Enterprise Oil, the British exploration company behind what is believed to be a major gas find 30 miles off Achill Head, is refusing to source its essential supplies from Ireland any longer because of unofficial action by dockers at the port of Foynes.
The dockers' action, which will cost the port an estimated £2 million in revenue, is in support of SIPTU offshore workers who have been unable to find employment on the drilling rig because of Enterprise Oil's insistence that it already has a quota of "European" workers.
Last night, the vice-president of SIPTU, Mr Des Geraghty, accused the company of acting in bad faith and called on the Minister for the Marine and Natural Resources, Dr Woods, to withdraw Enterprise Oil's exploration licence.
"From the outset, this company has shown nothing but contempt for Irish workers and local industrial agreements which have successfully operated in the oil and gas industry here for the past 29 years", Mr Geraghty said.
He described comments made by Enterprise's Glasgow-based general manager, Mr John McGoldrick, as "gratuitously insulting" and claimed that the company had "never had any intention of operating to benefit either the local workforce or the economy".
However, Mr McGoldrick told The Irish Times that the matter was not "an Irish national issue". He pointed out that the crew on board the Sedco drilling rig located off the coast of Co Mayo had been together for some time in the North Sea. They were efficient and worked well together, he said, adding: "I don't see why I should be forced to replace them with people I don't know and need simply because I cross from British into Irish waters."
Mr McGoldrick claimed that SIPTU was demanding wages which were "way in excess of industry norms". There were also matters of European law which precluded him from positive discrimination in favour of Irish workers.
Neither was he convinced that the Irish oil rig workers had the expertise it was claimed they possessed. "The oil and gas exploration business finds it difficult to handle casuals. We'll only be around for two months. The SIPTU people claim their workers have lots of experience, but doing what?" Mr Padraic Campbell, a spokesman for SIPTU's National Offshore Workers' Committee, con firmed that Irish oil rig workers had been angered by Mr McGoldrick's attitude towards them. That was the reason behind the dockers' action at Foynes, which the union was not officially condoning.
Responding to Mr McGoldrick's apparent scepticism about the suitability of Irish workers, he said: "Irish oil rig workers are among the most experienced in the world, especially on Sedco rigs, and agreed job quotas have been in place ever since oil exploration began, 29 years ago, off the south coast."
Mr Campbell said that Irish wages, at £7 an hour basic, compared well with industry norms. He claimed that comparable wages in Norwegian territorial waters were running as high as £35 an hour. He was "certain" that the workers on the Enterprise rig did not possess the experience of their Irish counterparts and could not match them in terms of productivity.
According to Mr Campbell, there was a belief among oil workers that a different agenda was involved. "We believe that Enter prise is sitting on top of a huge gas find and they don't want Irishmen on board in case the details of this leak out prematurely. Now they have the excuse to source supplies in Scotland, there's no problem."
Enterprise Oil's general manager conceded that the company had found gas "while looking for oil" off Achill Head in 1996. "But we had to close down our operations at the time for some technical reasons." He could not confirm whether it had a major find on its hands. "I have a range of possibilities to consider, from economic to uneconomic. I would not venture a forecast at this stage, because we simply don't understand yet what we've got."
Enterprise has a 45 per cent stake in the gas field, while two Norwegian companies, Sage and Statoil, share the remaining stake, owning 40 per cent and 15 per cent respectively. Last year, Statoil employed between 40 and 50 unionised Irish workers on a similar Sedco exploration rig off the coast of Connemara. The wages were in line with those paid to workers in the Marathon field, off Kinsale, and caused no problems for the state-owned Norwegian company.