Tag Archives: Corrib

Forget austerity, we’ve won the lotto

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Matt Cooper’s introduction to an interview with Lorna Siggins on The Last Word, Today FM, 7/10/10:

“For many people getting an oil or gas find is a bit like winning the lotto, untold riches flow, great benefits for everybody involved. Unfortunately it’s not always like that, certainly when it comes to the Corrib gas field discovery, made as far back as 1996. It is a decade since the works started, trying to have the gas from that field processed in Ireland and yet all we’ve had over the last decade is misery and anger and rows and disruption and people’s lives, in many cases, not quite ruined, but very very adversely effected, and it is all part of a new book by Irish Times journalist Lorna Siggins, Once upon a time in the West.”

Listen here. [starts Part 1 – 17:30 mins]

The remainder of the interview, while interesting in the areas covering the social consequences of the project and the safety concerns, entirely failed to explore the subject of these ‘untold riches’. Given the state of the economy, the tone of this introduction is depressingly familiar. Just as negotiations or, god forbid, proposals to renege on zombie bank debt are marginalised in public discourse, so too are suggestions to revisit contracts made by previous governments in relation to these finds.

We needn’t bother even mentioning the phrase ‘Climate Change’, it is so far removed from the discourse at this stage that even whispering it would be to make oneself an outcast of intelligent mainstream debate.

For more on those untold riches and how they are to be divided:

The Great Corrib Gas Controversy, Centre for Public Inquiry, November 2005

On a slightly unrelated note, there is a photograhpic exhibition of Canada’s tar sands between London and Tower Bridge:

Image via Oil Change International

I’ll eat my hat if the Irish Times publishes this

Bites, ,

Madam

Given the significance of the Corrib gas project to the Irish economy and the highly controversial nature of the way it has been carried out so far it beggars belief that severe criticism of the project from no less a person than a former Norwegian oil company board member does not get front page billing in The Irish Times.  On the 12th of July another of Lorna Siggins’ scrupulously accurate pieces about Corrib was once again buried in the paper despite the importance of its content.

Could your muted coverage be explained by Managing Editor, Peter Murtagh’s documented hostility towards the local people who oppose the project for all the reasons identified by Mr Stein Bredal?  When an experienced oilman observes that just about everything is wrong with the project – from the location of the pipeline and refinery to the terms on which the deal was done this is big news indeed.  Mr Bredal also refers to the tried and trusted tactic of oil and gas companies who set out to manipulate the media to act against local communities by accusing them of being ‘crazies and fundamentalists’.  This is exactly what has happened in much of the Irish media in relation to Corrib, with Mr Murtagh being among those most willing to lead the charge against people under enormous stress, including many incidences of physical assault and, according to Pat O’ Donnell, the threatened use of guns.  Two men are now scandalously in jail on dubious charges for opposing the Corrib project on entirely legitimate grounds – both of them caricatured by the media exactly as Mr Bredal describes.

Of course Peter Murtagh is by no means alone.  Pat Kenny for RTE, for example, has marked him every inch of the way in helping to promote a mountain of widespread media inaccuracies about the protest such as claiming that the pipe in Mayo is no different to the domestic pipes that are under the streets of Dublin.   In fact the pipeline in Mayo would be running at up to five times the pressure and will contain volatile, untreated gas close to some people’s homes – allowing them just 30 seconds of life in the event of a rupture.  I wonder what the story would be if the pipeline and refinery were located outside their own front doors or in whatever no doubt leafy suburb or satellite of Dublin they live in? Is there any siginificance in the fact that Shell Oil’s most senior PR representative in Ireland, Mr John Egan, was previously an RTE reporter, well known to his former colleagues and friends in the small world that is the Irish media?

The IMF have just ordered Brian Lenihan to discover another E3.5bn from the wages of Irish people but still no editorial from the Editor of Ireland’s paper of record calling for a root and branch reappraisal of our disgraceful oil and gas licensing terms though we so desperately need it.  Meanwhile, Mr Connor Lenihan has confidently announced that there could not be a BP/Gulf of Mexico type of disaster in Irish waters.  If ever The Fates were tempted, they surely were by that.

And I will eat my hat if this letter is actually published.
Yours sincerely
Miriam Cotton
Editor
MediaBite