This year's Climate Camp will take place in a field at Shanvas Cross, Pollboy, Cluanín/Manorhamilton, Leitrim from August 9th to 13th 2023. Take action and join us!
Slí Eile hosts the Climate Camp together with a range of community groups and campaigns. The Camp is an anti-capitalist, all-Ireland, family-friendly gathering, which will feature workshops and debates, direct action training, practical skill-sharing, music, art, craic and more.
We build upon a long tradition of solidarity camps, dating back to the Peace Camps of the 1970s-’80s: one that models the society we need, beyond capitalism, bringing people together to build a strong and radical climate movement on the island of Ireland.
Focus of Climate Camp 2023
This year we will focus on the two extractive industries which threaten to turn Leitrim into a sacrifice zone – conifer forestry plantations and gold-mining. The camp will take place in Pollboy, about 4km from Manorhamilton just off the N16, the main Sligo-Manorhamilton road. Pollboy is one of the 47 Leitrim townlands currently under threat from prospecting mining licenses issued to Flintridge Resources (Galantas) in May 2022.
The camp in Leitrim will act as a central meeting point of resistance-building on the island of Ireland – connecting communities north and south of the Border. We will support and work closely with local campaigns, in particular Save Leitrim, which campaigns against the expansion of conifer plantations, and Treasure Leitrim, which campaigns against gold mining in Leitrim.
Forestry Plantations
We demand a sustainable, community-focused model for forestry in Ireland.
We demand the recovery and re-establishment of native Irish forests managed by and for local communities, that benefit wildlife and people, absorb carbon, provide clean water and crucial flood relief, and that are sustainably harvested with a priority on ecosystem and human health.
We oppose the extraction, for profit, of natural resources from the earth, with little or no benefit to the community.
We will uproot hidden colonial assumptions of humans dominating nature, while gently watering the dormant seeds – tenderly planted long ago – of deep connection with the rest of nature.
The Threat of Mining
More than a quarter of all land on both sides of the Border is under prospective licences for extractive mining practices. We must resist the neocolonial governments, who maintain unsustainable economic growth, while poisoning the land and the life that depends on it.
Grassroots groups such as the Mexican Network of Those Affected by Mining have reported on the destruction these companies can conjure, including: “health harms, environmental contamination and destruction, criminalisation of social protest, threats, harassment, smear campaigns, surveillance, arbitrary detentions and the assassination of defenders…”
The Climate Camp will be a place where we can turn the trauma of fighting against extractivism into vibrant stories of resistance. A place where shared stories cultivate hope and the motivation to keep resisting. The capitalist system can only hold on to power when we fail to remind ourselves that we are not alone in this struggle.
About Slí Eile
Slí Eile is the organisational group involved with the climate camp. We began in 2019, emerging loosely from the tradition of climate camps. We are building a movement on the island of Ireland to resist climate change and its driving force, capitalism. We target the powerful interests that are causing the climate crisis while profiting from the current economic system. We are organising for the transformation of our communities and the wider world into one based on equality and solidarity.
Our Aims
We believe in the power of self organised communities to create the new systems we need. We need to take urgent strategic action to resist climate and ecological destruction.
We have three aims:
- To create spaces for education, for ourselves and our wider communities
- To build a radical climate movement on the island of Ireland.
- To act to end capitalist control of people and the earth