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    Day 100 (June 2011 Editorial)

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    On Enda Kenny rests that most daunting of responsibilities in this battered society: the fulfilment of Hope In our last edition just before the general election we expressed, without confidence, the hope that having been the victims of some of the most notoriously bad governance on the planet, we would have learnt that our political classes need to be replaced. In fact, at election time we saw no new ideas and no significant new parties. The non-ideological, non-visionary parties of the incompetent pragmatic centre touted their old ideas, bolstered only by professions of aspirations to higher standards of ethics and transparency. Village has consistently made the case that Fine Gael is the closest thing to Fianna Fáil, being driven by small-time vested interests (see for example the Cherrywood article at p60) and a blasé laissez-faire. We see no reason to alter this judgement in terms of the fundamentals of policy: wealth creation and distribution (see Niall Crowley at p46), and the environment (see for example the cute handling of the despoliation of Ireland’s raised bogs at p16). The handling of the debt crisis is indistinguishable from Fianna Fail’s, despite a manifest, though comprehensively obviated, public desire for radical change. Fine Gael’s manifesto declared, “Borrowing up to €25bn in additional funds from the EU/IMF at 5.8 per cent to cover additional bank losses from firesales of loans and other bank assets at rock-bottom prices, as this government has agreed, will push Irish government debt towards unsustainable levels and hinder economic recovery, threatening the stability of the entire Euro area”. Yet this is what the coalition is doing, even as the coalition concedes major interest-rate changes are unlikely. Elsewhere also the coalition are pushing the previous government’s programme. Fine Gael implied it would hesitate to recapitalise the banks if bank losses were higher than anticipated. In fact it recapitalised them anyway. It said it would burn unsecured senior bondholders “as part of a European-wide framework for senior debt focusing on insolvent institutions like Anglo Irish and Irish Nationwide that have no systemic importance” but will not. Fine Gael said it would introduce water and property taxes only after preliminary measures and safeguards were in place but is now moving ahead anyway. And so on. There have, however, been some substantial policy improvements. Restoring the minimum wage level is a welcome gesture to social solidarity as is the IMF-mandated intention to shake up the legal and medical professions in openness in government. There have also been important improvements in openness including promised referenda on compellability of witnesses for Dáil committees and overdue whistleblowers’ protection, (see Noel Wardick’s article at p25), extension of the bodies covered by Freedom of Information and expansion of the role of the Ombudsman. There have too been marked improvements in tone. These include the reduction in ministerial cars, a promised referendum on judges’ pay and less-partisan Seanad appointments. Nevertheless, the change is fragile: nepotism continues in the hiring of political assistants and drivers and, depressingly if predictably Phil Hogan has downgraded John Gormley’s review of local authority planning malpractice. In our last edition we predicted that Mr Kenny would collapse under scrutiny, particularly on the international stage, and we churlishly queried his credibility. This was too harsh. In fact, despite a strange cattlemanish delivery and a tendency to term his co-nationals ‘Paddy”, lachrymosity in the presence of Riverdance and some probably-unfairly-derided oratorical plagiarism, he has performed adequately, and sometimes well, as his confidence has risen with high office. In this he mirrors the ascent of other assumed light-weights such as John Bruton; and even Albert Reynolds and Bertie Ahern. The Taoiseach has certainly been helped by recent State ceremonies and the associated pomp. The Queen’s visit was a triumph and, like most reconciliations, worth the effort. President Obama too, though not at his charismatic best, leavened the pervading national misery; and the death of Garret FitzGerald provided an opportunity to reflect on the possibilities of a lifetime dedicated to public service. Enda Kenny should use his political capital to take a braver, more economically-literate and indeed, since it is unfair to make a country including its most vulnerable pay the debts of its banks, more ethical stance on the elementary truth that Ireland is insolvent (see Constantin Gurdgiev at p6). It will anyway be exposed as such next year when it must seek investors in government bonds who, given current rates of 11%, are not likely to provide affordable funding. While the government ignores this, pursuing chimerical economics, it is difficult to divine much clarity of purpose anywhere, a difficulty that can only get worse if the political capital dissipates. On the narrow shoulders of Enda Kenny rests that most daunting of responsibilities in this battered society: the fulfilment of Hope. On the economy, on the environment and on equality he should be braver.

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    Subsidies make unsustainable fishing viable (June 2011)

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    Fuel aid is 31% of value of Irish fish landings. By Dara McHugh On May 12, the European Parliament voted 369 to 203 in favour of the ceiling for de minimis aid to individual fishing companies being doubled. De minimis aid is aid which can be granted by national governments without breaching the general proscription on state aid. The increased ceiling could, if endorsed by the Commission, be used to help the industry cope with higher fuel prices. This would be the second time that the de minimis ceiling has been raised; the Commission previously increased it by a scale of ten, from €3,000 to €30,000, in 2007. The argument for increasing the size of potential aid payments is fairly clear: the industry relies heavily on subsidies and would likely go under without them. For those vessels that use mobile gear (trawling, dredging, etc), fuel amounts to approximately 60% of operating costs, so assistance allows fishing that would otherwise be unprofitable, to continue. On the other hand, the industry’s problems do not stop at energy. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates 85% of fish stocks are over- or fully- exploited, while European stocks are believed to be more than 70% over-exploited. Fisheries are, it is clear, on an unsustainable path. It doesn’t make sense, then, to increase subsidies that exacerbate the excess. The fundamental problem is over over-capacity; there is too much catching power and too few fish. A 2009 Green Paper on Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) Reform called fleet over-capacity “the fundamental problem” of the CFP, a view backed up by a recent report by the Chair of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) Negotiating Group on Rules. This over-capacity is sustained by a poorly thought-out régime of subsidies. Both WTO and CFP reports focus on the role of subsidies, and particularly fuel subsidies, in maintaining over-capacity. Fishing vessels can avail of marked diesel, whose rate of excise is about 9% that of standard diesel; and since fuel is the biggest cost component, this support is crucial. In Ireland, the fuel subsidy is, according to recent research by Smart Taxes Network, approximately 31% of the value of landings. These subsidies worsen over-fishing, as they enable destructive and energy-intensive fishing methods to continue when they would not otherwise be economically viable. It doesn’t make sense for national or European subsidies to support the industry in destroying its own resource. Instead of responding to short-term economic demands, policy-makers should see subsidies as a tool for managing and protecting fish stocks and ecosystems. Stock recovery plans are an obvious starting point for this approach. Irish Sea cod stocks, for instance, despite over 10 years of rebuilding programmes, are showing no sign of recovery. A major factor is that derogations, sought by the industry, allow trawling to continue in the sea for other, less threatened species such as Nephrops, the Norwegian lobster. This non-selective fishing inevitably brings cod by-catch and undermines its recovery. Consequently, the EU cut cod quotas in December last year and Commissioner Damanaki has even threatened the complete closure of the Irish Sea to fishing if the situation does not improve. Ultimately, as long as non-selective fishing for other stocks continues in a recovery area, the threatened species will be caught and killed. Species-recovery requires that government direct subsidies to that end. Smart Taxes’ research proposes a simple mechanism for doing this: to disallow marked (subsidised) diesel to any vessel that is caught using towed gear in a recovery zone. Fuel costs are so substantial, and the marked diesel support so significant, that this would be a strong incentive for compliance. More broadly, instead of blind spending such as de minimis aid, subsidies should be used to help the industry reduce its capacity and adapt to biological reality. Other useful measures would include aid for implementing selective methods in recovery areas, so that only healthy stocks are caught, leaving the threatened species untouched. As the de minimis vote showed, the fishing industry is threatened by insolvency. Biological sustainability is being accorded lower priority than economic survival. The role of Government and European support is to ensure that the two imperatives overlap. Dara McHugh works for Smart Taxes

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    Information maestro (June 2011)

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    Journalists should FoI and Cross-reference. Miriam Cotton interviews Gavin Sheridan of TheStory.ie Miriam Cotton (MC): What did you do before you started The Story? Gavin Sheridan (GS): In 2002 I started Gavinsblog.com. That’s in semi-retirement though it is still up there. I was just 21 then and at the time there were only about a dozen blogs in Ireland. The Iraq war was imminent, 9/11 had happened and the blog was a place where you could start writing about whatever you wanted. MC: When and how did the idea for TheStory.ie come to you? GS: I started to become involved in local government stuff after I graduated in 2008 from UCC. My New Year resolution in January 2009 was to build an Irish version of ‘TheyWorkForYou.com’ which was a British parliamentary transparency website. After I graduated I started working on this in my spare time. I found out that a man called John Handlaar was already trying to build something similar in Ireland. By April 2009 we had the first version of KildareStreet.com which is the Irish version of ‘They Work For You’. From my involvement in all of this I had become very interested in open government. I went to some conferences in London in summer 2009 and again I met some very interesting people. Heather Brooke did the original Freedon of Information request (FOI) for MP’s expenses. This was all very interesting to me – there was no FOI culture in Ireland. A few people had done some FOIs – Damien Mulley had done some on broadband and the Department of Communications. Journalists were using them but relatively infrequently. I realised that the culture that existed in the UK where citizens were putting in FOIs about, for example, why a building down the road had been sold for one pound, just didn’t exist here. So the first thinking I did when I got back to Ireland was to look at what FOIs were being done and the most interesting one I found was Ken Foxe’s one about John O’Donoghue. I FOI’d his FOI – not because I wanted to steal his story but because I wanted to see the receipts. It was a really good story that was going into The Sunday Tribune every weekend. But it wasn’t being talked about in the dailies or on the radio. The Department of Culture, Sport and Tourism sent them to me and I put them on-line through my scanner and started publishing the details of each trip. That gave the story an extra push. TheStory.ie hadn’t started at this stage so I put them on my own blog [GavinsBlog]. I also went to the Politics.ie website and gave them the details. I had met Mark Coughlan (Co-founder of TheStory.ie) at a Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis earlier that year and we’d been talking a good bit about this concept. We started ‘The Story’ in August 2009, just when the story about the expenses of John O’Donoghue, Ceann Comhairle, was taking off. Instead of submitting FOIs for individual things, we thought why not FOI for everything! What is fundamental to getting everything under an FOI is to submit requests for databases. If the government has gone to the trouble of more efficiently holding information then we can write more efficient FOIs to more efficiently get that efficiently-held information! The process of exporting a database is quite easy and a large amount of information can be got. We were thinking that if they’ve got an expenses database, we don’t just want to know about John O’Donoghue we want to know everything – within reason. How do one set of expenses relate to others? We were about transparency and advocacy – transparency first, journalism second. Most journalists would not know how to control a big spreadsheet of data and that was something we had to teach ourselves. A friend of mine who was working on the BBC’s Panorama taught me a lot of basic computer-assisted reporting like what you do with a spreadsheet once you get it, how you analyse it and graphically represent it. We learned about all the tools that are freely available for mapping information – the basics of Excel and Google Fusion Table. Cleaning spreadsheets is very important for instance. We then set out a policy whereby we began to look for precedent. We decided that if we were refused a database we wouldn’t just say ‘well, that’s that then’. We decided to appeal any decision which we believed was worth the €225 to appeal it – things that would have the effect of broadening the scope of the FOI Act as much as we could. Ken Foxe’s FOIs were an example of how documents are important because within them was information relating to the database that was used to record the information. We saw that they were using a thing called Oracle. The whole exercise took three months. There was an initial request testing to see how they would reply, then a second request asking for the entire database. That was refused under three FOI Act exemptions so we appealed that and finally we appealed to the Information Commissioner in January 2010. We eventually got the database. It named the civil servants, how much they claimed and more or less what it was for, but with some redactions applied because you have to work around S.10 of the FOI Act which is to do with volume. If you’re asking for a lot of information they can argue that it’s too voluminous. There is a certain amount of bartering. I was being as reasonable as possible and it was possible to have some negotiation. The day after we had reached an agreement with the Information Commissioner and with the Department of Arts, Sports & Tourism and we had published it, we went to other departments saying there was no reason why these other requests should be refused. Ultimately the databases that we have now published account for nearly half

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    Transcendent Dylan (June 2011)

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    Mama, You Been On My Mind triumphs under scrutiny. By John Waters I wouldn’t, in normal circumstances, go so far as to assert that any of Bob Dylan’s songs is his best. That would risk being too big a statement.  But if you put a gun to my head this very moment and demanded that, on pain of death for getting it wrong, I name his best song, I feel I would have a fighting chance of surviving if I mentioned Mama, You Been On My Mind. The strange thing is that I don’t think of it as a song. It’s deeper than that. Of course, there are versions of it that turn it into a song, including some horrendous duets Dylan did with Joan Baez. But there is a version in existence in which the song lives in a different way, as something more than the sum of its parts, as something so special you have to wonder why it is only to be found in one apparently throwaway version on the Bootleg collection, just one of many interesting tracks that got left to one side. The sleevenotes with the Bootleg Series tell us it was recorded in the middle of 1964. They also mention the several versions Dylan was to do with Baez – when Dylan would “ham the song up unmercifully”; and the solo version Baez released – ridiculously called Daddy, You Been On My Mind –  on her 1965 album, Farewell Angelina. The solo recording that features on the Dylan bootleg was presumably made before this, perhaps in 1964 or even earlier. The note also mentions several other versions of the song that Dylan recorded or participated in. One, a “rather ponderous version as a Witmark demo with piano accompaniment in the summer of 1964”, another with George Harrison in 1970, in a New York session of which nothing was ever released.  We are told that he performed the song live several times. If you search for it on YouTube, you get people who sing the song and don’t tell you it was Dylan that wrote it. You get people who sing it so badly that you wonder why they bother. You get Dylan and Baez cheerfully murdering it.  You get a Johnny Cash version in which he inexplicably changes the lyric, including the opening line, arguably the greatest in all of popular music, for reasons unstated but worth speculating about. But if you want to hear Dylan sing it as it was meant to be sung, you need to get the Bootleg Series and expect to be playing nothing else for a week. Dylan wrote, recorded and released lots of songs.  Many of them are carried by stories or statements or riddles or simply clever hooks that make you wonder about the immense sense of irony that resides within this man, this poet, this seeker, this joker. For half a century he has been standing on the edge of the world looking in, reflecting or refracting some things that caught his eye, uttering them in ways that always suggest a stab at truthfulness, then moving on as though unsure what he has done. Almost none of his songs are finished, and some are no more than begun. Some of them seem to go on forever and others seem to end before they get to the chase – containing “too much and not enough”, as he put it himself, coating their subjects in words as though to convey the inadequacy of description. But this song, this statement, this riddle, this joke, has something more in it than the others.  It has Dylan in it in a way that the rest of his songs do not. Dylan is a storyteller, a creator: there is no need for him to be present in his songs, and there are no reasons for us to jump to the conclusion that we have glimpsed him in any or all of them. At any given moment it might be him or not, probably not. There is a character in this song, but I don’t suggest this character is Dylan.  It might be, but it doesn’t really matter. The voice is Dylan’s and he gives this voice to the character as he does in many other songs. There is a baldness and clarity to the delivery that suggests it is Dylan talking.  His voice carries none of the affection it sometimes has when he is trying to find the right pose or attitude for a song. Anyone who has read his autobiographical work, Chronicle, will know that he likes to lay false trails and blow up existing understandings. But there is a trueness here that is difficult to avoid. His voice is up close in a way that it rarely is. It is as though he has stopped to get real, if only for a few moments. The song, if it can be called a song, is great because it is not a song. There is no real hook to hide behind. It has no chorus, just the repeated title line. Moreover, the song is itself concerned with laying false trails, about the duplicity that lies behind the word and the note and the face and the name. Deep down, he has said more than once, nobody’s got a name. And yet the song that is not a song is, in another sense, banal. It is a kind of love song, on the surface of things a throwaway afterthought about a relationship that ended some time ago. Except that it is not throwaway. It is not an afterthought. It is a cry from deep within the heart of one who has loved too much and lost not just the love but also the capacity to face that loss. It is the plea of someone whose life has been stilled by the fallout from desire and the encounter with its limits.  It is a song about the way human longing has the capacity

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    Happy Valley Destroyed (June 2011)

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    The Mahon Tribunal, perhaps to avoid discrediting chief witness Frank Dunlop, failed comprehensively to investigate the Cherrywood rezoning that led to its establishment. By Michael Smith In 1995 Colm MacEochaidh and I sponsored a £10,000 reward for “information leading to the conviction of persons for rezoning corruption” after I had been involved in a long campaign against the suspicious rezoning of Cherrywood, beside Dublin’s Bray Road some years earlier. Allegations we received through our Newry solicitor, Kevin Neary, brought James Gogarty into the public eye and indirectly led to the establishment of the Flood/Mahon Tribunal, the jailing of Ray Burke and the resignation of Bertie Ahern. With the scandalously-delayed tribunal report again deferred – but this time only until the autumn – this is the evidence I gave to the Tribunal (available on its website). 1960-1983 For me one of the main distinguishing attractions of growing up in built-up Loughlinstown in the 1970s was its access to the idyllic Shanganagh Valley. This was an arcadian landscape, celebrated since the Norman invasion, bordered on one side by the Bray dual-carriageway and an ancient wall and then unbounded all the way to Stepaside and Kilternan, miles to the West. Thousands of acres of greenery. At Cherrywood dramatic hills ran down to the Shanganagh River, there was a stray orchard and a country lane; mysterious minor archaeological artefacts were present in inexplicable abundance; these and a wood of oak and beech gave the place an air of transcendence and permanence. This is how it was obliterated. 1989 On 30 June 1989 the banner headline across the front of The Irish Times Property supplement stated that Monarch Properties, best known for developing the Square in Tallaght, had bought 234 acres which they intended to rezone and develop with 900 houses, opening up the yawning interior of the Valley also to the JCB panoply. Though I had long moved out of the area and was unlikely to return to that part of Dublin, I was concerned; and I wrote letters to Dublin county councillors suggesting they zone the area amenity, perhaps with the aid of some sort of land swap. 1990 By 1990 the Council management wanted to rezone much of what they now called the “Carrickmines” Valley for a population of 30,000 people along what The Irish Times described as a Los Angeles-style grid-system. Residential development of 1,000 acres with two district centres (Cherrywood and Ballyogan), industrial development around a motorway and a brand new sewer were the main components of this proposal from management as recommended at a meeting of Dublin County Council on 18th Oct 1990. A heavyweight representative organisation styling itself the Carrickmines Valley Preservation Association (CVPA) was established to lobby against wholesale rezonings. They said the Carrickmines Valley was the Southside’s Phoenix Park. They took a hard-hitting approach, focusing on councillors and making them account for their actions. They held terrifying monster meetings. Councillors were probably scared to appear pro-rezoning. Between 1990 and 1993 the CVPA distributed several high-quality and effective leaflets to the tens of thousands of people in the area they said they represented. On 6th December 1990 Councillors Ed McDonald, Jim Murphy and Betty Coffey successfully proposed a motion that the Los Angeles-style development be limited to one (the eastern) side of the proposed line of the South Eastern Motorway, that the proposed industrial zoning be reduced and that the residential zoning and open spaces be indicated. 1991 The management produced obfuscating maps providing confusingly for the 6th December motion “except for updating to take account of the developments to date and adjustments of objective drawing number DP90A/129A refers”. In fact this provided for most of the Monarch lands to be zoned at four houses to the acre. A motion proposing this passed 21: 19. It went on public display and the local elections intervened. It would be for the new County Council, following a big public debate, to see if it wished to proceed with this sort of zoning. The CVPA were very influential in getting these resolutions passed. In 1991 so far as I was concerned development had been stopped. Newspapers and the CVPA said there had been no significant zoning change. So, relieved but concerned about the future, I decided I’d put out a leaflet before the 1991 local election in the name of the Campaign for Honesty in Politics drawing attention to the record of councillors in the outgoing council on a sample of specific issues. Its principal point was that there was a device whereby councillors outside an area voted for rezonings while their local colleagues cynically voted against. It noted that this practice was favoured by the big parties. It was hard-hitting and we distributed 7,000 copies of it in the Ballybrack/Loughlinstown/Cabinteely/Foxrock areas (see page 65). Some time in October 1991, I realised with consternation that in fact the Monarch lands had been rezoned. In late 1991 I set up a group which we called the Shanganagh Protection Committee. It was intended to sound like SPUC, a topically passionate protest group of the time. We were a bunch of about ten in our mid-twenties – precarious student-types. We included two members who subsequently became active in national politics in the Green party Éamon Ryan and Déirdre de Burca. Now Monarch, aware of the accumulating opposition, went on the offensive. 1992 The Roadshow Monarch employed soccer anchor and all-round cuddleball, Bill O’Herlihy who had a Fine Gael background and the ear of many councillors. His public relations company published a lot of cynical propaganda and organised a series of roadshows, mostly in schools, on Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday for eleven weeks, in which they touted their scheme for Cherrywood. These were staffed by droves of Monarch personnel who we got to know quite well. They had a large-scale model of the scheme. Members of the Shanganagh Protection Committee would stand outside – often because the school or institution would have been paid to keep us out, counter-propagandising. At these roadshows Monarch

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    Mighty, Lucky Quinn (June 2011)

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    The Quinn empire benefited from goodwill in Cavan County Council and among -at least most – locals By Anton McCabe The epic fall of Seán Quinn and his Quinn Group is the end of an empire – one which has left a legacy of environmental degradation along the Cavan-Fermanagh border. There is a network of quarries in the area around Ballyconnell (Co. Cavan) and Derrylin (Co. Fermanagh). No figure for the area of quarries in Fermanagh is available; however, the area in Cavan was 257.7 acres in 2006 – around 130 football pitches. In the same small rural area, the Quinn Group also operated a cement factory; a factory producing rigid-polyurethane insulation; a block-making plant; a ready-mix plant in Co Cavan; and, on the Fermanagh side of the Border, a glass factory; another block-making facility; a factory making concrete floors; a tar-making plant and a tile making factory. Five years ago, An Taisce described what has happened on the Ballyconnell-Derrylin road as “a massive combination of large-scale industrial development (which) has occurred without the land in question ever being zoned for such development or subject to the integrated provision of services and road infrastructure required. The developments approved by Cavan County Council and An Bord Pleanála both individually and cumulatively have taken place without the required individual or cumulative service provisions, traffic management or environmental mitigation measures being in place. Each development granted in succession is going to exacerbate the problems caused by previous planning permissions for other developments”. The Group and other Quinn companies have been fortunate in their dealings with the planning authorities. On three major projects, the board of An Bord Pleanála has over-ruled the reports of its inspectors, who recommended refusal. In 2004, An Bord Pleanála over-rode the recommendation of its inspector to refuse permission for a 110- acre quarry south-east of Swanlinbar, and a linked 10.9 kilometre access road across Slieve Rushen to the Quinn cement factory at Ballyconnell. The planning application covered 24 townlands. The inspector wrote, in his recommendation of refusal: “it is considered that the proposed development would result in the pollution of ground and surface waters in the vicinity of the site, would be prejudicial to public health and would be seriously injurious to the amenities of the River Blackwater“. He questioned proposals to close the quarry after it became exhausted: “A large hole filled with water in continuity with the groundwater system will, in perpetuity, be a site at which the groundwater system is vulnerable to contamination”. Seven years earlier, applying for the cement factory at Ballyconnell, the Quinn Group had informed the North’s Environment and Heritage Service that further quarry development would not be necessary: “It notes the new plant would require an increased supply of raw materials but the supply will be available in existing quarries”. The site of the quarry was of archaeological importance. Archaeologist Robert M Chappell has described it as “outstanding” because it had been occupied from the Early Neolithic to the Medieval period. Chappell wrote: “few (if any) sites demonstrate such continuity and variety of activities at a single location”. Quinn acted totally within the law on this matter; however, it does not fit well with his self-definition as a man who respects the heritage of his home area. Despite the recommendation of its own inspectors, An Bord Pleanála decided to give permission. It cited a number of reasons, including “the strategic role of mineral extraction in the regional construction and cement industry”. In 2004, An Bord Pleanála’s inspector again recommended refusing planning permission to a ready-mix plant at Gortawee, Ballyconnell. The inspector wrote: “The site for the most part is reserved as ‘High Landscape Area/Leisure Reserved Industry Zone’ in the Ballyconnell Development Plan adopted in 2002. … The development is, thus, in material contravention of this”. Again, An Bord Pleanála granted planning permission, this time with “regard to the pattern of industrial development in the vicinity, (and) to the nature and scale of the proposed development”. In 2008 An Bord Pleanála’s inspector recommended rejection of a combined cycle gas turbine station near Louth Village, Co Louth. The inspector wrote: “The proposed development would in my view therefore materially contravene the Development Plan for the area”. He described it as “visually obtrusive development and a discordant feature in the rural landscape”. An Bord Pleanála’s Board again voted to grant permission, having “particular regard to the location of the site in close proximity to the Monavallet 220kV substation and the nearby gas interconnector, to the topography and nature of the surrounding countryside and to the pattern of development in the area including existing electricity infrastructure, to the function of the proposed power plant as a public utility and to the need for additional electricity generation capacity”. However, the most generous planning body has been Cavan County Council. According to its files, it has granted the Quinn Group and subsidiaries nine applications for retention. This means the developments were developed without planning permission. They included: a 12.2hectare limestone and shale quarry: two office blocks at separate locations: a three hectare shale quarry: and an 0.83 hectare car park: and a third storey on a two-storey office block. The last was in an application from Quinn Hotels to retain additions/alterations to a two-storey office development “additions include extra storey”. One of most spectacular events involving the Quinn Group was the disappearance of a tractor in February 1996 in Co Fermanagh. There is nothing to indicate Seán Quinn had any personal involvement in the disappearance. The Quinn Group was building a road to serve a quarry on the northern side of the Border, and its windfarm on the Molly Mountain, near Derrylin. There was a dispute regarding ownership of one stretch of land. The family claiming ownership went to the North’s High Court, and lost. They were, however, concerned the Quinn Group was not complying with conditions imposed. Family members thus blocked the line of the road with a tractor. The tractor disappeared. The RUC were sufficiently

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    Alternatives to expensive oil (June 2011)

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    The average household needs to find an additional €950 during 2011 to cover energy bills as higher oil prices are passed on by wholesalers and retailers. But must the steady rise in oil prices really have such stark implications for every home? And what should government be doing about it? Having averaged $85 a barrel over the course of 2010, oil is now trading at around $115 a barrel. With demand from Asia keeping on the pressure, forward contracts suggest that $115 is a reasonably reliable average price for 2011. In 2010 Ireland spent €4bn importing oil – crudely an average of €1,000 for every man, woman and child, irrespective of age and income and the comparable figure for 2011 is set to be €1,350. With some 2.7 occupants per home on average, this year the additional burden placed on each household due to higher oil costs alone will be an extraordinary €950. The government is giving the matter little enough attention. First, government is guided to a great extent by the policy assessments of the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI). Sadly, the ESRI has been slow to acknowledge the link between oil costs and economic activity, or to take the next logical step – highlight what can be done on a practical level to stop money leaving the country to buy oil, and circulate it within the local economy instead. (For the wider implications of rising oil prices see the accompanying graph. Again, government-supported economists appear slow to tease out the issues here.) Accounting firm Ernst & Young has a much better sense of the interaction between economic activity and oil cost, pointing out in February of this year that the Irish economy would shrink if oil prices remained in or around $120 a barrel. Their latest figures, released at the end of May, say Ireland’s economy will contract by 2.3 per cent in 2011, with consumer spending falling four per cent over the course of the year. Households, including our 14.8% unemployed, are already struggling with other outgoings. And the pressure from mortgages (790,000 of Ireland’s 1.4m homes are mortgaged) and taxes is being compounded by rising oil prices. Oil prices are likely to rise 30 per cent over the next three years. That’s according to Fatih Birol, chief economist to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in an interview with Australian media at the end of April. The IEA’s track record has been to downplay concerns regarding rising oil prices, which makes Birol’s projection all the more daunting. Translated into prices at the pumps, the IEA forecast would see the cost of a litre of fuel approach €2 within three years, up from €1.45 cent a litre now. Little can be done fast to change travel habits to ease back on oil use. Transport initiatives – the promotion of walking and cycling and public-transport investment will take time to pay dividends, as many households are ‘locked in’ to long-distance car-commuting. Home insulation and home heating offer far more potential. Insulation is being addressed but there is one significant gap: with the Warmer Homes initiative aimed at households with no or low incomes, and the Better Energy programme tending to cater for higher earners, middle income households can literally be left out in the cold. Still, progress is being made. But while insulation helps to hold in the heat it doesn’t create it in the first place. This is where wood-burning stoves and boilers come in. However, grant funding was withdrawn from wood boilers under the Better Energy initiative announced on 11 May. No explanation was given. And more curiously, grants were retained for new oil and gas boilers. This strange decision-making comes at a time when Ireland’s forestry sector is gearing up to supply the commercial and domestic sectors. Government should encourage wood-thinning initiatives. By James Nix A recent publication maps out how forestry thinning can provide a reliable supply for commercial scale wood biomass boilers (“Step by Step Guide to Selling Your Timber for Wood Energy: Experiences from the County Clare Wood Energy Project”, Teagasc, Galway). In Donegal – a county with 60,000 hectares of forest cover – a reliable supply chain has been created for firewood (see www.donegalwoodlandowners.com), with 4.8 cubic metres of seasoned hardwood available for €340 to members of the initiative, for example. And, in what might serve as a model for small and medium-sized forests across Ireland, the company also offers a range of services to the sector, spanning timber processing, marketing, plantation maintenance and business management. Ireland won’t be able to staunch oil price rises. But by promoting alternatives to oil we can stimulate the local economy and maximise resilience.

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