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The new Fianna Fáil minister with responsibility for energy, Des
O’Malley, soon came to know just how difficult and unpopular the
nuclear portfolio might prove to be. Pilloried and personally vilified by
the anti-nuclear movement and criticised by his political opponents for
retaliating when he dubbed his tormentors ‘flat-earthers’, O’Malley
stood his ground against opposition proposals for a joint parliamentary
committee to assess the Carnsore project. For over a year, he
also held out against increasingly vociferous demands for a public
inquiry into the project, from both the opposition and the media, most
notably, Fianna Fáil’s own paper, the Irish Press, on the basis that it
would serve no useful purpose.
In the short term, Ireland faced a crippling energy crisis. Electricity
demand in the Republic had increased by 10.5 per cent in the year to
March 1978 and there was an expectation of an average 8 per cent
annual rise throughout the next decade. More important, Ireland was
about 75 per cent dependant on oil for electricity generation. Even
with the diversion of 50 per cent of the output of the recently discovered Kinsale gas field to the ESB for generation purposes, dependency
on oil would continue to increase.
Internationally, the problem was not so much the price of a barrel
of oil; it was one of supply. The onset of the second oil crisis, borne
out of political turmoil in Iran that led to ousting the Shah in February
1979 and his ultimate replacement by the Islamist, anti-Western regime
of the Ayatollahs, had once again pushed energy to the top of the agenda
for most European governments. The second oil crisis took a particular
toll on an Irish economy that was ill-prepared to adjust to it.
‘Because of the shortage of oil, because of our very high dependence
on it and because of our inability to switch quickly to other things we
were, needless to say, in a very difficult situation,’ O’Malley later
observed.
Brown-outs and blackouts were the order of the day. The brownouts
were particularly serious for industrialists as sudden drops in the
level of power risked irreparable damage to sensitive machinery in
factories. Holding the dual portfolio of industry and commerce with
energy, O’Malley was made sharply aware of industry complaints.
Nor could he ignore the anger of ordinary consumers about the
constant breaks in electricity supply. The level of voltage was also by
no means uniform throughout the country and areas of low voltage,
especially in the west and north-west, were worse affected than others.
‘People were complaining pretty miserably and they couldn’t
understand why the heck the ESB couldn’t provide electricity for the
country,’ O’Malley said.
In the medium term, the only realistic alternatives were coal or
nuclear. O’Malley had already persuaded the cabinet to sanction an
ESB coal-fired station at Moneypoint on the Shannon estuary in
Co. Clare, at an outline capital cost of £350m, similar to the 1977
projected costs of a nuclear power station. Industry and job creation
were ostensibly the more important part of his ministerial portfolio.
By his own account, most of his time, particularly throughout 1979,
was devoted to attempting to secure oil supplies for the Republic,
including purchasing it directly, as well as chartering ships in the Gulf
to bring the oil into the country.
O’Malley first attempted to acquire the rights to drill oil in a North
Sea ‘gold block’, as the drilling blocks auctioned off to other countries
by Norway in the late 1970s were known. On 20 June 1979, the
minister announced that the government had agreed arrangements
with the Irish-owned Aran Energy to take up a 51 per cent share in the
company in the event of Norway agreeing to lease a gold block to
Ireland. At the time, there were media rumours of Irish fishing rights
being bartered to the Norwegians as part of the deal. A basic requirement
for the Norwegians was a national oil company. They refused to
give a gold block to a private company and negotiations failed.
O’Malley first visited Baghdad in August 1979, some three weeks
after Saddam Hussein had taken power, and although he did not meet
with Saddam, discussions were held with the Iraqi Oil Minister and Tariq Aziz, who later went on to become Iraq’s long-serving Foreign
Minister. The Iraqis were prepared to sell 700,000 barrels of oil to
Ireland at about $22 a barrel, subject to a number of conditions.
‘The deal was done on a national basis, not on a commercial basis,’ according
to O’Malley, ‘and I had to give them an undertaking that I wouldn’t sell on
any of the oil and that in particular I would ensure that none of it got into
the hands of the Seven Sisters.’ On his return, O’Malley told the cabinet that
Ireland would have to establish a national oil company to receive and process
the Iraqi consignment. The Irish National Petroleum Corporation was formed.
O’Malley recalls that shortly afterwards he was approached by a
major oil company, one of the Seven Sisters, and asked to divert the
Iraqi oil. He was offered $7 dollars a barrel on top of what he’d
already paid; a substantial profit margin. ‘I told them I couldn’t do it,’
he said.
Within the cabinet, there was no serious opposition to pushing
forward with the Carnsore project. ‘As I recall I had no problem
getting them to agree with whatever I put up,’ according to O’Malley.
‘Some had reservations because of the emotional carryover from
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that they were just unhappy or a bit
uncomfortable, shall we say, with nuclear. But at the time, given the
situation we were faced with, there was no alternative.’
O’Malley liked to tease his parliamentary opponents that he might
reserve the final decision on a nuclear power station to himself as
minister. He delighted in pointing out that the National Coalition
government decision of 28 November 1973 had been made without
any consultation with anyone, including ‘Friends of the Earth or the
recently distinguished winner of the Lenin peace prize, who feels very
agitated that we should have a nuclear power station’.
That decision still stood. ‘Unless I want to go back and change what
was done in November 1973 I need not go back to the Government at
all,’ O’Malley warned.
He also felt himself entitled to some irritation at the cynical political
posturing of the former National Coalition partners in face of the grim
reality of Ireland’s energy crisis. In opposition, Fine Gael had shifted
their stance from nuclear necessity to not being opposed ‘in principle’
to nuclear power. Fine Gael identified what it regarded as the Achilles’
heel of the nuclear project: the capital cost of the new station. Labour
straddled both sides of the fence, marshalling all the arguments against
development of nuclear energy in Ireland, ranging from a putative
threat to Irish neutrality to the disposal of nuclear waste, while at the
same time conceding in a half-hearted way the possibility that the
nuclear option might, in the end, prove a necessary evil.
Introducing legislation to provide for ESB capital borrowing for the
Moneypoint station, O’Malley expressed disappointment that only
three opposition speakers showed up to address such a massive investment
in coal-fired generation. And when they did, ‘a great deal of the
discussion of the three Deputies was related to the nuclear proposal’.
O’Malley’s policy on the nuclear option was in fact more flexible
than his detractors gave him credit for. Far from how he was represented
at the time by the anti-nuclear movement and subsequently by
political opponents who never missed the chance to take a cheap
political shot, O’Malley was no nuclear zealot. His, and the government’s,
short-term priority was to secure energy supply for a small
country with distinct geographical and political disadvantages that
inhibited the possibilities of interconnection with Britain, had no
indigenous fossil fuel resources of substance and suffered from the
absence of the economies of scale that applied in the energy market of
larger countries. Diversification from dependence on oil was the
key policy determinant, and coal and nuclear were the only viable
alternatives.
As Minister, O’Malley sought to integrate long-term energy policy within his
overall strategy for the industrial development of the Irish economy, the
first time such an effort had been made. In June 1978, his department
published a separate Green Paper on energy, which in simple yet erudite terms
analysed all the options and invited the public to respond – an early and
unprecedented, in Irish terms, exercise in public consultation. Later that year, the Green Paper proposals were
incorporated in the Government White Paper on Industrial Policy.
O’Malley had also instructed the ESB to engage with groups opposed
to the Carnsore project and to provide comprehensive information to
all responsible parties who requested it. In principle, O’Malley said, he
had no objection to a public inquiry on the nuclear project, but he
queried whether it would illuminate public debate or polarise it.
Ireland had no tradition of public inquiries and Britain’s experience
was not relevant to the Irish project.
‘The inquiry which was set up last May into the proposal to expand
for foreign purposes the Windscale reprocessing plant is the only one
that was held that I or my Department can find in relation to any kind
of nuclear plant in Britain. There were none held that I, at any rate,
can discover in relation to any of the smaller stations,’ O’Malley told
the Dáil.
That inquiry, he added, ‘cost hundreds of thousands … if not
millions of pounds’ and it finally ended up with the judge ‘telling the
British Government that it was perfectly safe to go ahead with
Windscale’.
‘Within five minutes of the findings being given the people who had
asked for the inquiry in the first place said that the results of it
should be disregarded, and that it was all rubbish,’ O’Malley noted.
By inference, any Irish inquiry would meet a similar fate.
Given the plethora of ESB studies and reports, the government
considered that the main public concerns had already been answered.
A report for the ESB by An Foras Taluntais, the Irish Institute for
Agricultural Research, in December 1977, for example, comprehensively
addressed the issue of the suitability of the Carnsore site,
accident scenarios and the environmental impact in normal or accident
conditions of the plant. The report, which included consultations with
a wide range of experts including BNFL personnel at Windscale,
assessed the likelihood of a major accident at Carnsore at about one in
400,000 years. It concluded there were no likely adverse effects to
agriculture or human and animal health from the operation of the
power station.
Anti-nuclear propaganda drew on a wider base, in which the
Windscale accident featured prominently, conveying the impression
that the Carnsore power station, in terms of relative safety, might turn
out to be a replica of the Windscale piles. O’Malley’s flat-earthers derived
from many shades of political opinion within the country, including dissident
republicans. Supported by international NGOs, the various components of the
Irish anti-nuclear movement were already masters in the art of undermining
public trust in official information.
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