Some 83km north-west of Rossport, scores of rig workers have continued drilling, unaware and uninterested in the events on land.

Drilling a vein through 350m of seawater and 3,000m of seabed to get to deposits of natural gas is about as tough as it sounds.

The men, and a few women, on board the rig work 12hour shifts in all conditions to keep the work going nonstop, day and night. The idea of a nine-to-five day disappears as soon as you lose sight of land.

The strain from the work is evident, but so is the camaraderie that comes out of the rig's isolation. Even so, there's not much time for socialising out on the water.

"When you're done, you just want to get to sleep as soon as possible, " says Sarah Naismith, a drilling engineer and one of six women aboard the rig. "There isn't much time for recreation." Aside from the occasional game of poker or darts, life on the Sedco 711 revolves around what's happening below the surface and below the surface is where everything gets complicated.

Drilling for natural gas is high on the list of professions that are likely to get you a black eye in Co Mayo. The situation reached a head during the imprisonment of the Rossport Five and has remained extremely heated in the two years since, as Shell continues to wait for final approval for their proposed onshore piping and refinery. But the crew of the rig, the people actually working the wells, are removed from the debate.

They have limited access to newspapers. They fly in and out of Donegal airport, not Mayo. Almost all Scots who fly home to Aberdeen and Perth on their time off.

They worry about their helicopter home leaving on time and the quality of the ten o'clock bacon roll, not about Shell's place in the future of Irish energy.

On the rig, everyone wears earplugs at all times to protect against the constant sounds of metal on metal and the loud generators in the engine room. The only reasonably quiet places in the entire structure are inside the accommodations and the cafeteria.

Everywhere else is an endless buzz of giant, whirring diesel machines.

Of the 80-100 people on the rig at any given time, the majority are employed by TransOcean . . . the company Shell hired to drill Corrib . . .

and travel on the rig around the world from one job to the next. The rig is towed by tugboats to sites around the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

The actual on-site work is done by a combination of TransOcean employees and specialists hired from a number of different companies. The specialists are hired to work on individual gas fields and usually operate highly technical equipment not central to the rig.

Bill Harvey is the specialist in charge of one of the most important pieces of equipment on the rig . . . the Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV). According to Harvey, this seven-armed robot can perform all manner of underwater maintenance and repair to the degree that human divers are no longer necessary. Every part of the drilling process is now controlled from above the water.

Dougie Brown, the offshore installation manager and man-in-charge on the 711, says "getting people from different companies to work together can be difficult, but we manage". The slagging that goes back and forth between the men and women on the rig seems to help grease the wheels.