We’re going to be honest: before our first public launch meeting happened, we here at PARC had a cheeky speech prepared for this article before it went up (don’t judge us—a whole lot of caffeine is being consumed at HQ!), with a brief playing out of how we thought the meeting would likely go.
But after residents began to arrive an hour before the bill, queues stretched all the way up Solva’s high street and people had to stand not at the back of the hall but even at the back of the kitchen adjacent to the hall, all our plans were off.
In our last successful anti-radar campaign in 1990, a bar was set in the form of one of the most well-attended public meetings in Solva’s history. It is a bar that, as modern campaigners, we can only hope to live up to our predecessors by getting close to.
This June 2024, against even our own wildest dreams, we matched and then smashed that historical record, with possibly the most well-attended public meeting any one of us have ever seen in the small town of Solva.
The meeting opened in drama, as PARC’s premiering campaign Hollywood movie trailer, going out through a PA system with sub bass fit for a cinema, lit up the room:
An epic bill of specialist speakers gave a jaw-dropping account about the all-cons, no-pros project of DARC radar in Pembrokeshire.
Internationally leading radiation and medical scientists Dr. Michael Peleg and Dr. Paul Héroux offered eye-opening presentations on the cancer-causing effects of Israel’s DARC-reminiscent Iron Dome military radar system and the physics of how non-ionising radiation at high power densities impacts the human body.
Emma Bowen, the manager of Twr y Felin Hotel—a huge landmark in the local tourism industry—gave a timely and highly valuable insight of the devastating potential impacts of DARC on local tourism.
Michail Davies gave an extraordinary and moving speech on how any version of DARC’s brightly lit, confusing night lights would disrupt the flight paths of a potentially countless number of arguably Pembrokeshire's most internationally important and beloved seabird, the manx shearwater—and send the unique population spiralling into a catastrophic increase in deaths.
Dylan Rowlands, Secretary of CND Cymru, gave a powerful oration on the US’s burdensome and unpopular moves to lumber local Welsh populations with soul-crushing, economy-ruining infrastructure like DARC—but how our solidarity, unity and most importantly the self-belief that makes us a uniquely resilient community is every bit what it takes for us to win our campaign.
Roy Jones, one of the very campaign founders who named PARC itself all those years ago, offered a vivid vision of why Pembrokeshire has a track record of winning, and just why exactly what made us win is what can, and will, make us that force for success with all over again.
Star campaigner Jim Scott gave a stirring speech from his extensive experience on how local campaigns with cases and local support as strong as PARC’s have an incredibly good chance of winning, and why local people have every democratic right to know not only what our decision-makers have to say, but what part they’re going to play in representing us. Lobby them now, and let’s make those wishes clear!
And Nick Dowsett tied it all together as our excellent meeting facilitator, making it his goal to ensure all voices were heard and all needs were catered to. Awesome job Nick!
Don’t just take our word for the quality of our speakers’ presentation though: hear the people of Dewisland say it themselves, in the intermission of our full livestream of the meeting!
We’d like to thank all the people of Dewisland who contributed to the meeting’s open forum second half with so many excellent and thoughtful questions, points and ideas for how we win. With the foundation of such a strong public consensus against DARC radar, your contributions are helping us learn about exactly the campaign you need PARC to be.
It’s a campaign with a clear and cogent plan of action, all the momentum a determined campaign needs, and a continuation of all the energy that has always made it the effective campaign Pembrokeshire residents have always known it for being.
We can’t wait to help you by helping to provide that platform in which we can come together, share our considerable skills and our determination, and protect our one-in-a-million landscape, environment and jobs.
With the petition against DARC having fast hit 10,000 (never mind just the population of Dewisland—that’s about double our population!) and the crowdfunder casually smashing its first goal of £1,200, Pembrokeshire people are in this to win it—and on day one of the campaign’s physical launch, this is one campaign that is stopping for nobody.
Take your first steps to support Dewisland now with these four easy actions:
