Minister for Energy Noel Dempsey must represent the people and lead the way in resolving the Corrib gas pipeline impasse, writes Mark Garavan
Since the Corrib gas issue has come to public attention with the jailing of five men from north Mayo, the Government and Department of the Marine have acted as though neutral observers. This posture has been continued in the Minister, Noel Dempsey's, recent article in The Irish Times.
The truth is that the Government has forgotten that the role of any democratic government is to represent the people. Elected governments have a solemn contract with the people that is renewed at election time. This contract forbids them to act as neutral observers when the lives, rights and welfare of citizens are threatened.
In contrast to their present passivity, since the discovery of the Corrib gas field the Department of the Marine has acted as the key facilitator of the project. This has completely overwhelmed their additional and equally important role as regulator and supervisor of the oil and gas industry.
Their consistent failure to critically examine the specific methodologies being used by Shell to process the gas has been the direct cause of the present crisis in Mayo.
A number of instances show this to be so. First, the State forestry company Coillte (whose shareholders are the Ministers for Finance and Marine) sold a 400-acre site to Shell in 1999. The details of this deal have never been made public.
No public tendering process occurred for this sale of a State asset to private hands. Despite Coillte's own guidelines, they carried out no public consultation prior to this sale.
This was a critically important decision in shaping the Corrib gas project because the possession of a large site made the decision to process the gas on-shore the most economically lucrative method for the company. Thus, alternative sites on the shoreline or offshore processing, either on islands or shallow-water platforms, were rendered less financially attractive.
In their haste to facilitate the project, the department ignored the safety implications of this site being nine kilometres inland and that, in order to bring gas to it, a production pipeline would have to traverse a populated area.
Second, the then minister for the marine, Frank Fahey, signed the Corrib Plan of Development in April 2002. This plan acts as the general outline consent for the project.
The signing of the plan legally committed the State to supporting and facilitating the specific proposals for processing the gas that Shell were making. However, the plan was signed prior to the grant of planning permission for the processing terminal and prior to any safety studies of the production pipeline being conducted.
The basis for the approval of the plan was the report of the department's own Marine Licence Vetting Committee (MLVC). That report is seriously defective in a number of matters. For example, it did not consider a shallow-water platform as a method for processing the gas.
Nor did it consider the consequences of an accident on the high-pressure production pipeline. Despite these and numerous other omissions, they recommended that ministerial consents be granted even in the absence of planning permission for the terminal.
This extraordinary situation prompted An Bord Pleanála's senior inspector to later observe: "How the MLVC came to its conclusions would appear to be beyond the realms of a rational approach to the planning of this major infrastructural development and exhibits nothing short of prematurity, in my view, when the decision of the board on the critical issue of where best to locate a terminal had not been made in April, 2002."
In addition, the inspector noted that this premature approval "may be construed by some observers as potentially undermining independent decision-making in the planning process."
Remarkably, the MLVC report dispensed with the highly complex and contentious pipeline issue in four sentences. Therefore, despite no safety audits or analyses of the safety of the production pipeline, Mr Fahey's signing of the plan committed the State to support the project and exposed the State to liability in the event of further consents being subsequently withheld.
This is the very reason why the present Minister now claims to be unable to alter the project.
Finally, the Department of the Marine granted the company power to compulsorily acquire land for the purposes of laying the pipeline. This is the first time such powers have been granted to a private company.
Yet no participatory process was put in place to determine how this was to be done. No oral hearings were held even though, by contrast, oral hearings were held for the Bord Gáis pipeline running through the rest of Mayo. Why was the Rossport production pipeline exempt from this normal procedure?
This question is even more pertinent when one considers that the Rossport pipeline is excluded from requiring planning permission, is excluded from the remit of the Health and Safety Authority and is not subject to EPA approval. As the Minister concedes, only the department gets to make the call on it and, as I have argued, it has a compromised track record on this matter.
Frank Fahey's support for the Corrib project blinded him from preventing Shell exposing a small village in Mayo to unacceptable levels of risk. Mr Dempsey, by failing to insist that the project be reconfigured, is perpetuating that error. Those paying the price are the five imprisoned men and their families.
Mr Dempsey needs to immediately show leadership on this issue and recognise that safety standards are primarily a matter of public policy. The Corrib gas project is already delayed by at least two years due to its numerous flaws.
The present plan of development needs to be formally set aside on foot of safety concerns and a new plan negotiated. This should follow the Norwegian model by including the local community in its drafting.
There should be no inherent contradiction between Corrib gas and safety.
The tragedy is that five citizens and their families have had to step in where the State has failed.
That their demand for reason and standards has resulted in their indefinite imprisonment reflects the unhealthy state of democracy in Ireland. It is time for the Government to purge their contempt for the people they have been elected to represent.
Dr Mark Garavan is a spokesman for the 'Rossport Five'