective struggles across the island of Ireland today, the anti-fracking movement. It presents the challenges facing communities directly opposing this new emerging industry and challenges them to critically reflect on their engagement with outside actors as they organise a collective opposition to it. This thesis explores how a green neo liberal hegemony controls the current ‘environmental movement’ driven by powerful elites; multinationals, the state and state actors, and official ‘environmentalism’. With these one-time allies now largely absent, combined with the growing threat of globalisation which ‘synergises’ power at the top to work against social movements, has this left the anti- fracking movement fighting the fracking battle alone? Drawing from the experiences ofanti- fracking campaigners from the North West, Belfast and Dublin, and outside activists from Ireland and Alberta, Canada, this research seeks to explore how building a broad ranging alliance at the grassroots of these very actors can produce the most effective resistance to corporate power. In an effort to contribute to activist knowledge, this thesis aims to inform two main audiences; grassroots activists involved in the antifracking struggle and ‘professional’ environmentalists. In an attempt to make the findings as inclusive as possible and for it to be applicable to both audiences it was difficult to contain the word count of this thesis to twenty thousand words or indeed thirty thousand words