Local hostility to energy projects costing jobs and investment

BUSINESS OPINION:TWO STORIES stuck out in Saturday's paper. The first was a report of yet another protest in Mayo over Shell's construction of a pipeline and gas processing plant.

This time it was reported that about 20 people disrupted deliveries to the preparatory site for one of the last pieces of the jigsaw, an underwater tunnel for part of the pipeline.

Notwithstanding Friday’s protests, the sense is that this issue has finally started to burn itself out, but not before Shell has been forced to put in infrastructure of a quality to satisfy the safety concerns of the majority of the local residents.

The additional bills have run into the tens of millions and, by industry standards, what has been built goes far and beyond what might be considered reasonable.

But the company has been forced down this route through a combination of problems, many of their own making.

The story is not yet over. The High Court will hear a judicial review on October 11th to the proposed underwater tunnel but it does seem as if gas will come ashore.

The other story was a couple of pages further on and concerned a protest over the jailing of a 65-year-old woman who had refused to allow the ESB and Eirgrid onto her land to erect a power line.

More than 50 people held a candlelit vigil for Teresa Treacy outside Mountjoy Women’s Prison where the court has ordered that she remain until she purges her contempt.

Her supporters, who want the ESB to seek her release pending negotiations and a halt to work, seem a mixed bunch, mostly neighbours and the like.

But according to the report many of them did not know her. Another straw in the wind was a comment attributed to her next-door neighbour Roseanne Tyrell, who made the acute observation that Ms Treacy languishes in the Joy whilst “all these financial big-wigs that left us all on our knees are flying away free?”

If this comment did not set off the alarms in the ESB and Eirgrid it should. It’s clear that Ms Treacy has the potential to become a focal point for much wider discontent among local and not so local people in much the way the Corrib issues was about much more than the objective safety of the pipeline.

Of course the situations are not entirely analogous. The ESB and Eirgrid are trusted state companies rather than an international oil company.

The personal safety argument is much harder to make in her case given the country is already crisscrossed with high voltage lines. Her objections seem to relate more to conservation and environmental concerns than safety issues.

But what is common between the two is that vital investment that will contribute to jobs and growth is going to be at best delayed and at worst abandoned because legitimate local concerns gain a far greater currency than they should.

Despite the rapid economic reversal in recent years it appears we still retain the ability to allow local causes trump major national issues such as energy security or the construction of a power grid that will insure the whole country has a reliable source of electricity.

Worse than that, we also seem to have developed a reflexive response to such projects. We damn them out of hand.

It is interesting to characterise the very positive response in the UK to the possibility that there may be untapped oil and gas in Lancashire to how the same type of news was greeted over here.

The story in Ireland seems to have focused almost entirely on fracking, the technology that would be used to extract it. Already a head of steam is building behind the argument that the potential risks to the local environment associated with fracking more than outweigh any benefits to the country of exploiting a €120 billion resource.

Earlier this month, the Australian company behind the project, Tamboran, held an information meeting in Carrick-on-Shannon.

About 500 people turned up to hear about the €7 billion project that would employ 700 people and extract €12 billion worth of gas out of the ground in Leitrim.

The response was hostile to say the least with Fianna Fáil councillor Francie Gilmartin making the following valuable contribution; a local couple could not get planning permission to build a house on the shores of Lough Allen but “ye can cement half of Lough Allen and it doesn’t matter. Screw the little fellow and let the big fellow get bigger.”

This is strange behaviour indeed for a bankrupt country. It’s hard to identify exactly which factor or combination of factors brought about this state of affairs, but it is clear that real political leadership is needed to change it.