Groundswell review – the fight against fracking in Ireland

Johnny Gogan's documentary highlights the misconceived plans of corporations that hoped to avoid protesters

In 2010, the American film-maker Josh Fox released something that in retrospect looks like one of the most influential and original documentaries of recent times: GasLand. It was about something new to many at the time: fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, under the earth to release natural gas from shale rock, at the risk of polluting the water table and turning areas of natural beauty into sludge dumps - and that is aside from the existing larger implications of gas consumption.

The film alerted many to a new environmental menace, and it plays its historic role in this new film from Johnny Gogan about the anti-fracking campaign in Ireland, often by people who were energised by seeing GasLand and determined to resist what one campaigner calls the new way of scraping the bottom of the fossil-fuel barrel". Exactly so. The coronavirus pandemic has, understandably, diverted many people's attention from the climate crisis. But there is no vaccination for climate change.