What happened in Erris?

In April 2000 an announcement in the parish newspaper informed residents of Erris that a new gas pipeline was proposed to run through the area to bring gas from the offshore Corrib field to a new refinery to be built at Bellanaboy. Erris is a strikingly beautiful, isolated and thinly populated part of County Mayo in north-west Ireland, surviving mostly on fishing, small-scale farming and tourism. A small number of villages, including Rossport and Pullathomas on opposite sides of Broadhaven Bay, were connected by quiet and narrow roads, which the state would soon upgrade for the benefit of the oil companies. Broadhaven Bay is protected as a European Union (EU) Special Area of Conservation (SAC). Initial responses in Erris, like those in Mayo generally, were positive about the boost to local employment and the prospect of children being able to stay and find work locally. It took time for residents’ questions and doubts to clarify into a realisation that this was an experimental, high-pressure gas pipeline that, in the case of an accident, would destroy many of the homes located close to the planned route. Consultation was limited, and the 2002 decision by An Bord Pleanála (the Irish Planning Board) to refuse planning permission for the project was overridden in 2004 through the intervening influence of Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern. Four years later, Ahern would be forced to resign after a corruption inquiry. Construction of the pipeline and refinery continued without consent from the community and without official permissions.

Those interested in the area, including trade unionists who had worked on the Kinsale offshore gas field, noted that Ireland's oil and gas regime had been changed in 1987 by energy minister Ray Burke, and again in 1992 by the then finance minister Bertie Ahern, from an approach inspired by Norway's successful gas and oil industry, giving the state a 50% stake in any commercial find and applying a 50% corporation tax, to a regime that abolished any state participation in the development and provided for a 100% tax write-off. Burke, who made this decision while meeting alone with the oil companies against his civil servants’ advice, remains to this day the most senior minister, in a notoriously corrupt polity, to have done prison time (for tax fraud).