Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

It is a national outrage that five Rossport men have been in jail for 91 days. Does the Taoiseach feign innocence as if he were Prime Minister of the outer Hebrides, not the Republic of Ireland which happens to include County Mayo?

It is true that it was Shell Oil that got the High Court to do its dirty work but the Taoiseach and his Government carry full responsibility. The Government gave this multinational corporation the power to trample brutally on the safety of a small rural community. When it resisted, the Government allowed five representatives to be put into what I can only call indefinite preventive detention.

In 1989, the Taoiseach's crooked colleague, the former Deputy and Minister, Ray Burke, gave the oil corporations a fabulous resource of gas for not a penny in royalties to the Irish people. In 1992, the Taoiseach, as Minister for Finance, gave them fabulous tax breaks. In early 2001, the Government gave the multinationals the power to expropriate the land of smallholders in Erris without consultation, any planning process or any proper environmental statement. Therefore, the Government has put the smallholders of Erris, including the area's boglands and estuaries, at the mercy of a multinational corporation which has shown itself to be merciless in how it deals with such communities in other countries in its greed for profits which amounted to an incredible €18,000 million last year alone.

When people look back on the history of rural Ireland in 2005, they will not remember the Taoiseach's flashy display of green wellies on the ploughing fields of east Cork, but the abject betrayal of a small rural community in County Mayo. The Taoiseach feigns innocence, however, as if he had been asleep since 1989, as soundly perhaps as his hapless Minister of State, Deputy Conor Lenihan, on a recent Tuesday morning. At least he was not pretending to be asleep like the Taoiseach.

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