OGONILAND is an area roughly the size of Co Meath in the midst of Nigeria's oil rich Niger Delta. Frank Kirwan knows it well, having spent four years there in the 1980s as a missionary priest.
Instead of talking about the weather, he noticed, people would remark that the fishing wasn't as good as it used to be or that crops didn't seem to grow as well. Few people put what they were saying together with the smelly and ubiquitous oil extraction going on around them.
But as time went on they did. Then, they organised. They formed the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP) and said loudly that they were unhappy with the way the oil bonanza was not trickling down and that their environment - which in African terms means way of life - was being killed.
Nowadays, after last November's execution of their leader, Ken Saro Wiwa, people are forbidden to gather in groups of more than three, says Kirwan.
In the past year about 1,000 people have died at the hands of security forces as a result of environmental and human rights protests, he says.
The numbers may not be enormous in the scale of the world's trouble spots but Mr Kirwan says that what is happening under Nigeria's dictatorship was relevant to issues which he and a small, like minded group started exploring a year ago.
Kirwan, Sister Magella McCarron, who worked alongside Saro Wiwa, Joe Murray of Action From Ireland (AFrI), the Body Shop, and Annette Honan of Trocaire saw in Ogoniland's campaign a global issue involving business ethics, politics, ecology and development.
The movement formed as a result of this concern, the Ogoni Solidarity Ireland, showed both its organisational ability and the depth of Irish anger by almost overnight bringing about 1,000 people to demonstrate outside the Nigerian embassy in Dublin.
Meanwhile, Ms Honan's work on the political levelled directly to the appearance this week of a Shell representative and an Ogoni environment advocate before the Oireachtas Foreign Affairs Committee.
Ogoni Solidarity Ireland has been calling for a boycott of Shell petrol and other products to focus attention on the degradation of life for the Ogoni. It wants people to use their "consumer power". Shell's representative at the committee, Mr Nnaemeka Achebe, said the company was being used as a lever to influence the campaigners' real enemy, the dictatorship of Gen Sani Abacha. Kirwan challenges a company assertion that it doesn't get involved in politics, saying it has been propping up corrupt and dictatorial Nigerian regimes for most of the almost 60 years it has operated there. After last year's violent events he asks: "When is enough enough?"
Joe Murray says that if Shell were to extend its current suspension of operations in Ogoniland to the entire delta it would be of huge benefit to the Nigerian people. Shell has blood on its hands.
The Ogoni advocate before the Oireachtas committee, Mr Oronto Douglas, said in an interview that Shell has a private army numbering up to 2,500 in its private army, "Shell Police", in Nigeria, and of arranging arms supplies to the military there. He said the members wore Nigerian police uniforms.
Shell admits to having a security force, like many another company. But Mr Achebe said that a statement in last week's Observer (apparently by another Shell spokesman) admitting Shell supplied arms to Nigerian security forces, was false.
Shell has said that it prefers dialogue when local problems arise, but Ms Honan rejects this. She says that too often the response has been the use of regular police or the Shell police.
Shell and indeed a briefing document from the Nigerian embassy in Dublin - has spoken of the company's work in building hospitals and schools for the Ogonis. But Mr Kirwan maintains a sense of perspective is needed here. He says that last Wednesday at the Oireachtas committee Mr Achebe talked about a programme to build "cottage hospitals". Six had been built and this was to be increased to 12.
"But the Niger Delta has six million people. They are just trying to make themselves look good." Asking how much of the money allocated for community projects actually got to projects, Frank Kirwan adds: "The big issue in Nigeria is corruption and mismanagement - and that has included Shell."
Joe Murray says the Irish movement is a response to Saro Wiwa, his work in getting 300,000 previously fearful people to demonstrate. Shell, one of six oil companies operating in Nigeria, was the agent of the destruction which was their grievance.
At an AFrI conference last weekend Mr Douglas, an author and environmental lawyer who helped represent Saro Wiwa, said that 40 per cent of the world's carbon dioxide contributing to global warming from flaring of gas from oil came from Shell's activities in Nigeria. Hence, Ireland, too, was having its environment harmed as a result.