Tuesday, January 13th, 4 p.m.:
Darkness is already falling and the rain is pounding on the roof of the "bender", a tent built of bent hazel trees and tarpaulin. A bright fire burns inside but one side is completely open to the elements. Howling gusts blast the woodsmoke from the fire into the edgy faces of those huddled around on crude wooden benches or upturned oil-drums. Sodden clothes hang on a line around the "walls".
The Irish Times brings a gift of warming cognac which is graciously accepted but laid to one side. The Vigil Keepers' camp is a no-alcohol zone. This is absolutely no-one's idea of fun. Fifteen hours of darkness lie ahead, cold, damp feet, stinging eyes, an undercurrent of tension, one irritating warrior who constantly and loudly interrupts . . .
The visitor's expectation of feckless foreigners playing at protest is smartly quashed. There is no privacy, no effective way of selecting your company, no light to read by, no long, hot bath to luxuriate in, no escapism to Frasier or The Simpsons. Eyes red and sore, notebook no longer visible, clothes wreathed in woodsmoke, I turn to Jeff Colhoun, and wonder what in God's name impels them to live like this.
"Why wouldn't we?" he asks. "Well, most people want to go home to a snug house with four walls and watch Coro- nation Street . . ." He looks at me appraisingly for a long moment. "That's sad," he says finally.
I consider telling him about Spider, the eco-warrior of Coronation Street, but decide against it. Spider may be a useful consciousness-raiser but with his feckless, pot-smoking, rebel-in-search-of-a-cause approach to life would hardly be a role model for the deadly-earnest Vigil Keepers of The Glen. They have maintained a "presence" here in the Glen of the Downs for more than seven months, their various accents suggesting origins in Scotland, England, the West of Ireland, Dublin, Wicklow. But this can be deceptive. Jeff is Scots-bred but Derry-born. Dermot Murphy is Manchester-born of Irish parents. There are what the locals describe as "hangers-on", inevitably, but there is widespread affection and respect for most of the core group.
A couple of Delgany businesswomen describe them as "very nice, friendly and great fun". Jim Moore, who runs a delicatessen-cafe there, is one of many Wicklow residents who give donations of food to the "tree people": "We need people like that. They're fundamentally right in what they say and whatever little they do, they're doing good."
Ollie, a fiftysomething denizen of the Delgany Inn, is also on side: "They're not wrong. There's something wrong with the world. Look at the tornados on the Isle of Wight and the south of England. Look at the number of blokes the same age or younger than myself who are getting leukaemia, cancer, heart attacks. I heard not long ago that Wicklow deer were still being checked for signs of Chernobyl radiation.
"A lot would see those lads as scruffy. But they're doing no-one any harm and I can tell you that before they arrived, people used to drive cars into that car park and set them on fire. You don't see that happening anymore. I was here one evening when one of them arrived in who'd walked from there to here and collected all the rubbish he saw on the way into rubbish bags. They clean up walking down," says Ollie, voice rising in amazement. "You won't see locals doing that . . ." Most of them have worked in "normal" jobs. Jeff has a qualification in applied physics with electronics from Napier College, Edinburgh and worked for the Future Systems Laboratory of GEC Avionics. Adrienne Murphy is an Irish journalist, environmentalist and comedy writer. Michael Hammond once worked for the old British Liberal Party and claims to have spent much of a £50,000 inheritance working for the peace process in Northern Ireland. Dermot Murphy works as a computer technician in Dublin. Maria Mason has had environmental articles published in the Scottish national press and will return to journalism when this protest is over.
They live off donations, by all accounts, on discounted wholefood and on the fruits of the wild: mushrooms, wild garlic, fresh water from the holy well. "The generosity of the Wicklow people has allowed us to live here," says Jeff. "This is a job, unpaid, but a job."
In September, a dozen or so of them took to the tree-tops, erecting hazelframed eyries in 300-year-old, 50-feethighoak trees, accessed by ropes and climbing harness. Inside, the treehouses are comparatively cosy - "it's not like a Georgian house where threequarters of a room is needlessly heated," says Jeff - lined with layers of blankets and boasting facilities such as little stoves fuelled on methylated spirits.