Irish with French twist finish head to head over Australian coalmine

It turned into a right old Irish ding-dong in the end in the battle between giant mining company Anglo American and John Magnier's Coolmore horse-breeding operation over Anglo's proposed coalmine in New South Wales, Australia.

Tom Magnier, son of John who runs Coolmore's Australian operation in Hunter Valley, teamed up to oppose the mine with the nearby operation of the company's rival, Darley Stud, which is ultimately owned by Dubai ruler Sheikh Al Maktoum.

On the other side of the battle, the chief executive of Anglo American Coal is Seamus French, who left this country to pursue a career as a chemical engineer more than 30 years ago.

The New South Wales planning assessment commission this week delivered the coup de grace to the Drayton South project, which at its closest point came to within 400m of Coolmore, which had threatened to pull out if the mine got the go-ahead.

Coolmore used broadly similar tactics in its long- running campaign to stop an incinerator near its main Tipperary base a few years back. To be fair, you can see its point with the proposed 100-million-tonne coalmine. What with all the inevitable dust in the air and so on, they may as well have named every horse at the stables Black Beauty.