Michael D Higgins highlights importance of Corrib gas book

Higgins cites importance of Corrib book


Áine Ryan

TRAGIC’ is how presidential hopeful and Labour Party TD, Michael D Higgins, described the impact of the controversial Corrib gas project on the remote  rural Irish-speaking community in north Mayo.
Deputy  Higgins was officiating in Dublin last week at the launch of Irish Times Western Correspondent, Lorna Siggins’s book, Once Upon a Time in the West – The Corrib Gas Controversy.
The book, which has a foreword by Fintan O’Toole, chronicles the complex story of the decade-long Corrib gas debacle ­– often likened to a classic David and Goliath struggle.
At the launch Deputy Higgins observed that the book’s important contribution hinged on the fact that  ‘from time to time when struggles take place and conflicts are there, there is an absence of a record of how things fell out or how they happened’.
Mr Higgins criticised the ‘spin’ that had been used during this controversy.
“The suggestion that what happened in Mayo was a simple law-and-order issue and what you had to do was exercise the authority of the State was such a distortion of what was taking place,” Michael D Higgins said.
He observed that it was ‘incredibly serious’ when agencies of the State, particularly of security and justice were called upon to ‘vindicate some kind of action’.
He likened the complexity of this struggle to that of the Land League which was often stymied by the commercial interests of the graziers or middlemen.
Mr Higgins said among the issues examined in the   book are the right to balance democracy with development and the consequent type of related discourse allowed in this country.
Last Tuesday night’s launch in Dubray’s book shop on Grafton Street was attended by a large contingent of Kilcommon residents, including Parish Priest, Father Michael Nallen. Three of the Rossport Five, jailed in 2005 for flouting a court order, Willie Corduff, Vincent McGrath and MicheΡl Ó Seighin, along with family members, also attended. Retired teacher Maura Harrington and fisherman, Pat O’Donnell, both of whom have served jail sentences over the project, also travelled to Dublin for the event. Shell E&P Ireland was represented by Ms Agnes McLaverty.
In his foreword to the book, leading commentator and Irish Times Assistant Editor, Fintan O’Toole, writes that, on the one hand, ‘the conflict over the Corrib gas field is a small and intimate affair’ played out – for the visitor or observer – in a remotely beautiful and exotic landscape – but for the local resident – in an entirely familiar terrain.
He writes that within this controversy are ‘many of the large themes of twenty-first-century politics – the relationship between governments and transnational corporations; the tensions between environmental protection and our collective hunger for fossil fuels; the balance between democracy and development; the need for a local identity in a globalised economy’.
Mr O’Toole notes that the dramatic remoteness of Erris removes the abstractedness from these contemporary dialectics and transforms the struggle into ‘immediate human dilemmas’.
He says that what has happened in Erris has a resonance around the world. Praising Lorna Siggins, he observes that her consistent reportage of this story has always been in ‘the public interest’ even when ‘the public has not been interested in it’.
It is 230 million years ago since the seeds of the Corrib controversy were sown in geological terms . It is 14 years since Enterprise Oil found the major source of valuable gas off the windswept and battered shores of north Mayo.
Lorna Siggins’s book essentially unravels and explains the many dramatic and heart rending twists and turns that, in the interim, have utterly changed ­– politicised, criminalised, divided ­– a small community.
Once Upon a time in the West: The Corrib Gas Controversy by Lorna Siggins is published by Transworl Ireland and is on sale in book shops throughout the country.