The Greasy Till And The Sacrifice Zone

national | environment | opinion/analysis

Saturday September 13, 2008 01:00

by Tel

Drawing the thread through some recent news stories of oil corruption, climate chaos, fuel poverty, and doing what the so-called ‘mainstream’ media will not do, linking them together, most pertinently linking them with the continuing Corrib gas controversy.
Then weaving into a consideration of zoning for pollution, or future resource exploitation in the West.

Part of the ruins of the Asahi factory in Killala north Mayo

The current news with our cousins across the Atlantic concerns corruption in the Minerals Management Service (MMS). This is the U.S. federal agency in charge of managing mineral resources, including oil and gas, on federal and Indian lands, and off-shore. That is the off-shore resources, and what is under state owned tracts of land, as well as what is under ‘Indian Reservations’. An official report found that nineteen employees of the office charged with gaining royalties from oil companies were mired in somewhat salacious corrupt practises. That office only has fifty or so employees so it is a significant proportion of its staff. Almost needless to say the companies involved included Shell.

Thursday’s Washington Post headlines: “Report Says Oil Agency Ran Amok” and reads: “Government officials in charge of collecting billions of dollars worth of royalties from oil and gas companies accepted gifts, steered contracts to favored clients and engaged in drug use and illicit sex with employees of the energy firms, federal investigators reported yesterday.” Further reading about the “MMS chicks”, bubble baths, cocaine, and skiing trips is to be found here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/52243.html
and here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20....html

Earlier stories from the United States a couple of years ago claim a systematic program of avoiding royalty payments by the oil majors. According to Kevin Gambrell, former director of the Federal Indian Minerals Office in Farmington, New Mexico, “the American taxpayers are losing billions of dollars”.
Further information on that here: http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/224/index.html and here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/business/yourmoney/03...c=rss

If it can happen in the United States, one can surmise it can happen in this country
It is of course totally speculation to say that this may be the case in a country where Ray Burke and Bertie Ahern were instrumental players in setting the current extremely generous licensing terms for oil and gas exploration. Likewise it is speculative to imagine that planning corruption may happen in Irish cases other than, for instance, re-zoning in Dublin. Indeed this might remain forever speculative, until in some surreal turn of events hundreds of Garda, Interpol, and hell why not even the Navy, are drafted in to investigate white collar crime. Should this hallucinatory vision actually come to pass, one can only hope that the ‘high standards’ wing of Fianna Fail, aka the Progressive Democrats, and the ‘environmental’ wing of Fianna Fail, aka the ‘Green’ party, are proven to have the wit to be getting their cut, be that one that comes in an envelope or a line.

One slice of the real criminality of the give away of energy resources can be seen in Age Action Ireland’s current campaign concerning the over 2,000 excess deaths of elderly people in Ireland each winter. A death toll for which, they say, fuel poverty is partly to blame. They launched the campaign in the wake of price rises such as: “Bord Gais prices increased by 20% in recent weeks, while ESB customers experienced a 17.5% price hike. The price of home heating oil soared 54.9% in the 12 months to July.”
(http://www.ageaction.ie/news/article-09-09-08.asp)
In the case of Bord Gais this coming after previous drastic hikes last year.

One would think we did not live in a country wherein there were at least some gas resources, not a country where the son of our major media lord speaks of a “new hydrocarbon frontier”, and not a country described by a branch of the state as “an exciting new petroleum province”. Indeed the hitherto existing terms for gas exploitation, prior to 1987, featured a reduced price for Bord Gais for the gas from the Kinsale field, whether passed on to the consumer is another question. In the instance of Corrib not this, but a gratis provision by Bord Gais of infrastructure, a major pipeline out of the Ballinaboy site, for Shell’s shareholders and executives. It is almost as if they followed the rainbow and found a whole tribe of leprechauns, complete with complimentary gold, inhabiting Kildare Street. After all they also get for the most part free security as a sort of holiday bonus. Moreover also in the news of late is a recent O.E.C.D. report on education, where Irish state spending on education was found to be the third lowest proportionately out of thirty O.E.C.D. countries. (http://www.rte.ie/news/2008/0909/education.html)
Could not these resources be taxed properly, is there not something there the resulting revenue could be spent on. Doubtless there are myriad examples like these, and will be more, with the coming of recession, public spending cutbacks, wage restraint, and other such things necessary when “we are living away beyond our means” as Charles J. once put it.

While the thought of the Irish establishment being pure as the driven snow will be seen by many as improbable as the idea selchies damaged the Solitaire, corruption is not the full story. (further reading on selchies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkie)
It is not the full story as any capitalist state will operate to maximise profit accumulation.
Failing, that is, the imposition of other needs and other concerns by a countervailing force. Frankly this is one of the core differences between Ireland and our near neighbour Norway. For sure as of yet they have way more resources found and exploited than we have here, all the less reason to squander here. Nonetheless it strikes me as the case that the ordinary five eights of Norway must have insisted they get their cut of their resources.
Which is, it might be noted, somewhat different from “nationalisation”, or “higher taxation”, as such doesn’t actually say anything about what revenue ends up being spent on.
(further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of...orway)
It is not just a matter of historic under-development, after all the Irish Republic is often found at, or near, the bottom of O.E.C.D. league tables on social conditions right next to the U.K. and the U.S. of A.

Meanwhile there are the costs, the externalities imposed on others, not showing up on the profit and loss accounting of the corporations. There is in the United States a jargon phrase: ‘sacrifice zone’. This refers to areas abandoned to high pollution. Their system of environmental regulation, state’s having pollution quotas, particularly facilitates this. Let’s move back to (almost) the next parish over, on the western seaboard of Ireland. Ethel Crowley, in her study ‘Land Matters: Power Struggles in Rural Ireland’, writes of the zoning of the Irish countryside into a zone of intensive productivist agriculture and, under the guise of ‘environmental protection’, a zone of “providing environmental goods”, “packaged in a consumer-friendly fashion, primarily to sustain the burgeoning tourist industry.”. This achieved in part through REPS schemes.

One might note the north-west of Mayo is not over-burdened with a tourism infrastructure. So what profit generating activity is it zoned for? It sure ain’t intensive agri-business unless it is very well hidden. With perhaps a little paranoia one might point to the other two high pollution/low employment factories planted in the general area in recent years. In 2004 large scale protests saw off a proposed asbestos recycling plant for Killala, which was to be built on the site of the former Asahi plant and to be operated by ‘Irish Environmental Processes’. Around the same time there was controversy over an unauthorised sludge factory, which processed sewage into fertiliser, in Geesala, Erris. The Cork based Oran group, owners of the plant, brought out an injunction against thirty one people over protests on this issue. Oran were stopped in their tracks.

However no one can call it paranoia when a consultancy firm working under the auspices of the Petroleum Affairs Division, Department of Marine and Natural Resources, produces publicity material selling the prospect of oil and gas exploration off the western coast on the basis that the Corrib gas infrastructure will be available to be upgraded to exploit any new resources to be found. Basically lads youse can stick in another refinery here maybe, the site is big enough, and has plenty of room for expansion, planning process? not sure if we have one, I’ll have to check, or perhaps have the cheque.
(see here: http://www.indymedia.ie/article/80242)

Either the barony of Erris, and surrounding districts, is intended as a ‘sacrifice zone’, and the current project is phase one, or Sir Anthony O’Reilly’s watchword was create two, three, many Rossports. I say ‘was’ as one expects he has got rather sore of hearing of the place, though the point stands, the alternative option would be a string of other similar developments in isolated communities along the west (and perhaps south-east) shoreline, making the current project still phase one. This is of course with the proviso they actually find anything valuable enough to bring ashore. It is important to be aware that the earlier phase of exploration and development in off-shore Ireland in the 70s and early 80s was alive with overblown claims. Nonetheless they ain’t in business for the craic, they ain’t exploring for the craic, and they ain’t trying to establish a precedent in Erris for the craic. It is a real live project of which the Glengad-Rossport-Ballinaboy axis is the vanguard.

Two years ago the Western People carried a look at the recent past concerning an April 1974 feature in Business and Finance magazine. The feature was on the arrival of the Asahi plant in Killala and on an oil rig construction plant proposed for nearby. The oil rig builders never got off the ground. The Japanese owned Asahi plant never provided the ten thousand jobs promised, but did reputedly leave a cancer cluster behind it (though the Western People article does not mention this latter point). The Asahi factory produced acrylic fibre from acrylonitrile and other chemicals. Several hundred people lost their jobs when it closed in 1997. While the Ireland of today is quite different from the Ireland of 1974, the Business and Finance article is instructively stark on what are the favoured requirements of some inward investment. In regard to the oil rig plant Business and Finance reports: “permission was pushed through by Mayo County Council in less than two months; without objectors” while in Scotland, the other proposed location for the development, conditions were being placed on the company. It also comments that in Ballina “there has never been an industrial dispute”. Bend over backwards may have been explicable in the utterly depressed Ireland of then, it may be explicable in regard to companies that have elsewhere to go, but the other bottom line is that oil and gas companies have to go to where the oil and gas is. There isn’t even room for debate on this. The government holds the best hand in this card game.

All this is to ignore the elephant in the living room, the other link the corporate and state media outlets will not make as disparate seemingly unconnected issues and events float about the ether of flickering light and newsprint. As the reality of climate chaos becomes ever more apparent, with for instance the recent news the Arctic may be ice free during the summer months in as little as five years rather than seventy as previously thought, the only really socially responsible usage of fossil fuel resources can be in facilitating a transition to renewable energy, if even that. Such a usage would certainly not include welcoming climate chaos criminals like Shell and Exxon Mobil to this country. The unifying thread to all these problems is that we do not have a political and economic system capable of responsible, planned, rational resource management. We only have the band-aid that is protest. We only have the ‘rights’ we take. That is a grim reality, but it is the only one we have got.