Gas, oil and the Irish state

Understanding the dynamics and conflicts of hydrocarbon management

Amanda Slevin

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526100979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Gas and oil are pivotal to the functioning of modern societies, yet the ownership, control, production and consumption of hydrocarbons often provokes intense disputes with serious ramifications. Gas, oil and the Irish state examines the dynamics and conflicts of state hydrocarbon management and provides the first comprehensive study of the Irish model. Interpreting the Corrib gas conflict as a microcosm of the Irish state's approach to hydrocarbon management, the book articulates environmental, health and safety concerns underpinning community resistance to the project. It emphasises how the dispute exposed broader issues, such as the privatisation of Irish hydrocarbons in exchange for one of the lowest rates of government take in the world, and served to problematise how the state functions, its close relationship with capital and its deployment of coercive force to repress dissent. Analysis of these issues occurs within an original account of decision-making and policy formation around Irish hydrocarbons from 1957 to 2014. The book traces the development of the state's approach in tandem with occurrences in Irish political economy and examines the impact of global trends on different approaches to hydrocarbon management. A comparative case study of Norway reveals ideological, political, social and economic forces which influence how states manage their hydrocarbons - factors which the book uses as the basis for a rigorous critique of the Irish model.

Part I

The Corrib gas project

1

Politics and pipelines: emergence of the Corrib gas conflict

It’s been a horribly difficult, desperate … damaging sort of project for the whole community up there. For people from both sides and there’s all sorts of perspectives up there, all sorts of different views.

(Thomas,¹ former Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources)

Ah sure Corrib is a disaster … for everybody … the people involved on all sides. It’s no good for anybody the way it’s been dealt with badly.

(Andrew, supports the Corrib gas project)

The one thing on which supporters and opponents of the Corrib gas project can agree is that the project has become a debacle that has embroiled a rural community in North West Mayo for over a decade. Corrib gas was discovered in 1996 and its developers and some politicians originally presented it as a panacea for the socio-economic woes of the region. Niamh, a retired school principal, recalled how the project was ‘presented first as the great good news story of the decade and it was going to change everything in the area. It was going to reverse emigration, it was going to provide all sorts of jobs and quality of life, you know there’d be loads of stuff happening’. However, the reality of the project has had an opposite effect and Corrib gas has become synonymous with social upheaval, remaining unproduced nearly twenty years after discovery.

Early days of the project

On 15 November 2001 a petroleum lease permitting the production of Corrib gas was granted to a consortium of companies comprising Enterprise Energy Ireland (EEI) (45 per cent share), Statoil (36. 5 per cent) and Marathon (18.5 per cent). As the first production lease granted in thirty years, Minister Frank Fahey described the petroleum lease for Corrib as ‘a milestone in Irish offshore exploration and production’ (Department of the Marine and Natural Resources (DMNR), 2001). Corrib was the most significant hydrocarbon discovery off the coast of Ireland since the 1970s, and Enterprise² and its partners were eager to bring the gas field into production. The field was estimated to contain 870 billion cubic feet of recoverable (sales) gas (Dancer et al. in Wood Mackenzie, 2014, p.21).

The Corrib gas field is located approximately 90 km off the Mayo Coast and the consortium planned to develop Corrib as a subsea tie-back which meant ‘about seven wells will be completed and tied back to a central gathering manifold which will connect to the main offshore pipeline’ (EEI, 2001). With subsea technology development of the field would be ‘entirely underwater with no above water structures’ (McGrath, 2001). The developers planned to use an offshore pipeline to transport the unprocessed gas from the seabed to Broadhaven Bay, where it would make landfall at Glengad Beach (the foot of Dooncarton Mountain).

Figure 1Map of the area

Once the raw, odourless gas was brought ashore, the consortium intended piping it from Glengad, through Sruwaddacon Estuary to the inhabited area of Rossport, where the pipeline would again make landfall. From Rossport, the pipeline would run parallel to Sruwaddacon Estuary until it reached an onshore terminal in Ballinaboy³ where the gas would be processed, odourised and transported to customers through the Bord Gáis (state body responsibility for gas distribution) network of pipelines. The onshore pipeline route and processing terminal were central components of the companies’ plan of development (POD) submitted to the Petroleum Affairs Division (PAD, state department responsible for hydrocarbon management) as the basis for the development, production and processing of Corrib gas. While the companies worked directly with the PAD to progress their plans for Corrib gas, people in the area began to hear about the project in an ad-hoc way.

Ted, a retired teacher later jailed as one of the ‘Rossport Five’, said the first notice of Corrib gas he encountered was an article announcing the gas find by Mike Cunningham (former Statoil director) in the Western People around 1998. However, it was not until April 2000 that Ted gave more consideration to the project, prompted by an informal plea from a ‘man in the Department of Fisheries’ who contacted and warned him ‘there was a study about to be done, an environmental study about to be done and unless someone from the area mentioned the in-shore fisheries that there would be no study done on the in-shore fisheries’ (Ted, former school teacher).

Ted sent a note to some local fishermen advising them about the forthcoming environmental impact study and for the time being took no further action. A fisherman for over thirty-five years, Joe became concerned about the project after reading the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) – an outcome of the offshore environmental study. ‘I went through a bit of it and it was very complicated so I sent it over to a marine biologist in the University of Southampton. This biologist produced an independent report on the EIS which stated there was a cocktail of chemical from the outfall pipe going into Broadhaven Bay’ (Joe). This was of huge concern for Joe: ‘I’ve two sons involved in the fishing and I wanted that tradition to be carried on and they wanted to do it anyway, when I saw they were interested in fishing I wanted to protect it for them.’ Spurred on by these concerns and his desire to protect this ‘way of life’ for his family and others, Joe began asking questions about the project and in early 2000 co-founded the Erris Inshore Fisherman’s Association (EIFA) which later opposed the development in the planning process.

A school principal in a primary school, Niamh had some prior awareness of issues surrounding gas and oil due to conversations in the late 1990s with a former oil industry worker who had alerted her to ‘how awful the giveaway terms were’. While Niamh knew there were limited benefits to the Irish state from its gas and oil, she hadn’t been aware of plans for the development of Corrib gas – ‘I had only heard about it through word of mouth … I certainly would have checked public notices and local news [papers] … and it wasn’t in that.’

The question of public consultation and information provision was one Niamh put to the developers during the first public meeting held in McGrath’s pub in the summer of 2000. Niamh described this event as a ‘public presentation’, saying it couldn’t be described as either an information meeting or a consultation meeting as ‘it was really just showing us pictures’. The absence of mechanisms for systematic consultation with the community, in tandem with growing concerns around the potential environmental impacts of the project, served to create an atmosphere of mistrust which was compounded by the developer’s actions following this meeting.

Lack of consultation

Several local people articulated a sense of an outside entity being imposed upon this rural area and this sentiment appeared to grow as the project advanced. Ted (retired teacher) viewed the summer of 2000 as the start of the ‘invasion’. The ‘invasion’ included gas company personnel frequenting local pubs, ‘buying booze for people and coming on with their models [of the project infrastructure]’ (Ted). In Ted’s view, these workers ‘were putting on a display and their models and that, they were so completely out of place and they were so completely irrelevant to the area … the invasion has started but I found it so absolutely pathetic.’ When asked if the company’s effort to build consent by approaching people in the aforementioned informal ways could be considered consultation, Ted answered ‘no’. The topic of consultation (or lack of) is a factor identified by most interviewees as contributing to the emergence and escalation of the controversy over Corrib gas.

According to Charles, a consultant who works with the PAD, Enterprise ‘definitely weren’t for talking to the locals about what was going on’. Worthy of note is how the state did not place any obligations on the companies to consult with those living in the area. Aidan, a civil servant, explained that before companies submit an application for planning permission there’s ‘an opportunity … to informally, or from a developer’s point of view, to voluntarily be influenced’. This ‘voluntary engagement’ is at the companies’ discretion and they are not expected to undertake thorough consultation with host communities. Jim (an educational psychologist living in the area) suggests Enterprise ‘came in rather naively’ with a view of ‘the local community here that being such a peripheral area it would be easy to sway the community to their way of thinking and that all that they had to do was dispense some largesse around the place’.

Jim felt the company was ‘quite cute really’ because they tried to get the Church on their side in the early days of the project, ‘I remember the priests talking positively about it, this new discovery of gas … in a very positive way to their congregations … but … there wasn’t any sort of real consultation with the community.’ Given the influence of the Catholic Church within Irish society, the support of clergy for the project could prove important for securing wider acceptance of the development. Citing Nic Ghiolla Phádraig (1995), Share et al. (2007, p. 510) suggest ‘Irish Catholics continue to practice their religion and support their church’s political positions’ because of the Church’s power, namely in the form of ideological control and control of significant material, organisational and human resources. Jim, however, dismissed the idea of priests consciously, or unconsciously, trying to build consent for the project saying ‘there wasn’t anything malicious in what the priests were doing’. In Jim’s opinion, the priests ‘felt this was a real opportunity for Erris, an opportunity for employment, development and so forth … they welcomed it’. Nevertheless, ‘I don’t think the priests really asked the difficult questions at that stage and didn’t realise that there would be difficult questions to answer and that … some real consultation and analysis of the project had to take place before the community could give their assent or otherwise’ (Jim).

Explaining why he supported the project, Fr Adam, a priest in the Kilmore-Erris parish in Mayo (west of the Corrib gas terminal and pipeline), said he thought it had ‘the potential to help social and economic development of this region’. However, this view was not shared by all the local clergy. While he and other priests ‘had an interest in the issue and learning about it’, Fr Donal, parish priest for the Kilcommon parish (where the pipeline and terminal would be located), had ‘environment concerns … issues about pollution … where I live at home was beside Broadhaven Bay and we always had a lot of dealings with our surroundings, our beaches, our inlets, our fishing’. Fr Donal later became an active figure in campaigns for the terminal and pipeline to be located elsewhere.

Within the wider Erris region, some people became interested in the development because of the potential benefits it could bring, yet others were cautious about the project and the involvement of members of the Catholic Church. Ted (former teacher) suggests Enterprise was ‘meeting the important people, the bishop, the parish priest … and the people in the golf club. They thought that these were the people who had influence.’ Some interviewees regarded corporate engagement with local authority figures (including priests and business owners) as an effort to get the local elite onside, thereby helping to sway public opinion in favour of the project. Such a perspective is not unfounded as in Irish society a ‘middle layer of teachers, priests, or local dignitaries’ can help secure the loyalty of people below them to ensure that ‘society’s rules’ are embraced by a wider population (Allen, 2007, pp. 243–4). However, in this case attempts to get local leaders and clergy onside, as a mechanism for securing widespread support for the project, were not very successful and as people began to learn more about the project, local opposition began to build.

Issues with the onshore terminal and pipeline

The issues for the people were, I suppose, safety first of all, the safety of the project, the safety of the pipeline, the safety of the terminal … and it is adjacent to Carrowmore Lake which is the source of all our water in Erris and certainly there have been scares already in the early days with mercury and so forth. And I think the risk to our water supply is probably the biggest risk we have and certainly over the longer period … so safety was one issue, the other issue was damage to the environment and I think the third issue was what benefit would it be to either this community or to Ireland as a whole?

(Jim, educational psychologist)

Issues surrounding safety, regulation, supervision, pollution, potential environmental devastation and questionable benefits from production of Corrib gas were some of the topics underpinning rising concerns and opposition to the project. The proximity of the gas pipeline and terminal to homes, schools and local businesses was also a cause of worry for local residents. Upon moving to Kilcommon parish in 2005, Fr Donal became aware of how close the pipeline would be to some homes (70 m in places) and he recalled people articulating ‘difficulties they would have in having to live beside a high pressure, raw gas pipeline’. At that stage the anticipated pressure in the onshore pipeline was up to 345 bar, over four times the pressure of gas in the national grid.⁴ Opposition to the project had a more visceral basis for some people. When talking about the first thing which concerned her about the project, Niamh replied ‘at the beginning, the very beginning, through the middle and at the end, is place. It’s the tenet of place.’ This concern for, and connection to, her physical environment influenced Niamh’s response to the project. While Niamh doesn’t live beside Sruwaddacon Estuary⁵ occasionally she’d drive past it and ‘it was sufficient for me to know that place was there, I absolutely loved it, always loved it … [a]‌ place that is sustaining in itself’. For Niamh the location of the terminal and pipeline was problematic on environmental grounds and she was unhappy with the absence of consideration of residents’ needs.

The diverse range of issues articulated by people living in the vicinity of the proposed terminal and pipeline also included threats to a natural environment wholly entwined with a community’s sense of self and place. As the chairman of the first oral hearings noted, ‘the imposition of the development would significantly alter the character of the area … it would form a dominant intrusion on the experiences, way of life, and pattern of activities of the local community’ (Moore, 2002, p. 155). The growing opposition on these grounds was exacerbated by various ‘mistakes’.

‘Mistakes’

Fr Adam, a project supporter, suggested Enterprise made some mistakes and ‘sought to rush the project ahead without proper consultation with the community’. Recounting a conversation with Enterprise’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in 2001, Fr Adam said he’d emphasised a need to undertake more consultation with members of the community, provoking the response ‘we haven’t all that much time, the gas has to flow by 2003’.

When interviewed by this author, that former CEO did not articulate issues around consultation and pressures to bring the project into production as mistakes. Rather, in his view, Enterprise made two mistakes. The first was hiring an English company to conduct an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), which...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Glossary
• Introduction
• Part I The Corrib gas project
• Part II History of Ireland’s oil and gas experience
• Part III Ireland in a global context
• Part IV Ireland’s approach – analysis, consequences and alternatives
• Bibliography
• Index